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Comment by gww | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with this. I believe that staff scientists should be treated as independent researchers. In my experience, they tend to be used as lab support, for example, ordering reagents, managing the annoying aspects of big projects, etc. etc.

As a post-doctoral fellow who would rather not be a principle investigator, I would love a job where I can work independently on my own research projects with a reasonable wage.

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> In my experience, they tend to be used as lab support, for example, ordering reagents, managing the annoying aspects of big projects, etc. etc.

The thing is, as a PI, someone has to do this. And while I too would like to spend my time working independently on research projects and not having to do time consuming lab support stuff I'd rather not do, I also need to be writing grants to keep my staff scientists paid.

Also, the whole argument to staff scientists representing institutional knowledge also applies to support stuff. "We don't order from X any more for reason Y." "Collaborators at Other University are usually two months late, built that into the timeline", etc.

You could try to get into the French system. They have more staff positions (permanent contract based) but of course at a lower salary.

Federal research (i.e. civil servants at NASA, NOAA, DOE, etc.) tends to work closer to that model, but not 100%.

Twenty years ago when I worked for a FFRDC (Mitre), the number of staff were preallocated for the entire year, and the only decisions were how to allocate personnel onto the pool of candidate projects. As long as you could interest a gov't project manager, you got approval to go ahead with your (their) work. However, our capital expenditures were generally pretty minimal. This model allocated labor almost exclusively.

That's about as liberal an R&D policy as I've seen anywhere.

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