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Monday, April 17, 2017

Flawed code story


Open letter to lab management about flawed code

http://www.independentnews.com/mailbox/open-letter-to-lab-management/article_c69106b4-1a35-11e7-915f-7fd08f789ffb.html



Hmm, I cannot say anything about the viability of his claims for the code. Sometimes these people have a point and other times not. Perhaps his issues have been addressed by the community but he just refused to believe it. Of course maybe he has a valid issue that needs to be addressed.

However there is some interesting tidbits here.

"I was even told that (at least in my group) the appraisal of a scientist’s work rests strictly and solely on whether or not they had managed to obtain funding; not on the quality or incisiveness of their ideas. Yet, and with all due respect, the Director of the Laboratory has recently proclaimed LLNL to be a ``new idea’’ Laboratory."

This does seem to ring true. Does anyone want counter this? To be fair funding is
important and should and must be part of the evaluation however it should not be the "only" criteria for evaluation. The point of being funded is to do something not just to be funded however I would say under the current management it is only funding that matters. Why is this so? I would say because it is easy, takes less work, and there is no upside to rewording good results. Only rewarding funding and this goes against the concept of an "new idea laboratory".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the point about a scientist being judged based solely on funding also includes the point that funding decisions are then based on need. So if you have no new ideas and no support, you are funded and then judged highly. New ideas are often left to find funding outside the Laboratory, however really new ideas need some start-up funding to be considered even by places like DARPA.

Management has been crushing new ideas this way for sometime. LDRD gets used to make management's job easier by funding people who don't have funding instead of having to find new jobs for them. The new ideas are left hanging.

Anonymous said...

The secret guys/gals is to do your day job and put in the extra time at night, over the weekends to investigate new ideas, write code, read literature, go to conferences to discuss novel ideas with trusted grad school professors, friends, etc...

If you want a 9 to 5 job then don't expect to become a world class scientist ! Period.

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