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Comment by dh2022 | Hacker News Reader

dh2022

And I hope, oh how I hope, that the positions eliminated in the US are administrative positions. That researchers, teaching assistants, lab technicians will keep their jobs.

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There are a lot of administrative staff at research universities whose jobs support... research. Is there bloat and are there too many managers/VPs? Probably somewhat, but the more of the grant administration work that gets pushed back down to PIs and research groups, the less time they have for research. They will also make many mistakes in both grant applications and how they spend the money, because the regulations are byzantine. That will jeopardize future funding and possibly get them penalized.

Tough. Researchers will have to get good at it.

Yes, and similarly to increase the efficiency of our healthcare system, I suppose doctors should have to get good at also doing their own billing, janitorial, etc.

Brilliant people should be unencumbered by admin tasks. Rare minds should be supported for the benefit of all.

I've worked with a lot of brilliant people who know how to do the paperwork that they have to do, and then they do it. Don't believe me? Check out the paperwork that medical doctors have to do -- it's insane, and what these researchers are being asked to do (assuming it's admins who get laid off) is way less. Or how about software developers? We have to dot our i's and cross our t's all over the place -- design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, test writing, and lots of process, and then we get to maintain and debug our own code and sometimes even operate it.

The fact you don't think they do this shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Good Lord.

That's the hope, but that's never how things go. Of course researchers and research will be tremendously affected, and that's a shame.

If it goes down how I'm seeing it in other universities and government labs.. highly unlikely. A ratio like 1:1 or 2:1 is still horrible, and those are big numbers.

Likewise, it's miserable for the people who are left. Research efficiency is plummeting due to having to do nonsense work and the funding path being murky for the next few years. Firing support staff and stopping funding paths means researchers must spend even more time to get fewer grants accepted.

The cuts in funding directly and immediately cut researchers doing lab work and the funds for all the reagents and experiments.

Teaching assistants are different, those are paid by the university so classes will continue. Only the science gets cut.

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