It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in the
Schmooze classwill be there to make sure you have to bow to them.It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle
It's a lot different in academia vs industry for hard sciences. I currently work in industry, we have no options in the things we research but we are funded to the Moon. There is of course some amount of bowing we have to do in order to keep them quiet but that's about it.
In academia you have to secure your own funding constantly or your project just ends essentially. Academic institutions also look at metrics like impact factor and papers published/time that also effects the availability of funding. I know that people have had to stop pursuing doctorates due to funding issues. Politics in academia is notoriously horrendous.
It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle
I did this when I was a manager with the people who wanted opportunity for advancement. I prepared them and told them that getting comfortable public speaking and being around strangers and selling yourself are all critical components of being seen and respected by upper management when the time comes for me to fight for a raise or advancement.
Because the harsh truth is that you don't climb without being seen, and you're not seen unless you can speak publically and feel comfortable in your own skin. I've seen some deeply introverted people climb to great success but this is because they had a strange combination of extremely sharp skills in critical fields in the company, and they weren't shy, they were just quiet, when they did talk they shot back zingers and deadpan one-liners that made the people over them either laugh or shrivel.
So whatever "personality type" you think you have, you simply do not rise without playing SOME aspect of the social game, it will always be like this as long as we live in a capitalist society.
That just what being a member of society is, lots of overhead.
Autistic people often face these challenges even outside of science.
Yup, this is every job. Your skills at performing a task are only a small part of success. The bigger part is being able to make friends with the right people.
Edison and Tesla come to mind. Edison wasn't the best when it came to electrical engineering but he was good at talking. Tesla was brilliant and is the father of modern electrical engineering but his best friend was a pigeon. During their lifetimes, Edison was much more successful than Tesla was.
Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.
politics are still politics.
Whenever you have more than one person at a time in an environment, you have politics of some form or another.
People who proclaim how much interpersonal politics bothers them will have a much harder time getting ahead because you don't get out of the political game unless you're willing to compromise on a lot of things we work for.
But it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing game, just getting a LITTLE more comfortable talking and socializing can have massive benefits to your professional life.
Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they've got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
so all they’ve got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
This sounds good on paper, but the actual hiring decision is almost always based on interview vibes, sorry to say.
I have spent years in a professional environment, I can safely say that 90% of all the serious, disruptive issues we have on teams come from people who have unusual personalities or strong sense of entitlement and have to have things on their own time-frame expectations. or people who rub other team members wrong and this is where a manager who is perceptive and emotionally intelligent is critical, and why having those social skills puts you in a favorable position for advancement.
I would actually rather have someone with lacking qualifications who can learn to do the job and makes everyone else comfortable, than someone who irritates everyone but doesn't need much help with the work. One is far more detrimental to productivity and meeting goals than the other. I can train you to enter data. I can't train you to stop being a freak around women or to understand that you can't expect schedules to revolve around your rent checks or the latest fight you had with your SO. I will always do my best to help everyone but if one person is dragging everyone down, they're the first to go.
IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions
That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we'd still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we're still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That's the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.
That just what being a member of society is, lots of overhead.
I think it's mostly that you can't expect people foreign to your field to understand how valuable your work is, you need to communicate it to them. Then there's a fine line between popularization and bullshiting that your sense of ethics will make you cross or not depending on the situation.
I appreciate the sentiment but no - in the case of hard science it shouldn't be.
Yes, BS exists everywhere, yes we all have to do it, yes yes yes but this is science. Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
Saying "so what we all have to deal with it" is not the point. If you're talking about seminary, that's maybe closer(?) to the gist than, say, marketing. Or if you're a systems analyst for the USPS it's similar maybe. But people out in the world doing non-scientific things have already agreed long ago that it doesn't really matter what they find or how they find it (so long as it leads to more money, the only source of "truth") - science does not.
All the bullshit and pointless politics and ladders and so on she's talking about in the quote are just ways to say "money" (or "power") for science which is an anathema.
And in the social sciences, we're really fucked.
Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
I don't understand how you'd prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let's say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There's only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you'll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.
One thing is how the world is, and another is how the world should be. The person you're replying to accurately depicts how the world is as of today, but isn't saying that is how it should be, which is what you're arguing.
What if everyone else is just one person with all the other bodies?
"How do we stop the world's smartest people from realising what we're doing?"
"Let's make them fight among themselves and call it a meritocracy; we'll limit their funding and let them keep themselves busy with political infighting!"
Annoyingly insightful.
This is why good teams are essential. One person to do all the bullshitting, and the rest of the team to actually get stuff done while the bullshitter deflects all the other bullshitters.
PROVIDED the bullshitter doesn’t turn inward. A PM with those skills unleashed on the team is hell, and is guaranteed to drive talent away.
"Bullshitting" is an essential skill, not a distraction. The greatest idea in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about it.
Marketing, scmoozing, etc gets a bad rep. But no matter how good your output, product, research, etc is, it has very little value or impact if people don't get on board.
If you can't play the game, team up with someone who can. And don't forget that while that schmoozer may not have your technical skills, they have a skillset you do not.
It wasn't Woz or Jobs. It was both.
It's funny you use Woz and Jobs as an example when Jobs regularly emotionally manipulated and abused his employees and stole Woz's money.
I wonder why schmoozers have a bad rep 🤔
Yep. We've got me a technical guy who loves deep diving in theory and understanding the why of everything, and a smooth talking ex-Navy guy who is good at thinking on his feet and has great mechanical acumen. Last but not least, we have the guy who uses a sick day whenever there's work scheduled, and then shows up the next day and goes on some libertarian rant about how any progress we've made since the 19th century is a sign of our country going down the toilet. Dream team baby
I often describe the team like we're doing a heist. There's the planner, the face, the muscle, and so on. We'll have a social problem and I'll tell the face to go talk to the other team for us.
Ok so what happens when the bullshitter gets all the recognition and nobody believes you when you try to prove otherwise? Document and take legal action?
Seconded. The “face man” gets to be the public face and thereby a lot of the social credit and perhaps most of the work credit as well.
We see people like this all the time in management who take all the credit for the work from those who actually did the work.
This "have to play political games to get ahead" bullshit seems to apply almost everywhere.
Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.
This might sound pedantic, but it isn't, it was actually naive: I expected a better environment in academia when I was young.
Why? Because academia is supposedly full of bright people, and I assumed they would be bright enough to be cooperative (because academia advances more when we are, and they supposedly love knowledge); unattached from superficiality (like judging people by their looks, money, etc., because they should know an interesting person can come in any "package"); relatively ethical (as bright people should figure out something close to the categorical imperative, although with unique details); a non-dogmatic, eager to learn and correct their ideas —over preferring recognition and pettiness— attitude (again, just because I assumed their intelligence must guide them towards appreciating knowledge and authenticity over much more ephemeral and possibly worthless things such as prizes, fame, etc.).
I was wrong, so wrong. It's painful to remember how I felt when I realized it...
But I think the premises weren't entirely off, I just imagined people much wiser and more intelligent than they are, myself included. Anyway, I fully understand why others are shocked too.
Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
Same. It physically hurts to see talentless suck-ups play the bullshit game and climb the hierarchy, whereas you get punished and kept down for pointing out the bullshit. My best decision ever was to escape the hell that is the field of software development, and instead get into teaching. Now my reward for a job well done is seeing my students succeed and I love it so much.
I know that feeling all too well. Funny enough, I’d thought about going into software dev because I thought it’d let me work alone more comfortably. Along the way I found a way to learn dev but apply it to my job instead, making me pretty unique at what I do. It lets me innovate, do deep research, and work on my own while being pretty openly anti-social. Luckily I have a boss who sees the value in me.
I can’t tell you the number of once-interns and junior managers, stuck-in-a-rut folks, that I’ve quietly influenced to senior or higher positions. It really does feel incredible! I call it “leading from the back.” I’ve been wanting to write a book on it - the introverts and individual-contributors who quietly (and happily) influence without being seen.
I work as an engineer for a huge financial company, so I relate. I was a scrappy upstart who worked himself through the lowest tiers of my industry towards the top. I'm also neurodivergent.
I can speak on for days about how bosses don't care who's doing the work as long as it gets done.
As a top performer, you're likely to feel that people should perform at the standards you set, and your natural first instinct is probably to try to train and educate your coworkers. You soon realize that they either don't give a shit or they're offended that you're giving them advice. No problem, we live in a hierarchical society, so you tell your boss about the problems you face, they'll have your back, right? Wrong. You're rocking the boat, and the boss' job is to keep the boat afloat.
Now, instead of rocking the boat, you start to wonder if you there's a way you can change the current of the water so the boat goes in the proper direction. That's where wisdom and skill meet. There's an incredible amount of depth involved in influencing people and change. I wish it wasn't the way of the world, but it is. Being brilliant is only half the battle.
@clearedtoland @fossilesque It makes perfect sense if you consider it. Imagine a closed system with two top performing components, where every other component is contributing to the system’s overall success. If one of these two top performers is able to connect and leverage all the other system components to amplify their work, but the other works in isolation, which is really producing more successful output when you measure the total system?
That's a pretty contrived setup. If the two top components are not factored into the performance of the whole and they are both defined by their ability to improve other components, then the one doing it's own thing is not, in fact, a top performer. It's task is to support others and it fails to do so.
And what if the loner's task is foundational? It doesn't have much direct output, but if he's gone and everything else goes to shit? Those ones are very hard to measure. I know, that's been my job for a good portion of my career. And things like that are common. Expecting a given performer, say an engineer, to also be good at public speaking has always struck me as impractical.
Read some Foucault for an explanation, that's just being human. You don't stop being human just because you follow scientific ideals. All human endeavors will follow human dynamics.
Seriously. I read this and all I could think was "what a dick".
Disclaimer, I have not read the full source material and am only basing this off the quoted image.
I fully understand not being interested in having to attract your own funding, it's awful. But the rest of it is not limited to the academic or scientific pursuits. Being a decent enough person so people want to support you? Developing good work that people want to hear about it (ie conferences)? (By the way, you submit your own work to conferences and they are judged to be invited blindly, ie names removed), being able to hold your tongue when you know someone is wrong in order to keep peace? Understanding that hierarchy exists?
These are not things that are antithesis to good science, and if no one had ever taught her these things that's a failing on her younger days.
Miss me with that thought terminating cliche.
No. Science is the only human effort that specifically defines what human is. If we allow that "sure being human is going to mess up science" then we have failed before we even started.
I'm really surprised, although this is becoming kind of common so perhaps I shouldn't be, to see all the comments saying effectively "yeah, so?"
The fact that this is considered brutally honest is part of the problem. I think it's just regular honesty. Academia's standards for honesty are too low.
This is the fucking world. Like it or not it's about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn't matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn't but it is.
To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.
Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.
This world is very difficult for people like me who are a little on the spectrum, since moving and shaking is what gets you places
Isn't it great when the social institutions regulating people who want to do science promote people with the skills of salesmen over people with the skills for doing science.
Unfortunately, it's for the best. If you're serious about research you have to present yourself. Especially if you're the first person to discover it, you're the most - possibly only - qualified person to talk about that thing.
Part of scientific communication is giving elevator talks. You have to be able to argue for funding.
Not to mention, if you never develop those skills, you're just opening yourself up to getting a worse financial incentive for the same amount of work
It's politics, not sales, even highly productive sales people struggle with the politics of moving up. I could sell hot sauce in hell, but getting my bro dawg boss to like me enough to promote me into his weird club of bro dawgs and not use me as a scape goat for his own mismanagement and incompetence is not a cross over skill from getting someone to spend $15.99 on a neck pillow with the cost of $0.17.
Yet another flawed system run by humans. Humans always ruining nice things.
The system was literally invented by humans and follows our shitty nature perfectly.
Yes but didn't we all know that at some point before choosing that career? How do you get roughly 22 years into it - a PhD - and not know that academia is essentially a political rodeo and your research is going to be affected heavily by it? Didn't anyone whisper it to you confidentially in the back of some elective?
It most definitely shouldn't be, it's clearly poisonous to the idea of science, but it wasn't like a secret either. Like, it's "not ok" that that's the case, it's not something we should wave away as "just human things" - it should be addressed, it should be fixed. But it wasn't unknown.
Many people I know get into it because of their idealism and desire to change the academic system for the better. They invest into this career, year after year, because it's always one more step until they can finally use their influence to change the system from the inside.
So they’ve agreed, as it were, to the politics, the metrics, etc that come with it. Hopefully they can in fact change it, or part of it anyway.
It's definitely unknown to the vast majority of the tens of thousands of college freshmen who sign up to be STEM majors. Usually by the time they figure it out it's already far too late to change their majors without rearranging their entire lives
It's also the only viable route to doing science for most people. So even if you're aware of the problem, you just have to grit your teeth and play the game if you want to pursue your passion.
Well, hopefully this will help change things then. It’s definitely not new.
it should be addressed
I think that's what she's trying to do.
Depends on the program you are in. The view from being a doctoral student to being a postdoc to being research/lecturing staff is very different. Not all advisors expose their students to the realities of higher levels of academia. And when a woman or minority is being mentored by a white man, they may not be aware of biases that can affect the student's later career.
I mean, maybe I had a different view, but that was known to myself and the people I was in school with as early as highschool. As a part of the landscape, like, yes you can pursue a career in academia but. Publish or perish, etc.
Sadly not just the USA.
Sadly not just science, either.
Isn't this true for all jobs? Specially corporate jobs? It's still horrible, but that's capitalism for you.
The same problem exists in socialism
You need to convince people what you’re doing is worth doing. Whether that is economically or societally
I'm sorry, but this has nothing to do with capitalism. If we were under a king, you'd still have to schmooze the king. Socialism may give you money to feed yourself, but it won't pay you to do science. An economic system doesn't prevent you from needing interpersonal skills.
It absolutely is like this in every corporate setting.
The key difference here is that if you don't play the game at TechCo Incorporated and spend the next ten years just entering data and being passed over, people will say "That's corporate life for you" and give you support and sympathy.
If you don't play the game in your academic field then you're "wasting enough money to buy a house" and that tends to raise people's ire or at least interest. It brings to mind all kinds of negative stereotypes in your own mind and makes you ashamed to be someone who doesn't want to play the social game.
If you want to be in any creative field like art or literature, you have to be able to run a social media business. It's like 80% PR and 20% the creative work you actually want to do.
Across the board, we have let people who are primarily motivated by accumulating wealth and power accumulate wealth and power unchecked, and then make all the rules for how everything around them works.
These are the last people you want making the rules if you desire sane and sustainable social environments.
The best thing we could collectively do for ourselves is strip and block these kinds of people from positions of authority on the sheer basis that they seek it so eagerly, tell them to their faces WHY, tell them they can't have it back and that they can ONLY have it back when they stop wanting it so badly, no matter HOW HARD they cry about it and then treat them with the same kind of disdain they've treated people who don't want to play by THEIR rules for centuries.
why underline the whole thing
Well you see, if we made people read that irrelevant first sentence, and the beginning of the following paragraph, their heads might explode.
Probably for their own use, for whenever they'd come back to glance again the book. In fact, it might have helped them to find the page if they chose to post it to social media some time afterwards.
For a line or two, sure, but for that long I'd just mark the beginning and ned of the passage or maybe just draw a line in the margin the length of the info.
I'm arguably good at a lot of those things but didn't want to persue a PhD because you can see the writing on the wall when you're deep enough into academia. There's a system in place and boy it can get dark and shitty in a hurry.
Sorry, unless you start your own sovereign country, you have to participate in society. Not everyone likes promoting themselves, disagreeing diplomatically, etc. Still, we play the game, even though I wish we didn't all have to...
I prefer to say that humans are not very efficient at organizing. We’re just the most efficient so far for general problems.
your comment reminds me of a text I read a long time ago, comparing humans to ants and pointing that we're incredibly intelligent when alone, but we become less and less intelligent when in bigger groups, while ants seem not very intelligent when alone, but when in groups, they seem amazingly intelligent
That is true it is a big part of society and how to get along, and you would think that because this is one of the foundations of this society it would be a bigger part of someone's education. This shouldn't be something people should have to figure out on their own in order to feed themselves and their family
One semester of Schmooze 101 could go along way in helping an awkward yet brilliant scientist get the funding they need.
Well there are two alternatives that let you not do it. We either die of starvation alone and isolated, never cooperating with anyone. Or we club and bomb each other away in endless fight and war over resources. I like the being diplomatic, political and deliberative way much better than either of these, even if it can seem a bit hypocritical and tiring some times.
Even if you do start your own sovereign country, once you have more than one person you have to play politics. It's just the human condition
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on this problem.
I was thinking of this video as soon as I saw the post. She's really an interesting person.
I think this is a very interesting take, but I am curious about how the career in youtube is better than the academia as she describes it.
Obviously, the discrimination against female and writing without proper acknowledgement is absolutely unacceptable, but I have never heard about anything like this in my field.
However, I feel like youtube is likely a more competitive landscape than grant writing. I think it is very likely the administrative overhead for youtuber is more than 15%, and youtuber needs to get the interest of people completely ignorant of the subject, not just experts, plus battling the unpredictbility of youtube algorithm.
Of course, I am not trying to downplay the problem she mentioned, but I am just wondering how youtube is a better alternative career, considering her goal to do "serious and innovative science".
Seeing this, it applies everywhere including something as trivial as a retail job. I wonder if that's why I too dislike that sort of backroom politicking so much.
And this is actually a good thing that it's taught at Penn, as it doesn't lie to you and say, "just get high grades and you'll be the best in the world!"
Would have been nice if my university taught us that
I've got bad news about...pretty much every career path.
Yeah, it's an important skill to both be able to communicate your achievements and to be able to interpret achievements of others correctly (i.e. be able to see through their bs) in any job setting.
My supervisor talked of Barnum and Bailey. He wasn't wrong, but glad I got out.
Science should be a worthy endeavour, currently it's not. Sell out for more...
"bUt PaRtIcIpAtInG iN sOcIeTy!", people with imposter syndrome who don't believe enough in their own abilities to be comfortable with the idea of merit alone judging advancement.
Underline tip
Throw a [ in the margin
For highlighting, highlight the tldr of each [ section, skipping over words deemed unnecessary to understanding it
Lucky, not hero.
This is a person saying they don’t like what everyone else on the planet deals with daily.
Fortunately they were published enough to not have to care.
Not a scientist but I have been reasonably successful by proving my worth to the ladder climbers and then they pull me up behind them.
This is also a form of marketing yourself to the correct audience.
that's how it workes everywhere
I SE>
These are just people skills. Of course you're gonna have to make people like you if you want to work with people. Half the brain is dedicated to networking with other brains.
And it's not actually that hard to agreeably disagree with someone. You say your thing, and then you do your little song and dance to make sure they know you respect them, and you go on your way.
A little bit of humility goes a long way. Hard scientists aren't above a little compassion, a little bit of care for explaining themselves to the public and to money movers.
Sheldon Cooper?
What's the point of underlining like that? I mean you highlight something to make it stand out, but when everything stands out nothing does. If you really must highlight such an obscene amount of text, maybe draw a vertical line next to the paragraphs instead, and add a note in the margin about why you marked it. If you need to find the passage again you could also put a postit on the page. But underlining with a pen? That's just poor style.
