It must be so cool to work at a university. You can just walk across campus to meet with experts and learn about or apply the cutting edge of any given field to solve whatever problem you're interested in.
Even when you work in administration, learning opportunities abound and are easy to seize.
I’m too shy to just walk into a random lab and ask questions, but three times a year, my boss likes to organize a tour of a different research facility and I really appreciate that.
Of course not when they get a media storm like these people. But I regularly correspond with experts in adjacent fields who have interesting papers put out.
I sometimes get unpublished artefacts (matlab/python/fortran code, data samples) just by... asking nicely, showing interest. And I'm not even in academia or a lab.
I don't remember the paper subject neither the researcher name (more than 20yr ago) but I remember that she was an ornitologist, the subject was quite niche and the response I received to my questions was longer than the article that prompted me to asks them.
I rankly speculate: for the set of low-effort comments on HN, there are more Reverse Gell-Manns than there are Gell-Manns.
> Not everyone is doing groundbreaking research.
They don't need to be, they only need to be able to understand recent, groundbreaking papers in their fields, and be able to bounce ideas with colleagues in different disciplines who walk up to them.
Insinuating that faculty staff are either on the bleeding edge or useless is a false dichotomy.