There is the eventual problem that senior professors spend more and more of their time on administrative work / providing guidance to their lab, rather than doing research themselves. But this isn’t going to be an issue until you get tenure, which is, if you do a post-doc, something like 10-15 years out from starting graduate school.
This might not even be a significant problem when the time does come around. High fluid intelligence only lasts for so long, and thus using more crystallized intelligence later on in life to guide research efforts rather than directly performing research yourself is not a bad strategy if the goal is to optimize for the actual research results.
Those are roughly my thoughts as well, although I’m afraid that I only believe this to rationalize my decision to go into academia. While the argument makes sense, there are definitely professors that express frustration with their position.
What does seem like pretty sound logic is that if you could get better results without a research group, you wouldn’t form a research group. So you probably won’t run into the problem of achieving suboptimal results from administrative overhead (you could always just hire less people), but you might run into the problem of doing work that is less fun than it could be.
Another point is that plausibly some other profession (corporate work?) would have less administrative overhead per unit of efficiency, but I don’t actually believe this to be true.
This might not even be a significant problem when the time does come around. High fluid intelligence only lasts for so long, and thus using more crystallized intelligence later on in life to guide research efforts rather than directly performing research yourself is not a bad strategy if the goal is to optimize for the actual research results.
Those are roughly my thoughts as well, although I’m afraid that I only believe this to rationalize my decision to go into academia. While the argument makes sense, there are definitely professors that express frustration with their position.
What does seem like pretty sound logic is that if you could get better results without a research group, you wouldn’t form a research group. So you probably won’t run into the problem of achieving suboptimal results from administrative overhead (you could always just hire less people), but you might run into the problem of doing work that is less fun than it could be.
Another point is that plausibly some other profession (corporate work?) would have less administrative overhead per unit of efficiency, but I don’t actually believe this to be true.