I choose you, Shyentist!

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.

Yup, this is every job. Your skills at performing a task are only a small part of success. The bigger part is being able to make friends with the right people.

Edison and Tesla come to mind. Edison wasn't the best when it came to electrical engineering but he was good at talking. Tesla was brilliant and is the father of modern electrical engineering but his best friend was a pigeon. During their lifetimes, Edison was much more successful than Tesla was.

Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.

Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they've got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.

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.

"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.

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.

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'm trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I'm coming up blank.

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.

Participating in society =/= social climbing

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.

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.

Sadly not just science, either.

The same problem exists in socialism

You need to convince people what you’re doing is worth doing. Whether that is economically or societally

Well you see, if we made people read that irrelevant first sentence, and the beginning of the following paragraph, their heads might explode.