Hi Yung-Yu,

Thanks a lot for your comment, it’s good to see different points of view and experience.

You are right, over-competition seems like a very apt explanation for a lot of things that happen in the labs. People put minimal effort into everything, because they think that everything above that is a “waste”, while it’s actually not taking the long term into account.

I was trying to get some (minimal) coding standards included in our thinking, because for example spending a little more effort in writing code will save a *lot* of time in reading the code later. Now I’m spending a lot of time writing explanation and documentation (separate from the code), months or years after the code, because finally the higher ups decided that keeping the knowledge is important.

Also, thinking more, this shortsighted short-term thinking is in everything. Many of the problems I experienced for example could be handled with some effective mentoring (because I need to learn more too, not just to rock the boat, but the effectively make a difference). But mentoring, and taking any interest in students and employees are explicitly labeled as waste of time….

As a punchline, I was just fired from this lab this week, so it is definitely time to get my game on, and grow where I can, not just were I am :)

If you are in Taipei, would love to meet up for a coffee some time, if you are interested, hit me up any time at imrehg@gmail.com :)

Greg

But I wanted to give my feedback on one of your paragraphs:

“There’s often very little training about generally useful things, because of the high turnover is so etched into people’s mind: if my student will leave soon anyways, why teach him, or why teach the group in general something that is not immediately useful for their work? Why waste time with that?”

This is a sad thing, and totally disregards the purpose of education. I actually fell into this fallacy when I was in grad school. At that time I was too obsessed by code development, and tried to persuade the PI to enforce some rules in favor of efficient team work, even if the rest of the research team has little understanding about software engineering. The reaction from my adviser was a gentle reminder: “It’s a good thing to have an organized code base, but in school, education is also important, and students need to gain experience form doing and erring.” Indeed, although there’s nothing wrong to be systematic about code development (we do computational things), it should be respected that everyone is in different stage in his/her learning path.

I guess the intentional omission of educational efforts in some research labs could be caused by over-competition. It’s generally unrealistic for a PI to take care of tens of students. I think even an experienced manager can’t function well with a team of more than 10 programmers. It’s extremely challenging to work with a big research team, the work of which is much more intellect-intense than programming, composed by PIs, postdocs, and grad students. Over-competition can be one of the most prominent issues. Luckily I’ve only heard about all those troubles, and not experienced with them myself.

But I think