A superposition of full glass and empty glass quantum states

After reading a couple of recent blog posts, especially those dedicated to issues of careers of young scientists - it occurred to me that blogs in general, and my blog in particular, may seem like a constant source of whining about how miserable we all are for choosing to pursue science as a career option.

So let me set the record straight - most blogs focus on negative sides of everything, otherwise it will not be interesting to read. Scientific research careers are no exception as the topic of blogging - we focus on backstabbing, result-scooping colleagues, cronyism and nepotism, difficulty in getting grants, lazy students, greedy suppliers, incompetent administrators - you name it.

The truth is - it's not nearly as bad as we make it sound. Even for a 99% full glass, blogs like this one would mercilessly focus on remaining 1%.

I am actually extremely happy and well-adjusted in my career choice, and after some experience in both government and industrial labs, I think academic career path, while not 100% perfect, is by far the best of the three, at least for me personally. And for anyone who is motivated by things other than $$$, doing research is far superior to other dilbert-like office jobs.

Most of my collaborators and colleagues in all of the departments I worked at are extremely smart, nice and hardworking people who deeply care about science. Almost all of them cared much more about good science than the careerism, or even their own egos. They give others plenty of credit when it is due, and despite the fact that ego *is* very often among the driving factors for their motivation, I think deep inside the scientific curiosity wins over. Many of these people, even with significant scientific egos and ambitions, are still very humble and would admit their own mistakes or limits of their own knowledge. In comparison with the world of business or politics this is actually quite rare.

If you compare this to business/industry worlds, academia is a really, really nice place to work.
It is highly decentralized, everyone is free to do essentially whatever they want, collaborate with whoever they want, and if you are unhappy with someone - colleague or collaborator, there are always ways to avoid working with that person. In "real world" most people are not offered this type of flexibility of establishing their own collaborations - short of quitting their job and looking for a new one, of course.

As researchers, we get paid to do research on whatever interests *us* the most - well, within certain limits of funding, of course, but it is still freedom most of us take for granted. Especially with a lot of fundamental research being phased out even from places like Lucent or IBM.
We get to have a lot of flexibility in our schedules, we get to travel a lot (or not - depending on whether you like it), collaborate with the smartest people with highest IQs in the entire world, teach some of the brightest students and postdocs, and in general surrounded by people who value pursuit of knowledge over materialistic interests - money, cars, etc.

Scientists do tend to work long hours, but this is primarily due to self-imposed reasons.

Those who do make it to tenure or even tenure-track positions do not have to worry about downsizing, re-sizing or "right"-sizing, outsourcing (at least not yet), mergers, buyouts and other things that concern regular Dilberts. Most scientists never get rich off academic research (unless they start spin-off companies or quit science for finance/consulting), but they live very comfortable, upper-class lifestyle. Even after accounting for raman noodle years of grad school, the PhD more than pays for itself over the long run - in almost all instances I know of.

Despite our complaints about lack of funding, US federal funding of fundamental research in physical sciences is at a very nice level compared to most other countries - like Russia, France, India, Italy, etc. Everyone wants more funding, but at the same time you will have hard time finding a research group at large universities that has no funding from federal agencies. So we tend to complain about our unsuccessful grant proposal, while taking successful ones for *granted* (pun intended). The same goes for tenure - we hear a lot about worries over tenure cases, and the stories of folks who don't get it seem to amplify through the grapevine and blogosphere. But a vast majority of folks on tenure track WILL get tenure - the same thing cannot be said about postdocs looking for tenure track faculty positions at respectable research universities, unfortunately.

Despite numerous claims to the contrary, and this part may be more controversial, I see very few examples of cronyism in hiring decisions - both in my department and through rumor mills. It appears that with some understandable statistical noise fluctuation, the entire hiring process is pretty close to an ideal model of "best candidate wins" - at least as close as one can expect for inherently subjective selection process involving real people making committee decisions. Clear discrimination cases are also quite rare - academic hiring in US seems to be much more fair than in the rest of the world, and other non-academic job searches.

This doesn't mean of course that people should stop worrying about internal politics, funding, tenure or discrimination, but I think on all of the points the situation is a lot better than the impression one could get from the internets.