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.
I’ve got bad news about…pretty much every career path.
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.
They do. However, the quality of a person’s work should be more important than their schmoozing skills. Not a shock, but definitely an annoyance.
This is how any new field of work or science starts out. Then, as money starts to be made, the field comes to the attention of the money- and power-hungry who slowly take it over and transform it into something they can control with politics and shenanigans. These people didn’t have the intelligence or passion or drive to create, but they know how to play people to get what they want. Unfortunately the good people too often let themselves be shmoozed by them and that’s their “in”
I know this term is overused, but it’s essentially enshittification. It didn’t start with the internet.
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.
At the top of academia everyone is tenured. Everyone has proved their intelligence. It is so political because there is so little at stake
I’m sorry you went through that. I grew up around academics – a few of my parents’ friends were professors and one was a research chemist, then I had several former professors as teachers in high school; the message from them was always clear – academia is awful because of politicking, backstabbing, and the neverending need to be publishing something next week no matter what you did last month.
The quote, often misattributed, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” has always stuck with me because of this. As I watched my wife pursue her postgraduate work in Chemistry, I was granted the unfortunate privilege of seeing it first hand. She now works as a children’s librarian and is much happier.
I’m genuinely confused how everyone is reacting to this. What good is research that no one cares to hear?
The research should speak for itself. Assuming the person judging it is competent, it shouldn’t need to be “sold”.
Competence is judged by their ability to communicate the purpose and results. Lack of social skills also detracts from the audience who is willing to review it.
Valid to a degree, but there’s such a thing as placing too much value on the person presenting it rather than the content of it. It seems like too common an occurrence.
The people with the money don’t understand the science. If you can’t convince them that your science is worth investing in then why would they give you money? What’s really shocking is that a Nobel prize winner isn’t smart enough to understand that.
The idea is that those people shouldn’t be the ones with the money.
Then the academics should get better at taking it from them :)
At that point it should become a problem of educating, not politicking.
The thing is, “research” doesn’t speak, humans do. If a tree falls in the woods… and so on. Part of being a scientist is communicating what you’ve done, otherwise no one else will know. It’s a skill that has to be developed in some more than others, and it was a key part of my training as a scientist. I don’t really like that part as much, but I do it because it’s what makes my work have any impact.
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.
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.
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?”
Science doesn’t define what humans are. Humans are, then science plays catch up to try and define what that even means. Science is a human endeavor, a framework of thought, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it cannot exist without humans thinking, talking about it and doing it.
So if I ask you to define what a human is, you’re not going to draw at all from any previous scientific studies?
I doubt it. Not to get too ontological, just saying science (biology, psychology, anthropology) very much do define what human is.
Miss me with that thought terminating cliche.
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.
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”.
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.
Socialism wouldn’t pay you to do science, but it would give you a universal basic income, so you could do science without needing to be paid if you wanted
These scientists aren’t schmoozing for a paycheck. Research is expensive. They’re getting funding for equipment and personnel.
Speaking as a Socialist, no, lmao.
First off, UBI’s are not Socialism. In fact, they are antithetical to Socialism. They are Social Democracy, which is objectively the moderate wing of Fascism, the standard borne by those who think we can make a better society by instituting ranked-choice voting, net neutrality, and a 32-hour workweek without ever looking past the symptoms into the actual problems inherent in the system.
Under Socialism, the vast, vast majority of science will be done (as it is/was, in the USSR and China) by government or government-funded research organizations, where materials are supplied to them and their research is guided by the public interest.
Cranks doing “science” in their garages and basements in their spare time will still just be cranks.
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.
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.
notes down: “capitalism is the problem”
👍
Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.
As someone who can see the flaws in the capitalist model and doesn’t agree with it in its current form… This is just silly. In any socioeconomic system there will be limited resources. People will still have to convince those that control the resources to give them the resources. The biggest difference between science in a capitalist system versus in a socialist system is that the end result of the science might benefit the common person more.
For instance: Superfest. Near unbreakable drinking glasses made in Eastern Germany that didn’t sell well internationally due to lack of profit potential. Basically, the entire glass industry revolves around the principle that glass can be broken. When your glass breaks, you buy a new one. But if your glass doesn’t break then you don’t need to buy a new one and therefore you do not. So if everyone buys Superfest then the industry dies since no one needs to buy glass any longer. And this is great for the people, great for the environment, but terrible if you’re a profit driven company. But whether it’s a state-owned endeavour or a for-profit organization, you’d still need to convince someone to invest in your work.
Going to start you off with Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
If you’ve ever heard of “publish or perish”, than you’ve heard of the main outcome of managerialism applied to academia and research. There are many critiques, I won’t mention them all. And if you hate bureaucracy, filling out all those endless forms as if your job is to fill out forms, that’s because of managerialism. You’re writing the inputs for that system to work. That goes for the healthcare system too, and for many others.
What we have put forward in this speaking out essay, is, that in its attempt to counter the apocalyp- tical pictured neoliberal competition, the management of a typical university is responding in a Derridean self-harming reflex of power. The university risks turning itself into a mere corporate factory of publications and diplomas, in which quantity is mistaken for quality and control for freedom, thereby derailing itself further and further from its societal function and orientation. By mimicking a hypercompetition inside the organization in order to adapt to the imaginary of a sur- vival-threatening hypercompetition, the modern university has been turning the competition against itself, resulting in a vicious suicidal circle of repression (Derrida, 2003: 100). Worryingly and sadly, the university, that self-declared bastion of autonomous, free, and critical thinking, has been transforming itself more and more into a remarkably oppressive and straitened bureaucratic organization (McCann et al., 2020). https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/427450/1350508420975347.pdf?sequence=1 (PDF)
Managerialism is the “capitalist organization science”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
As managerialism changes the operating paradigm from producing scientific knowledge to “scoring points”, there are long-term consequences that lead to the failure of the system. If you don’t get the importance of a paradigm shift, read Donella Meadows.
Capitalism is always the problem
I’m trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I’m coming up blank.
That is hardly the idea the author is trying to give…
Owner of Twitter?
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My cousin works (sometimes) as a truck driver. He’s certified for any size truck, flammable/biohazardous goods, the lot. He’d be making good money if he could stop telling his bosses to fuck off.
I was in IT for 20 years. In order to succeed, I had to become 50% therapist.
Am currently in IT, can confirm.
Overnight security guard
IT Business Analyst
IT is super hierarchical and requires immense political skills to get anything done.
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 should be addressed
I think that’s what she’s trying to do.
There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don’t have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.
Fair, but how does someone take on that career and not know that?
I think it’s the degree of bullshit that increases gradually. To speak from experience, when you are a grad student you get a feeling like there’s corruption but overall your project seems like it’s important and making a real contribution (hopefully). You also don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from. Sometimes the grant as a whole is total bullshit but there is enough discretionary spending included that great science comes out of it. But you don’t realize this until you’re writing grants, and by then you’re maybe too deep in the game to pull out. Essentially, you end up becoming a manager once you get tenure. There is no epiphany; it’s more like a slow creep.
Okay. I dunno, for me it was expressly stated by many people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
Kick the last one out. Get a fresh out of college graduate in place instead.
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 🤔
Jobs was an asshole.
Also, he got shit done. He wasn’t a technical genius, but he and the team he built could pitch the shit out of products. Apple’s value has rarely been in its technical superiority, but in branding.
“Asshole” is the word for a guy who likes to cut people off in traffic. I think there’s probably a more appropriate word for someone who emotionally manipulates you over the course of years so you’re continually a nervous wreck and can be destroyed any time it’s convenient for him. Seriously if you haven’t watched the interview I linked at least look at the first couple of minutes.
And at the end of the day, who did this behavior actually benefit? Steve helped make Apple a lot of money, sure, but where did most of that money go? It didn’t go to the employees he abused, that’s for sure. But maybe Apple products ended up benefitting society as a whole, and without Steve we wouldn’t have had that? Well you already said that more often than not Apple’s success didn’t have anything to do with technical superiority.
The fact that people like this (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc) often head successful companies isn’t an example of how beneficial they are, it’s an example of how broken our system is.
It shows how important having a charismatic person is to make any venture a success. We’re all humans with limited time on the earth. We can’t possibly experience everything. All we see and do is filtered out of necessity. A charismatic advocate of a product/movement/idea can get people to pay attention.
The best musician in history is probably unknown because they didn’t have a good manager/agent.
The greatest painting ever made was probably thrown away because nobody ever knew about it.
Hype men are necessary.
In my personal experience I’ve had to go out of my way to find every quality product I’ve ever purchased, from dishwasher detergent to heat pumps, and none of them were the ones with the highest advertising budgets. You’re right that we all have limited time and can’t possibly evaluate every single thing that exists, but hype men don’t help with that. The professional liars and manipulators that work in advertising only add to the noise and make it take longer to arrive at a conclusion. For example the fact that there are the 12 different brands of space heaters that come in different sizes and shapes and at different price points despite all performing the exact same way. It’s like that with literally everything, from bar soap, to maple syrup, to sunscreen.
I think this way because I am autistic. I honestly cannot imagine feeling the need for hype men. The phrase “you need hype men” sounds to me like “you need your abuser, you cannot live without them”.
Something like 35% of autistic people attempt suicide because of what the original post describes (and not just in science, but in every aspect of the world). And yeah, I think if I had to work for someone like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk I would as well.
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You “need” them because the society we live in is built around them. It’s the same reason you are forced to learn how to mask - you “need” to mask to survive, to put food on the table, to have a home and a bed to sleep in. This world is commanded by the manipulators, shaped and molded by the manipulators, and if you don’t have the skills to swindle your drop of money in the form of a grant in research or investment into your company, your project just dies. Everyone hates it (except the manipulators), but that’s just how things are at the moment.
I’m very much the same way. Sales people are just give me hints of what not to trust and usually fold under any sustained inquiry about their product. Skilled sales people know when to turn me over to their subject matter expert. We get to geek and I actually learn a thing or two about their product and, often times, the state of the industry.
One of the things the above post doesn’t include are the people who championed her. Between Elliot Barnathan, the cardiologist whose lab she was initially hired into, to David Langer, the resident who was able to get her a job in neurosurgery department, she was lucky enough to have someone who could do the hype while she did her work brilliantly.
In the publishing world, a great editor can recognize the genius of a writer, give quality feedback, and protect them from the moneyed interests.
I don’t know if I’d call these people hype men, as they were so much more than hype, but they definitely hype the genius of the patronee.
ok, everyone has hype men now. Everyone is charismatic now. Now what, will the greatest be found? We’re just back to square one.
I’ve noticed that everywhere I’ve worked I have connected with a person like that, for better or worse. I’m really bad at the people part of things but great at technical stuff. Unfortunately for the non people savvy it’s hard to distinguish who is trying to use you vs who really wants to team up with you and help you as well as themselves… Yes Apple needed a Jobs to sell themselves, but it seems Jobs viewed Woz as an end to a goal, and not the partner/ human being who helped him get there.
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.
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
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.
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 would read this book! Even a blog post, I’d 100% be interested
For something that I really hesitated to post, that was really encouraging to hear. Thanks!
+1 on the book idea. Sounds like a delightful read. I have a similar philosophy as well that’s worked for me. I’ve never once cared about getting credit or props, I make my boss/team look like geniuses. That naturally tends to reward you as well. Great individual contributors are actually pretty rare. Out of hundreds of engineers I’ve worked with closely, only a few were brilliant in the way you described.
If you’re looking for related reading, perhaps for inspiration, there’s a great book called
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.
I highly recommend it.
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.
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.
