
Biology needs more staff scientists - kungfudoi
http://www.nature.com/news/biology-needs-more-staff-scientists-1.21991
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xaa
My career goal is to be a staff scientist (in biology/bioinformatics). I hate
writing grants and the related political bullshit. All I want is to do actual
science, even if it means a marginal pay cut and some degree of decrease in
autonomy -- although in practice, I'm not sure how much autonomy there
actually in being a PI, where you are "autonomous" in that small portion of
your time that doesn't involve raising money.

I made a simple proposition to my PI: I'm skilled. I'm at least 3x as
productive as a grad student (and I could make 10x in industry). You pay me
3x, and I'll work on your projects some of the time and mine some of the time.
Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat
me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed.

It takes an experienced PI to understand just how much more value a staff
scientist gives over a early-stage postdoc or grad student, which are cheaper.
You get stability, expertise, and experience for what is ultimately not that
high a price tag. I myself have watched my PI undergo this evolution. I have
been with him 10 years, and in the early days, he was all about summer
students etc. Now he knows that you simply cannot get real work done with
cheap, temporary labor.

I could get higher-paying or more prestigious jobs elsewhere. And I do believe
I could cut it as a PI if I wanted. But I really, really value this
arrangement.

~~~
chrisamiller
I am likewise a staff scientist by choice. I'm confident that I have abilities
and track record that would allow me to start my own lab if I wanted to, but I
value being able to do science instead of writing grants full time. Our
current system excels at taking bright scientific minds and turning them into
middle managers.

~~~
Fomite
I think it's also important to recognize that _hiring_ a staff scientist means
that that the PI is further entrenching themselves in middle management. You
need to write _more_ grants in order to fund a staff scientist and give them
the job security they expect.

Most PIs I know would prefer to spend more time in their lab.

"Hire me to do the things you wish you were doing, and in the process damn
yourself not to be able to do them" is a steep ask for a lot of labs,
especially small ones.

~~~
hyperbovine
I thought the same thing -- given the choice, most PIs would just as soon hire
a full-time "staff grant writer" and return to science themselves. Of course,
you can't actually pay for such a position using government grants, and
therein lies the rub.

~~~
xaa
If we're talking about unicorns, a competent "staff grant writer" has to be
the rarest of them all. To write a grant well, you have to deeply understand
the specific science at hand and be a good writer. Someone who would
voluntarily choose such a job would also be someone who enjoys the process of
writing.

So, in other words, someone perfectly suited to be a PI, a more prestigious
and better-paying position with more freedom.

Our institution has one you can ask to help write/review/correct grants. They
are pretty useless because they cannot possibly understand the science each
individual lab is engaged in at an adequate level. Usually they just offer
superficial suggestions/corrections.

~~~
Fomite
I think I've met _one_ person with a dedicated lab grant writer and yeah, I'm
pretty sure the PI would take a bullet for them.

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ThePhysicist
Science in general needs more staff scientists. Currently the system is based
mostly on "cheap" labor by students and postdocs who often work long hours for
minimal pay in the hope of one day getting a real position. This is not only
demotivating and unfair but also very inefficient, since labs will often tend
to solve problems using manual labor instead of seeking more innovative
solutions.

Personally, I think a well-run lab needs a combination of staff scientists,
very good engineers and salespeople, with one or more visionaries at the top
who define the direction of work. OpenAI is a great example of how this can
work (IMHO),as they have both excellent scientists but also brilliant
engineers and people that are very good at selling their vision to the world.

~~~
gww
I completely agree with this. I believe that staff scientists should be
treated as independent researchers. In my experience, they tend to be used as
lab support, for example, ordering reagents, managing the annoying aspects of
big projects, etc. etc.

As a post-doctoral fellow who would rather not be a principle investigator, I
would love a job where I can work independently on my own research projects
with a reasonable wage.

~~~
thearn4
Federal research (i.e. civil servants at NASA, NOAA, DOE, etc.) tends to work
closer to that model, but not 100%.

~~~
randcraw
Twenty years ago when I worked for a FFRDC (Mitre), the number of staff were
preallocated for the entire year, and the only decisions were how to allocate
personnel onto the pool of candidate projects. As long as you could interest a
gov't project manager, you got approval to go ahead with your (their) work.
However, our capital expenditures were generally pretty minimal. This model
allocated labor almost exclusively.

That's about as liberal an R&D policy as I've seen anywhere.

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danieltillett
Nothing is going to change until the people making the rules and awarding the
grants stop getting all the money. The whole science funding process is rigged
to favour senior scientists running a feudal hierarchy with themselves at the
top.

Actually what would be nice to try is a system like the way the polio vaccine
was created. At the beginning there were a whole lot of technical and
scientific questions that needed to be answered and the march of dimes
organisation handed out grants to the various scientists to answer all these
questions. One of the biggest problems with the current system is the
knowledge gathered often has large gaps that make it impossible to use - no
one wants to work on all the boring, gap-filling work that is critical to
using a breakthrough.

~~~
killjoywashere
One of my mentors told me, holding my grant application in his hand: "This
(the funding org) is a mafia. Do you know how you fight the mafia? You build
your own mafia." Project is going like gangbusters, no government money.

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krapht
You can't pay a staff scientist $20k a year like you can a graduate student.
The article mentions that. I don't see the situation changing unless the
supply of graduate student labor dries up.

Hell, if I could hire grad-school quality new cs grads for 20k, I'd put up
with the necessary mentoring and supervision they'd need.

~~~
dekhn
A staff scientist at a National Lab is going to make $100K or more (cost-
adjusted for the region; Berkeley likely pays more than Argonne, since the
former is near SV, while the latter is an hour+ outside Chicago).

A grad student is never a replacement for a staff scientist. Grad students
aren't particularly useful until 4-5 years into a 7 year program, and then
they're out in a couple years, so they can't do complex, long-running
research.

~~~
arcanus
The labs don't employ many life scientists compared to physics and engineering
doctorates. The article is focused on biology.

Not that we don't generally need more staff scientists, but the national labs
are probably the best gig along those lines available, and due to their
mission, they are very focused on CS/Engineering /Physics

In my limited experience, the life sciences are much more depressed in terms
of wages.

~~~
dekhn
I was a staff scientists at a national lab (titled "Computer Scientist", but
at the time, I was a biologist that used computers). We had plenty of people
in LS (there are several divisions dedicated to biology). It grew a ton over
the past few decades (true for all the labs). There is a modest difference in
pay between a Staff Scientist in the Life Sciences Division and a Computer
Scientist (doing life sciences) in the Computational division, but that's
mainly explained by the fact that we had to compete with Silicon Valley to
hire. Also, both CS and life sciences aren't hard funded like physics is (at
least at LBL, dunno about others).

I suppose what I'm saying supports you, in that I had to specifically be
titled CS to get the higher salary. I would agree that in general, life
sciences wages are depressed, but then, there are far more people in life
sciences than CS, but much more demand for CS, and CS people bring in more
dollars/hour (in terms of company revenue in the case of a biotech vs. a SV
computer company). You can't fix that without making structural changes.

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Animats
Research organizations hate to admit it, but much of what they do would be
considered "plant engineering" in heavy industry. Installing equipment,
building tooling, connecting things up, and running the equipment are skilled
work, but not research work. The physics community in their big-money "nuclear
future" days was organized that way.

I once worked in a large R&D facility for hydraulic equipment. The place was
about 75% blue collar workers - good ones, because this was all one-off stuff,
not production. Only about 20% of the work force had engineering degrees.

~~~
comstock
Right, but most academic institutions would hire lab technicians to do those
jobs.

Actually, you probably wouldn't even trust a PhD student or junior postdoc to
setup lab equipment...

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oneshot908
Um as someone with a Ph.D. in the life sciences:

I can make close to 7-figures (amortized over a decade or so) pushing/enabling
the AI/Cloud Computing agenda...

or...

I can make close to 6-figures (and stably so) working as a staff scientist...

Gonna have to split the difference there IMO to grow the ranks. I am somehow
reminded of the article complaining that retirees are hoarding cash instead of
spending because they fear the future.

How about constructing a society where I feel I should work for those
6-figures because it will bring a better future rather than compelled to chase
7-figures because the future is @#$%ing scary right now? Because that's what
it's going to take for someone like me. And of course, I only speak for
myself, but the data in that article about retirees makes me think I'm not the
only one.

~~~
austenallred
Close to 7 figures? How are you doing that math? (Genuinely curious)

~~~
oneshot908
Over ~2 decades...

Join a lot of startups that ultimately fail, but which were doing the right
sort of things... Some of them didn't fail... Repeat with ever-increasing
ability to detect bozos...

~~~
lqdc13
I guess I still don't see it. I know a lot of life sciences and CS PhDs and
only one made 7 figures amortized over 15 yrs.

Mostly you make very low 6 figures.

~~~
infinite8s
Are you talking about gross? At 75k/yr you'll easily clear $1M after 15 years.
Staff scientists at national labs easily make that.

~~~
lqdc13
I am assuming we're talking about annual amortized income. Otherwise, why
bring up the word amortized?

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pishpash
The academic market is distorted because of the withholding of final
credentials (and for foreign students, the papers to be in the country). That
alone suppresses wages and disincentivizes the hiring of staff scientists who
demand the higher natural wage for the work performed.

It is further distorted by lacing what would be a better collaborative
allocation of resources with instead strong flavors of formalized individual
protectionism, whether student or PI. So now your limited funding gets spread
to 10 groups secretly doing the same thing and they have to take a lot of
shortcuts to "win."

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bitL
I know some unemployed PhDs in their late 30s that are always low-balled when
looking for a job, looked down upon because they didn't manage to become
successful titans of industry earlier... PhD is either a ticket to the highest
echelon of the society or a life-long poverty.

~~~
oneshot908
I remember when one of Craig Venter's startups offered me little more than
post-doc money. When I turned them down, most of the people I interviewed with
emailed me privately to ask for a referral to my new employer.

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sndean
One issue:

> All institutions should be like Broad (paraphrasing)

> The Broad Institute attracts world-class scientists, as both faculty members
> and staff.

HHMI's Janelia, the Salk Institute, and others that function like Broad can
all attract world-class scientists. I'm skeptical that they're producing
better/more interesting science because of their staff-scientist heavy model.
A simpler explanation is that they attract better scientists and have almost
unlimited funding.

~~~
mattkrause
Money and talent certainly help, but the grad student/postdoc model also locks
people into a certain kind of project where most of the work is done by 1-3
people over 1-3 years, with some extra bits done here and there by
collaborators. This gets you a lot of underpowered experiments, bad analysis
code, and tons of reduplicated effort as people scramble to finish up,
publish, and move on.

~~~
chrisamiller
Indeed. The lack of continuity is killer, not just for the people working in
that lab, but for science as a whole. That model is how we get shitty
unsupported bioinformatics packages, experiments that no one can replicate,
etc.

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dnautics
Just as a point of reference:. I got hired 'through the backdoor' at a
research institute once. I applied for a ba/bs biologist position and got a
substantial pay raise over the postdoc position I had prior. Eventually they
converted me over to postdoc and with a pay raise with the promotion, I became
the highest paid postdoc.

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carlob
A few years back I was kinda in this role: I was contacted by an old professor
of mine who didn't know I moved out of academia and into software. He had
recently won a grant and wanted to hire me as a post doc.

In the end we arranged things so I would work 1-2 day a week for them, while
keeping my day job. I ended up helping a few other postdocs with their code. I
do have a PhD in physics, but in that position I was free to ignore the deeper
part of the science (like reading literature, figuring out hypotheses) and I
would mostly concerned in helping them set up their numerical experiments, or
symbolic computations.

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pvaldes
We are ready to be hired; but the trend currently is to fill jobs with unpaid
volunteers, ask for stupid requisites like Phd <30 Yo just because, and
recruit retired professors to teach again for free. Therefore... thanks, but
not thanks

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whyenot
Well, duh. It's a great job. I have a small lab. I have some limited funding
to pursue my own research projects. I don't have to teach classes except for
an occasional guest lecture. I don't have to serve on committees, or manage
graduate students. It only took two years to get the staff equivalent of
tenure. I have job security. Most importantly, I get to help a lot of people
and collaborate on interesting projects.

The downside is that the pay is rather poor, at least for me in the life
sciences. Also don't expect to be treated with the same respect as tenured
faculty.

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geebee
_Why haven 't more research institutions expanded the roles of staff
scientists? One reason is that they can be hard to pay for, especially by
conventional means. Some funding agencies look askance at supporting this
class of professionals; after all, graduate students and postdocs are paid
much less._

It's refreshing, in an article about needing more technical workers, to see at
least some glimmer of a nod to the realities of supply and demand. I can't say
this article quite recognizes this reality, but in its defense, we are talking
about science, were people openly state they are motivated by the opportunity
to do good work rather than salary alone.

So, this is different from a startup founder looking to get rich complaining
about a lack of engineers to hire, without mentioning pay. But not completely
different, only a little different.

"Biology needs more staff scientists." You sure you don't mean more
programmers at low pay? Much of the work requires increasingly sophisticated
programming ability, a skillset that is not really taught in or rewarded in an
academic career path. It sounds like biology needs more people who will work
for half of what they could make in industry, in a field structured to ensure
they will never rise to leadership positions.

I might as well say that biology needs more disposable young programmers who
are willing to work for $5 an hour. I might as well say there is high
unemployment among biology staff scientists who won't work for less than $250k
a year.

At a low salary, the market will demand a lot of a service, but there is
little incentive to supply it. At a very high salary, the market will demand
much less, but there will be. much higher incentive to supply it.

There's also an elephant in the room here - university positions are often
exempt from H1B caps, which means they can bring in programmers who aren't
free to participate in free labor markets. As long as that is the case, don't
expect supply and demand curves to meet. Markets only work if people are
broadly free (not just to take another programmer position at a similar
institution, but to leave the field, start a business, become an artist,
install dry wall, sell real estate... you know, _free_ , as in, well...
_free_. I'm not sure there's any other way to put this).

This is a strange thing, but here it goes - if you ever read an article about
a "shortage" of workers in a field, be very careful about going into that
field. It may mean that employers are looking for ways to gain coercive
control over their workers lives, and to create a captive workforce that is
not free to go into other fields. And that sort of control often spreads into
abusive work relationships, poor working conditions, and other very ugly
situations.

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RichardHeart
Women are doing pretty amazing at biology these days!

~~~
RichardHeart
Is there a discipline of science they're excelling at further? I truly love
progress, particularly medical, and the more hands on deck the better.

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En_gr_Student
No they don't. They don't want or need them. It is one of the female dominated
fields, and the pay is horrible. Economics 101, if you actually wanted it, you
would pay for it. I cannot accept a field where it is reasonable to pay
someone with a solid Bachelor of Science, recent grad, $12/hr. That is a joke,
not a profession.

