Someone who just left our company on Friday worked the magic of cranking out good research publications while working as a programmer, always taking on only projects that had good publication potential and never getting stuck with the horrible life-sucking, year-sucking drudgery tasks of, say, converting application X from using database Y to database Z.
This seems like a really important question that a lot of people might benefit from knowing the answer to. How does one “manage upwards” and ensure that one gets put on the interesting, rewarding projects as opposed to the tedious stuff?
Well, I know at least some researchers simply give the tedious stuff to someone else. You can hire an external group of people (such as my company, I work in this field) and tell them “Check this dataset/program, for common errors.” and get back a list of things like “These 30 people report both Non-smoking status and 30 pack-years.” You can also have them do things like “Check this paper draft for publication.” “Collect these 12 different types of data into a single dataset.” “Generate these tens of thousands of forest plots.” etc. And yes, sometimes there is a “Convert this database type into this other database type.”
Since I’m a computer guy and not a researcher, the data grinding isn’t really any more tedious than any other job, and if anyone does acknowledge/coauthor me in a paper, it’s a pleasant surprise.
I feel like this is a rather longwinded way of saying comparative advantage though. A shorter answer is to find someone who is relatively better at tedious stuff and give them the task.
This seems like a really important question that a lot of people might benefit from knowing the answer to. How does one “manage upwards” and ensure that one gets put on the interesting, rewarding projects as opposed to the tedious stuff?
Well, I know at least some researchers simply give the tedious stuff to someone else. You can hire an external group of people (such as my company, I work in this field) and tell them “Check this dataset/program, for common errors.” and get back a list of things like “These 30 people report both Non-smoking status and 30 pack-years.” You can also have them do things like “Check this paper draft for publication.” “Collect these 12 different types of data into a single dataset.” “Generate these tens of thousands of forest plots.” etc. And yes, sometimes there is a “Convert this database type into this other database type.”
Since I’m a computer guy and not a researcher, the data grinding isn’t really any more tedious than any other job, and if anyone does acknowledge/coauthor me in a paper, it’s a pleasant surprise.
I feel like this is a rather longwinded way of saying comparative advantage though. A shorter answer is to find someone who is relatively better at tedious stuff and give them the task.