Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich on class wars, jobs, and management
Noel
Interview: Barbara Ehrenreich on the prey and the predators
By Tom Engelhardt
June 5, 2006
You turn into a middle-class, suburban housing project on the periphery
of Charlottesville, Virginia, and at a row of attached homes, you pull
up in front of the one with the yellow "for sale" sign on the tiny
patch of grass. Ushered inside, you take in an interior of paint cans,
a mop and pail, and cleaning liquids. On the small porch that overlooks
a communal backyard, workmen are painting the weathered wood railings a
nice, clean white. Later, when they're gone, we step out for a minute,
on a balmy late spring afternoon, and she says, "You know what I need
out here? Flowers!" And it's true, the nearest neighbor's small porch
is a riot of red, orange, and purple blooms, while hanging from her
railing are three plant holders with only dirt and the scraps of dead
vegetation in them.
Not surprising really. Barbara Ehrenreich, our foremost journalist of,
and dissector of class is regularly not here. Practically a household
name since she entered the low-wage working class disguised as herself
and, in her already classic account, Nickel and Dimed, reported back on
just how difficult it is for so many hard-working Americans to get by.
Then, a few years later, she repeated the process with the middle
class, only to find herself not in the workforce but among the
desperately unemployed who had fallen out of an ever meaner corporate
world. Her most recent book, Bait and Switch, The (Futile) Pursuit of
the American Dream, was the result. Now, she spends much time traveling
the country talking to audiences about her -- and their -- experiences.
She has become a blogger, is involved in launching a new group to help
organize the middle-class unemployed, and in her spare time she's even
finished a new book.
Now, after four years in Virginia (at least some of the time), she's
about to head north. She gestures at the bookshelves. "There are a lot
fewer books this week than last. I'm giving them to the Virginia
Organizing Project." And it's true, the place is clearly being stripped
down for sale. But you have the feeling, looking around, that it was a
no-frills life to begin with, as Ehrenreich herself, in her short hair,
jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, presents a distinctly no-frills look.
(Suddenly, imagining her with an image make-over advisor in Bait and
Switch trying to give herself that perfect corporate look of
employability seems amusing.)
Her mind is wide-ranging and daring indeed. Some years back, in a book
entitled Blood Rites, she even managed to turn traditional ideas about
the origins of war on their head. She is a thoroughly no-nonsense
national resource.
Looking forward to a trip to the local gym followed by a visit with her
two grandchildren (the daughters of her daughter Rosa Brooks, a law
professor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times), we sit down at a
paper-and-book cluttered dining-room table, which shows no evidence of
having held a meal in some time, and -- eye on the clock, no fooling
around -- begin.
Tomdispatch: You were at a graduation ceremony recently where the
students were bouncing beach balls in the stands. The college president
leaned over and whispered, "This is the problem with having the
commencement in the afternoon. Some of these people have been partying
for hours." In response, you wrote: "There are reasons, whether the
graduates know them or not, to want to greet one's entrance into the
work world with an excess of Bud." Could you start by explaining why an
excess of Bud might be an appropriate response to leaving college
today?
Barbara Ehrenreich: Well, a lot of graduates are simply not going to
find jobs appropriate to their credentials. They're going to be wait
staff. They're going to be call-center operators. Their twenties could
be spent like that. I recently got Jared Bernstein of the Economic
Policy Institute to do some research on this. It's still tentative, but
he found that 17% of people in jobs that do not require college degrees
have them. Those are very often people in their twenties who can't get
professional-type employment, or people in their fifties who have been
through one too many lay-off and are no longer employable because
they're quote too old. So I was thinking of that, and then I was
thinking that for a lot of those who do get jobs, you know, the fun is
over. They're going to be sitting in cubicles and they won't be able to
bounce balls around when they're in boring meetings with their bosses.
TE: The real earnings of college graduates fell by 5% between 2000 and
2004, so they also have that to look forward to.
BE: There still is a real big earnings gap between college and
non-college graduates, but it's begun to shrink. Jared tells me that
the reason it was growing so fast in the nineties was not that college
graduates were doing so well, but that low-wage people, blue-collar
people, were doing so poorly. Their wages were being held down -- and
that remains true.
TE: In 1989, you published a book about the middle class, or the
professional-managerial class as you call them, entitled Fear of
Falling. The book was way ahead of its time. If you were titling a work
on the subject today you might just call it, Falling.
BE: What I was thinking about then was the fear of intergenerational
falling, the fear a lot of upper-middle class people have that their
children will not get into the same class, because you can't just
bequeath your class status to them. They can't inherit. They have to go
through this whole education thing. Now, it could be Free Fall, though
it isn't quite that bad? yet.
TE: In Bait and Switch, the book where, as an investigative reporter,
you sought a corporate job and found yourself in the world of the
middle-class unemployed or anxiously employed, you wrote, "On many
fronts, the American middle class is under attack as never before."
What happened to the middle class between then and now?
BE: In Fear of Falling, I was concerned with the distance between the
professional managerial class and the traditional working class. I
thought I saw a new class developing. The strict Marxist idea is:
You've got the bourgeoisie. Everybody else is a wage earner and they're
not that different, whether they're accountants or laborers. And I was
saying, no, there's a real difference here. The white-collar worker who
sits at a desk is telling other people what to do in one way or
another. Such workers are in positions of authority when compared to
blue and pink-collar people.
Back then, I was emphasizing the differences. Today, in Bait and
Switch, what I'm emphasizing is the lack of difference, that the
security the professional-managerial class thought it had is gone. The
safest part of that class, when I was writing in the eighties, seemed
to be the professionals and managers with corporate positions. Then
something happened in the nineties. Companies began to look at even
those people as expenses to be eliminated rather than assets to be
nurtured. What I was seeing in the late eighties was this pretty tight
middle class where, really, the only problem was to get your kids into
it, too.
TE: Your fear was for your children. Now it's for you?
BE: And of course, your children, too.
TE: In Bait and Switch, you describe life in the corporate world as a
"perpetual winnowing process."
BE: One way that shows itself now is in the requirement in so many jobs
for an annual -- or even an every six-month -- evaluation. You're
constantly on your toes, constantly being reviewed, and potentially
always up for elimination.
TE: And how do you account for the change in corporate culture?
BE: I'm not sure. This is partly a mystery to me, but the pioneers were
people like [Sunbeam's] Al ("Chainsaw") Dunlap and Jack Welsh at GE,
who took pride in eliminating as many people as possible, white as well
as blue collar and were richly rewarded by seeing their stock prices
rise and their CEO pay go up. Leanness became the currency, what you
wanted to achieve. I think part of that -- but I don't know enough yet
to say this with confidence -- had to do with the fact that top
executives were increasingly being rewarded with stock options, so that
the distance between management and ownership was no longer there. A
CEO knew that, if he could raise quarterly profits via cuts, he would
get handsomely rewarded. The easiest way to raise profits is to cut
expenses and the biggest expense is labor. Of course, the better way to
increase profits would be to sell a better product, or more of them, or
at a higher price.
TE: You're famous now for having been in two worlds as an investigative
journalist, the low-wage world of the working class in Nickel and Dimed
and the middle-class unemployed one in Bait and Switch. You've also, it
seems to me, been one of the relatively few members of the professional
managerial class to gnaw at the issue of class regularly. I suspect on
this issue you really feel your politics. What was it that got you to
class analysis and what kept you there when so many others were heading
the other direction?
BE: I'm sure it has something to do with my background. When I was
born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a
hard-core, blue-collar situation. But ours was an amazing story of
upward mobility. My father managed to get through college? well, the
Butte School of Mines? while he was a miner. He was, by his own
account, a genius. [She laughs.] Eventually, he got out of the mines
and ended up as a corporate executive. He started out doing research as
a metallurgist and then got turned into an executive. So my childhood
was sort of an unguided tour of American classes.
TE: For people I've known, leaping classes tended to be a complicated,
painful experience.
BE: Well, my dad was always a heavy drinker, but he was a falling-down
drunk by the time he finished his career -- or it was finished for him.
He wanted all that. He wanted success. He wanted to make more money --
not that we were ever wealthy, but we certainly got toward the upper
end of the middle class. But he also had this social nostalgia for the
mines and would often talk about men he had worked with, things that
had happened. It was clear to me that that was a real world of much
stronger ties among people.
TE: And that he had lost something?
BE: Oh yes! One thing that stuck with me and helped me when I was doing
Nickel and Dimed: I had told him in the seventies about young leftists
going to work in factories to organize the working class. He thought
that was hilarious, but then he said something very interesting: "Do
you know what they probably don't understand? If you want to do
something like that, the first thing is you have to do your job right.
The first thing is -- do the work." As a miner he had known communists
organizing in the mines, but wasn't always impressed with them because
some of them weren't good miners.
TE: Is there less mobility, and less study of it, than there was in
your father's day?
BE: There is less. We don't compare well to Europe any more on that
score.
TE: You now have a blog. You travel the country extensively and,
because of your books, you hear from blue-collar and white-collar
people in various kinds of trouble. What sorts of stories do you hear
these days? What don't we know?
BE: Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the
middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not
to think about. Periodically, we'll have some little focus on poverty,
like post-Katrina, but then it goes away again. After the dot.com
crash, there was a brief moment of thinking about downwardly mobile
software people; then we forgot about them. But it's there all the
time, these crises in people's lives.
When it comes to the media, anything about economic pain is what gets
left out. People sometimes say to me, why do you always focus on the
downside? Because morally that seems to be my obligation -- to look at
pain. Not to celebrate every instance of successful entrepreneurship,
but always to think of who's hurting. That just seems like a basic
moral requirement for everybody. But that's what's missing too often in
the media, the pain.
Stories of pain, the forum on my website is full of them. People will
just post them:
I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering. I give up. I've
been searching for three years.
I'm living with my parents now. I had to give up my apartment, my home.
I'm working in a call center now.
That's the kind of thing I hear, over and over. And then people are
losing pensions, losing health insurance. That's happening across the
board -- to people in middle-class occupations too.
TE: You recently commented, "Thanks to Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, we
now have a government with vastly expanded military and surveillance
functions and sadly atrophied helping functions. Imagine, for an
awkward zoological analogy, a lioness with grossly enlarged claws and
teeth but no mammary glands."
BE: This was something I first wrote about in 1997 in an essay in the
Nation which they entitled, "Confessions of a Recovering Statist." I
talked about the shift of government, at the end of the Clinton years,
away from the helping functions and toward the military,
penitentiaries, law enforcement. At what point, I asked, do
progressives have to say: I don't want to expand the helping functions
of this government because look what it's doing? A nice example is
public housing -- okay, public housing's a good thing, but when you
start doing drug tests on people to get in or stay in such housing,
then it's become an extension of the law enforcement function of
government.
I still raise that question. Today, we have this even larger federal
government, more and more of it being war-related,
surveillance-related. I mean it's gone beyond our wildest Clinton
administration dreams. I think progressives can't just be seen as
pro-big-government when big government has gotten so nasty.
TE: And also when civil society has been stripped of so many of its
"civil" capacities, including, as with Katrina, the capacity to
rebuild.
BE: Katrina's a perfect example of how militarized the government has
gotten even when it's supposedly trying to help people. The initial
response of the government was a military one. When they finally got
people down there, it was armed guards to protect the fancy stores and
keep people in that convention center -- at gunpoint! I mean, this is
unbelievable.
TE: And what about the fobbing off of the civil parts of government
onto religious and charitable groups, often politicized?
BE: It's partly that the evangelical churches have reached for these
things, and then there's the faith-based approach coming from the Bush
administration where the dream was: Let's turn all social welfare
functions over to churches. A lot of the megachurches now function as
giant social welfare bureaucracies. I wouldn't have found this out if I
hadn't been researching Bait and Switch and gone into some of them,
because that's where you go when you want to connect with people to
find a job. That's also where you find after-school care, child care,
support groups for battered women, support groups for people with
different illnesses. As government helping functions dwindle, the role
of the churches grows. What's sinister is that so many of these
churches also support political candidates who are anti-choice,
anti-gay, and -- not coincidentally -- opposed to any kind of expansion
of secular social services.
TE: Let's turn to the hot-button issue of immigration. For Nickel and
Dimed, you went to places where there was still a low-wage, white
working class -- Minnesota, Maine?
BE: Not Key West which was packed with immigrant workers. But I did
choose my places carefully, because real ethnic sorting does go on. For
example, my son Ben Ehrenreich, who is also a freelance journalist,
decided to get a job in a meat-packing plant in LA. When he showed up,
sixty guys were there and he was the only Anglo. Though he speaks
perfect Spanish, he was rejected because they just think: What's he
doing here? Employers get it in their minds that a certain kind of work
is done by a certain kind of person and we're not going to hire someone
different. When I realized that was going on in Key West, I said: Next
stop, Maine, where almost everyone is white and I wouldn't run into
racial sorting. I couldn't have done Nickel and Dimed so easily in LA
or New York because they would have thought: Blue-eyed, white,
middle-aged woman; if she wants this job, she must have a serious drug
problem. [She laughs.]
TE: The issue of class and immigration threatens to split what's left
of the Bush administration constituency, but not just them. How do you
read the class politics of immigration?
BE: My son went to a Minutemen gathering in the southwest and the
fascinating thing was that a lot of the leaders talked a very big
anti-corporate line: The corporations are crushing us, we're the real
Americans, and so forth. In their minds, the immigrants are part of the
thing that's crushing them and it's so much easier to pick up a gun and
go to the border than to confront your employer.
Then, commentators keep saying that Americans won't take the jobs
immigrants take. It's not that native-born Americans won't do heavy
work and hard work and sweaty work. The problem is that these jobs pay
so little. What makes it possible for immigrant workers to live on such
low wages is their willingness -- at least temporarily -- to put up
with just impossible situations, with many people packed into a room.
After all, what does immigration do, in corporate terms? It provides a
group of people you can really, really exploit. As long as they're
illegal, you can do anything you want to them. Like not pay them. Not
at all. If you were going to take on the immigration issue seriously,
you'd have to look at what NAFTA did to the economy and agriculture for
working-class Mexicans. Much of the immigration stuff is standard
scapegoating. I mean, we're not going to begin to get at the problem
until we take a serious look at the economies of the countries that are
exporting people. Illegal immigrants are not coming here for the
climate. We need to ask: How would we help Mexico, for example, become
a place with stable employment and agriculture. Not with NAFTA for
sure.
TE: Isn't the other side of the immigration issue, the outsourcing of
jobs?
BE: It's very hard to have a serious discussion of outsourcing when we
have no safety net for people whose jobs are outsourced. It's
calamitous to lose your job and that experience does pit you against
the software writer in Bangalore. The longer term issue is: How do we
get together across those national boundaries, so that the software
writer in Atlanta is talking to the one in Bangalore and saying, we're
in this together?
TE: What about the lack of protest in our world, especially the
middle-class world you visited in Bait and Switch? You've started a new
organization to begin to deal with this, right?
BE: You know, after I wrote Nickel and Dimed, so many middle-class
people would say to me: Oh, what's wrong with these people? Why do they
take it? Well, they didn't just take it! Even if they expressed
defiance in ways that were not too productive like laughing at the boss
behind his back or regularly breaking little rules. With the
white-collar people, though, it just seemed so internalized. I couldn't
get over it, how beaten down people were, how they had internalized
obedience. The fear of standing out in any way that might be noticed
seemed to grip them.
Our new organization, United Professionals, had its launch meeting in
Atlanta at the end of April. Its constituency is unemployed,
underemployed, and anxiously employed white-collar people. Now, it's
not a union. Obviously, you can't have a union for people with such
vastly different employers and professions. But it will provide
advocacy for universal health insurance, extended unemployment
benefits, and the like. And some services. We're looking at ways of
offering cheap health insurance and mostly what I call networking, not
in the instrumental corporate fashion, but a coming together, people
sharing their stories, trying to figure out for themselves what's going
on, what they need to do.
TE: A little à la early feminism then.
BE: I see so many parallels because there's a huge stigma attached to
unemployment. People who have been laid off are very ashamed and
depressed. There's a need to come together and overcome that shame. In
those early meetings in the feminist movement of the seventies, people
were ashamed to talk about having been raped. They were ashamed to talk
about having been molested as a child. To be able to say that has
happened to other people proved transforming. So let's bring it out,
let's see what the problem is here.
TE: Isn't this the problem without a name again?
BE: Exactly. So I see the need for something at the same level of
emotional involvement as in the early women's movement.
TE: What other solutions to white-collar distress do you imagine?
BE: Obviously you want some employment rights like the French just
fought to preserve -- saying you can't be fired at will, that a
procedure must be gone through. When I was in England recently talking
about Bait and Switch, my publisher told me: "You know, people aren't
quite understanding what you're saying, how you could be laid off or
fired without any procedure." They didn't understand the concept of
employment at will. So I had to explain that, in America, you have no
rights: no right to your job, no right to a hearing. You could be fired
for a funny expression on your face.
Some of the people involved with United Professionals are looking into
the concept of fighting collectively for what are called transition
rights. Let's say everybody gets laid off. This happened at a mortgage
company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Layoffs of hundreds of white and
pink-collar people. They're all told individually, here's your little
severance package; now, never say another word or we might take it
away. They're trying to take this on as a group and respond: No, you
can't deal with us like that; we all want a severance package we can
live with or at least that will get us through a few months.
TE: In that half-century-plus from the 1950s to the present, do you
feel there's been a transformation of middle-class culture?
BE: It's more sealed off for sure. If you're in the upper middle class
you never have to interact with other classes, except with your
servants or a cab driver or a manicurist?
TE: Until you get fired by your corporation, of course.
BE: Yes, that's the surprise, but until then, your children won't go to
the public schools; you won't be using the public parks on weekends.
You don't ride public transportation if you're in that class. They're
really walled off.
TE: Back in 1989, you wrote of a "culture in which the middle class
both stars and writes the script." What did you mean and is it still
true?
BE: There's been a lot of polarization within the
professional-managerial class since the 1980s. There is now a huge gap,
for example, between a journalist and the managing editor of the paper.
The difference between the university provost and the associate
professor of sociology could be a hundred thousand dollars a year.
They're less and less in the same world. So I would modify that
statement. The scriptwriters have gotten higher up.
TE: What would an anatomy of your professional-managerial class of 1989
look like now?
BE: The main thing is there's just more leakage at the bottom, people
falling out of it. In 1989, college education had expanded a lot, but
not as much as today. Now, so many jobs insist on a college education.
I have no idea why. I think they're just training people to sit quietly
for long periods of time. Obedience training I guess is the phrase...
TE: ...for dogs.
BE: Yeh! I don't see where a typical BA even represents any serious
skills. Obviously I'm for education, but there's a major element of
rip-off here.
TE: What happened, by the way, to the famed 1950s man in the grey
flannel suit? I was amused that, for your working class book, you could
go to work more or less dressed as you are now, wearing a T-shirt and
jeans.
BE: I think you would need khaki pants.
TE: Right. But when you tried to make your way into the corporate
world, there was this constant stylistic retooling. No more single
uniform.
BE: The explanation for that -- which sociologist Robert Jackall
offered and my image make-over guy confirmed -- is that, by being
precisely right in your appearance, you signal that you'll conform in
any other way they might want. You're sending a signal about your
degree of compliance.
TE: Certainly the man in the grey flannel suit didn't expect to get a
$300 million thank-you note when he retired. Here's a figure you had in
one of your blog entries: "The top 10 percent of households saw their
net worth rise [between 2001 and 2004] by 6.1 percent to an average of
$3.11 million." I was wondering how you looked at the vast payoffs to
CEOs, a tiny endowed elite, who will, in fact, be able to endow their
children.
BE: It's just plunder. You have your pay determined by a board of your
buddies, often just other CEOs. They can take what they want. What was
it in the paper today? Home Depot. [She grabs a newspaper off the table
and begins rifling through it.] "The stock fell but the chief's pay
kept rising." That's news? [She laughs.] Or it was Verizon? Stock
tumbled and the CEO got a raise. They'll push down wages as far as they
can, and if there's no union to stop them, they'll just keep going, and
they'll push up their own pay. There's no limit to what they'll take!
TE: You've talked about the invisibility of the poor, the low-wage
working class, and these middle-class people falling out of the
corporate world, but in a weird way aren't the rich invisible, too?
BE: Well, not that invisible, because they're always in the media
spectacle, though they aren't studied enough. I think that the poor
know much more about the rich than vice versa. You can get some sense
of their lives from the entertainment media and, if you clean their
houses or you wait on them in stores, you sort of see them. Whereas the
other way around doesn't seem to function.
TE: What I was thinking, though, was: Who writes books today with
titles like: Who Rules America?
BE: My fantasy after Bait and Switch was to go undercover among the
rich. I spent a long time talking to [Harper's Magazine editor] Lewis
Lapham about it, but we came to the dismal conclusion that I wouldn't
pass. It's not only things like fingernails, but that a woman of my age
should have had a lot of surgery. I would be a dead give-away. Not to
mention: How do you get access? Too bad -- I thought that would be so
much fun to do.
TE: Looking toward the midterm and presidential elections, what are
your thoughts?
BE: I don't spend a lot of time thinking about electoral politics,
though I'm kind of interested in John Edwards, because since '04 he's
devoted himself to talking about poverty and he's showed up at picket
lines and the like.
TE: In terms of the issues that matter to you, can you explain the
difference between Democrats and Republicans to me?
BE: [Laughs.] What kind of question is that, Tom!
TE: I've been writing a lot, based on that infamous presidential
Mission Accomplished banner of 2003, about what the Bush administration
hasn't accomplished abroad. There, I believe, they're already standing
in the rubble of their own project. But have they accomplished more of
their mission more successfully at home?
BE: No, because they haven't completely dismantled the welfare state, I
mean, welfare itself is pretty much just a pathetic
wage-supplementation program now, but they couldn't get rid of social
security and they actually expanded Medicare. There's a trip-wire
people have not let them go over yet. I remember hearing Stuart Butler,
a Thatcher guy who arrived from England at the end of the Reagan years,
say that he felt this was a country where he could really see his goal,
the destruction of the welfare state in all forms, being achieved.
Well, they haven't done it.
However, one of the places where they've been most successful, as Peter
Gosselin, an economics writer for the LA Times, has pointed out
incisively, is in shifting risk to individuals. It's happening with the
disintegration of the whole concept of insurance. Insurers don't want
to insure the coasts any more; they certainly don't want to give
anybody health insurance who might ever get sick. That's one of the
things they've done pretty well at. In the ownership society, you take
care of yourself; don't bother us, it's your problem.
TE: When you look to the future, do you see some path other than this
incredible one we're on that seems possible?
BE: Oh, yes! I'm sort of a libertarian socialist type. There are a lot
of things that just should not be in the market. Health care, that
should be taken care of. I think there's a place for markets, but
there's always going to be tension between markets and our mutual
responsibility.
TE: If the polarization in the middle class you describe continues
apace, do you imagine a moment when those dropping out of the old
middle class and the corporate world may make common with?
BE: That's my whole theme as I've trooped around the country talking
about Bait and Switch to somewhat more middle-class audiences than I
normally get with Nickel and Dimed: There's a lot in our society that
makes people with college degrees and white-collar jobs think they're
special and superior. But next time you're seeing that person pushing
the broom, remember, you may be one year, maybe even six months away
from that yourself. You're not special, not in the eyes of the owners
and the CEOs. So we've got to get together; we've got to bridge that
divide, get over that snobbishness.
TE: Let's turn briefly to war. We're in a war period and you've offered
a thoroughly ingenious explanation for the origins of? well, you call
them humanity's blood rites in a book of the same name. You've
suggested that they came not from our prehistory as aggressive hunters
of prey, not even out of aggression, but out of fear and from an even
earlier period when we were the prey of other creatures. Of course, in
a non-war situation in your two recent books you've been dealing with
the prey. But I was wondering if you have any comments on our modern
blood rites?
BE: First, you said something interesting about looking at the prey in
my books on economic themes. Well, yeh! And the way in prehistory that
humans or hominids rose from prey to predators was through collective
action. I mean that is the great human trick. Weapon-making, too. We're
smart at that. But there's a human ability that doesn't get enough
attention -- that ability to mobilize concertedly as a group. I think
that's ultimately what tipped the balance in our favor. Other primates
can jump around together to ward off a predator, but humans can do it
so much more effectively. We're good at collective action. Similarly,
to get out of these internal prey situations in our own economy, you've
got to band together. That's not just a lesson from the last 200 years
of labor history, but one of the deepest lessons from thousands of
years of human experience.
Now, what do I think of wars at present? Well, the current war and the
first Gulf War were, to a certain extent, rally events. That's a term
sociologists started using fairly recently to describe something that
leaders initiate for the purpose of manipulating mass emotions. In
their favor of course. [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher was
sinking in the polls when she did the Falklands War, just as the first
George Bush was before Gulf War I when he soared to something like 90%
approval.
TE: And, by the way, the younger Bush before 9/11.
BE: That's right. It was just sort of handed to him on 9/11. Of course,
it was his choice to invade a random country in response. But that
rally effect has not lasted and I don't think they can pull it off
again. I don't think people are going to start waving American flags
for the bombing of Tehran. The scarier thing would be another terrorist
attack which might mobilize some crazed, non-rational response. What do
we hit next? Norway? Because these people are not understanding that
terrorism doesn't pose a normal military challenge. What the U.S. is
doing in Iraq is as silly as the British marching around in little
files in the forests of North America in red uniforms and getting
picked off by Americans hiding behind trees. There's just no clue as to
what to do. Historically, if you don't make the transition to the next
threat, if you're still fighting, basically, the Second World War,
which is as far as they've advanced, you're not going to make it.
TE: Last thing -- maybe a term that's disappeared might be worth
reconsidering: class war.
BE: I already use it when I'm talking to groups. I say, yes, there's a
class war. It's totally one-sided and it's time for the rest of us to
mobilize against the aggressors.
Straydog
Good piece that sums up the real situation. I wonder if you, Noel, are the
same Noel Fong that was on SRC some 6-7-8 years ago? I've been on here
almost continuously since '92, and I had, for about a decade the website
"Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" until I took it down earlier this
year for lack of interest (I can't compete with AAAS' own chatroom, run by
Dave Jensen, and pumped up with advertising to promote their website
sc.org). And, of course, I post here under an alias.
However, if you feel like telling us how things are going for you, I'd be
curious. We still have a core of regulars who have been here for most of
that interval that I've been here. We also have the usual few transients,
and a few ostriches (with heads in sand), and we have Kamal Prasad, an
Indian, telling us how good globalization is for us, giving us lectures on
the "new economics," and how the only important thing in the world is
where to get cheap labor (guess where? India, of course!).
Oh, yes, I read the whole piece, below.
Art S.
===== no change to below, included for reference and context =====
Noel
> Good piece that sums up the real situation. I wonder if you, Noel, are the
> same Noel Fong that was on SRC some 6-7-8 years ago?
Yes, one in the same. I've continued to lurk all this time.
> However, if you feel like telling us how things are going for you, I'd be
> curious.
(I was going to get around to this in the next few days, now that I'm
back. I'm surprised you remembered me!)
When I last posted in ~2000, I was finishing my post-doc and got a
(rare) job as a yeast biologist with a biotech company in Seattle. The
first 2 years there were good, as the company still had some research
going on. I was doing what I loved, engineering new microbial
strains. But, the company was changing to become more production
oriented, so my job became more developing programs (cell banking,
etc.) and its accompanying paperwork. Lots of paperwork.
Superfamilies of paperwork.
As the company "matured", they started bringing in the "professional
managers." I got assigned to this power-hungry, ethically-challenged,
insecure middle manager (stupid, too). I was the fourth person pushed
out of the group. I'm sure there have been others since. BUT, I saw
the writing on the wall, and quickly cashed out the stock to my
advantage, and did fine. After almost 5 years there, I am now
semi-retired. It was a horrible experience, and I renounce corporate
life forever. That was a little over a year ago.
Keeping in mind all the advice you offered over the years on trades,
Art, I changed careers.
I am now in a culinary program at the local community college, learning
how to make Artisan Breads and European pastries! I am having a TotAL
bLaST !!! (So far, I've learned to make baguettes, croissants,
danishes, fruit tarts, several types of cakes, ciabatta, and brioches.)
I believe we are embarking on some very bad economic times in this
country. But, no matter what, people will always need bread. Although
I really enjoyed practicing microbial physiology, the new economy has
little room for someone to do that on my level. All the hiring in
biotech these days is in QA, QC, Regulatory Affairs and Clinical
Development, stuff which doesn't interest me.
Being amoung non-scientists and people who are not over-educated or
snotty has been a refreshing change. One of the things that disgusted
me in corporate life was the sheer volume of bullshit and mind-fuckin'
games. There's something inherently honest in baking. Either the
bread gets made or it doesn't, and either the pastries taste good or
they don't. And, you get paid accordingly. Ironically, what I am
doing is a great application of yeast biology. Also, our school is
setting a program in artisinal cheeses, which are often co-cultures
(e.g. blue cheeses). I can see a possible niche later on in the
microbiology of fermented foods. Also ironic is that I have more time
to read science than I used to, as I'm no longer buried in paperwork.
In the meantime, making pastries is just a load of fun.
Noel
S. 'Trash' Ny Fui
Noel wrote:
> Straydog wrote:
> > Good piece that sums up the real situation. I wonder if you, Noel, are the
> > same Noel Fong that was on SRC some 6-7-8 years ago?
>
> Yes, one in the same. I've continued to lurk all this time.
I also remember your name. (Vaguely.)
> ... BUT, I saw
> the writing on the wall, and quickly cashed out the stock to my
> advantage, and did fine. After almost 5 years there, I am now
> semi-retired. It was a horrible experience, and I renounce corporate
> life forever.
Well, I think this is an explanative illustration to why the number of
participants at s.r.c. dropped from several tens in the middle-1990s to
several in the middle-2000s. In the beginning of the 1990s, the country
just emerged after the economical recession, and there was a dearth of
jobs for scientists. People vented their frustration at s.r.c. And then
the booms in IT and biotech occured, and this sucked the majority of
scientists in, and gave them a good life. They had no longer the
motivation to write to s.r.c.
\/
Straydog
On Sun, 10 Jun 2006, Noel wrote:
> Straydog wrote:
>> Good piece that sums up the real situation. I wonder if you, Noel, are the
>> same Noel Fong that was on SRC some 6-7-8 years ago?
>
> Yes, one in the same. I've continued to lurk all this time.
Well, its my pleasure to see another one of our few "wayward flock" stray
back and become re-aquainted!
>> However, if you feel like telling us how things are going for you, I'd be
>> curious.
>
> (I was going to get around to this in the next few days, now that I'm
> back. I'm surprised you remembered me!)
Well, I recall that we traded books on careers because I was writing book
reviews for the web site. I forgot which books, but there were two at the
time on alternative careers and non-conventional, or something like that.
I guess I could look at my own copies of my saved website (now on zip
files) if I really wanted to know.
> When I last posted in ~2000, I was finishing my post-doc and got a
> (rare) job as a yeast biologist with a biotech company in Seattle. The
> first 2 years there were good, as the company still had some research
> going on. I was doing what I loved, engineering new microbial
> strains. But, the company was changing to become more production
> oriented, so my job became more developing programs (cell banking,
> etc.) and its accompanying paperwork. Lots of paperwork.
> Superfamilies of paperwork.
> As the company "matured", they started bringing in the "professional
> managers."
Ahhh...hah!! Yep, I've heard that one before.
I got assigned to this power-hungry, ethically-challenged,
> insecure middle manager (stupid, too).
On his way to become a CEO someplace, someday?
I was the fourth person pushed
> out of the group. I'm sure there have been others since. BUT, I saw
> the writing on the wall, and quickly cashed out the stock to my
> advantage, and did fine.
Good for you.
After almost 5 years there, I am now
> semi-retired. It was a horrible experience, and I renounce corporate
> life forever. That was a little over a year ago.
Life is not always where the money is, or where the money is is not always
where the life is, or...something like that.
> Keeping in mind all the advice you offered over the years on trades,
> Art, I changed careers.
Good, brilliant.
> I am now in a culinary program at the local community college, learning
> how to make Artisan Breads and European pastries! I am having a TotAL
> bLaST !!! (So far, I've learned to make baguettes, croissants,
> danishes, fruit tarts, several types of cakes, ciabatta, and brioches.)
Cool ! !
Wife and I have been spending a little more money on visceral pleasures
(i.e. the "dessert tray" too).
> I believe we are embarking on some very bad economic times in this
> country. But, no matter what, people will always need bread. Although
> I really enjoyed practicing microbial physiology, the new economy has
> little room for someone to do that on my level. All the hiring in
> biotech these days is in QA, QC, Regulatory Affairs and Clinical
> Development, stuff which doesn't interest me.
Understandable.
> Being amoung non-scientists and people who are not over-educated or
> snotty has been a refreshing change.
Ahhh, isn't it interesting? Maybe you'll recall that I've said a few times
that I've met some secretaries and janitors that were better human
beings....
One of the things that disgusted
> me in corporate life was the sheer volume of bullshit and mind-fuckin'
> games.
Yep. Not to mention the "rah-rah-rah," "go-go-go," and "push-push-push"
crap.
> There's something inherently honest in baking.
I did some handyman work the last few years, too. And, worked with guys
(sub contractors) who helped me build our retirement home. I got that same
feeling about "something inherently honest..." You get to see your work
develope in front of you, relatively quickly, it has immediate benefits to
the end user, its simple, concrete, practical, you have much more control
over the process. Etc.
Either the
> bread gets made or it doesn't, and either the pastries taste good or
> they don't. And, you get paid accordingly. Ironically, what I am
> doing is a great application of yeast biology. Also, our school is
> setting a program in artisinal
^^^^^^^^^
Never heard of them, I'll ask my wife, she's the foodie.
cheeses, which are often co-cultures
> (e.g. blue cheeses). I can see a possible niche later on in the
> microbiology of fermented foods. Also ironic is that I have more time
> to read science than I used to, as I'm no longer buried in paperwork.
> In the meantime, making pastries is just a load of fun.
If you've been reading my snot, then you know I've gotten rid of almost
all of my science books, and now have about a thousand books on history,
and reading Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization" (in ten volumes, ave
800 pages each, almost done with volume 6, and have not enjoyed reading as
much since I was a kid). Most of this reading is history and
history-related, but also read some books on economics, finance, banking
(as relates to the world economy, globalization, etc).
I agree with you above, that we're headed into bad economic times. Save
some money for the rainy days. Sounds like you're doing fine. Enjoy.
> Noel
>
>
Straydog
On Sun, 10 Jun 2006, S. 'Trash' Ny Fui wrote:
>
> Noel wrote:
>> Straydog wrote:
>>> Good piece that sums up the real situation. I wonder if you, Noel, are the
>>> same Noel Fong that was on SRC some 6-7-8 years ago?
>>
>> Yes, one in the same. I've continued to lurk all this time.
>
> I also remember your name. (Vaguely.)
>
>> ... BUT, I saw
>> the writing on the wall, and quickly cashed out the stock to my
>> advantage, and did fine. After almost 5 years there, I am now
>> semi-retired. It was a horrible experience, and I renounce corporate
>> life forever.
>
> Well, I think this is an explanative illustration to why the number of
> participants at s.r.c. dropped from several tens in the middle-1990s to
> several in the middle-2000s.
Oh, its only part of the explanation. The other part is that
website chatrooms and website blogs have soaked up a great deal of
attention. AND, I know lots of people who don't know about newsgroups and
when you explain newsgroups to them, the give you blank looks. Its all
part of the mindset that "understands" that the "eye candy" you get when
you do your internetting with a web browser is the whole internet and you
do everything with the web browser, period. when I look at headers on
posts, a large fraction show "MS Outlook, ver X", or some version as the
"agent" and rarely anything else.
You have to realize that its much much easier to commercialize a website
(thus AAAS sponsors sc.org, and sc.org "sponsors" AAAS), and so they feed
into each other. I've almost never seen a website make reference to
newsgroups (but Dave Jensen seems come over here every 6 mo to a year
trying to grab off anyone he can, but he can censor me off sc.org if I try
that "over there" [my rant]). And, out in the printed media, its easy to
give a URL and have everyone go there because its so easy. Try to
"advertise" newsgroups! If you said "sci.research.careers" anywhere,
people would be typing that into the URL slot and get "404". Even if you
told them to type in "news://sci.research.careers" it would probably
result in an error message unless the ISP configured their news server to
respond to that URL (="news://") let alone the URI (Uniform resource
identifier=either the website domain, or the resolvable newsgroup name).
PS. I think less than one in a thousand people know the difference between
an URL and URI, and most of the time people use the URL for all of it.
Same problem with the terms "font" and "typeface". Most usage is confused.
In the beginning of the 1990s, the country
> just emerged after the economical recession, and there was a dearth of
> jobs for scientists. People vented their frustration at s.r.c. And then
> the booms in IT and biotech occured, and this sucked the majority of
> scientists in, and gave them a good life. They had no longer the
> motivation to write to s.r.c.
People who were on SRC and leaving just as I started to show up regularly
told me that "horror stories" in science careers existed before and way
before my time. The tough times and the better times move up and down just
like the tides of the oceans.
> \/
>
>
Phil Scott
--
Phil Scott
Ideas are bullet proof.
"Noel" <noell...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1150000368....@f6g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Stupidity and those other characteristics are a matched
set...when you see arrogance or lousy ethics the rest goes
with it...
I was the fourth person pushed
> out of the group. I'm sure there have been others since.
> BUT, I saw
> the writing on the wall, and quickly cashed out the stock to
> my
> advantage, and did fine. After almost 5 years there, I am
> now
> semi-retired. It was a horrible experience, and I renounce
> corporate
> life forever. That was a little over a year ago.
I see this in my business too. At NASA they had their
young engineers dying in their late 30's and early 40's... a
study showed 'shredded heart muscle'...thats tension from all
the insane idiocy clear off the chart..
you wonder how much longer this mess can go on.. apparently
however, the corporations are making enough money starving out
the middle class and paying starvation wages that it can
suffer the idiocy.... that bodes a nasty end game.
>
> Keeping in mind all the advice you offered over the years on
> trades,
> Art, I changed careers.
>
> I am now in a culinary program at the local community
> college, learning
> how to make Artisan Breads and European pastries! I am
> having a TotAL
> bLaST !!! (So far, I've learned to make baguettes,
> croissants,
> danishes, fruit tarts, several types of cakes, ciabatta, and
> brioches.)
>
>
> I believe we are embarking on some very bad economic times
> in this
> country.
Indeed... the basis for that is already on late stage
irreversible trend lines.
> But, no matter what, people will always need bread.
> Although
It can be made in China and dumped off shore...starving
americans can swim for it...saves long shoremans labor.
It will be a broad entrepreneurial skill set, and what I call
a 'zero overhead' life style.. that will save ones ass.
> I really enjoyed practicing microbial physiology, the new
> economy has
> little room for someone to do that on my level. All the
> hiring in
> biotech these days is in QA, QC, Regulatory Affairs and
> Clinical
> Development, stuff which doesn't interest me.
Keep your hand in..and practiced by doing research on your own
for something you can market.
>
> Being amoung non-scientists and people who are not
> over-educated or
> snotty has been a refreshing change. One of the things that
> disgusted
> me in corporate life was the sheer volume of bullshit and
> mind-fuckin'
> games.
It is a relief to hear that I am not the only one who noticed
this...and the degree of destuction it causes.
There's something inherently honest in baking. Either the
> bread gets made or it doesn't, and either the pastries taste
> good or
> they don't. And, you get paid accordingly. Ironically,
> what I am
> doing is a great application of yeast biology. Also, our
> school is
> setting a program in artisinal cheeses, which are often
> co-cultures
> (e.g. blue cheeses). I can see a possible niche later on in
> the
> microbiology of fermented foods.
Now there you go... a winner. Pehaps there are similar
things engineers can do.. so far for me its the high end
trades, not bad. Small scale solar/wind/bio gas packages
might be something I do next...a person can get off the
corporate power grid that way.
Phil Scott
Phil Scott
--
Phil Scott
Ideas are bullet proof.
"S. 'Trash' Ny Fui" <panno...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1150001293....@c74g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
I rode the boom for engineers in the 90's... got out as it
began to get terminally nasty in the late 90's.... then took 8
years to recover and learn how to market my trades skills.
...in that time frame I lost track of much farther south it
had gone in the engineering business.
I put my resume out last year, gave it my best shot, with a
promise to cease seeking an engineering job if something good
didnt come up in a year.... that year will be up in
September.
Ive learned enough about the mess to have geared up my other
options... Life will be good...and relaxed...and working 20
hours a week (but no paying rent, house payments or
taxes..that is the primary anchor to the trap most people are
in imo)
In Sausalito you can live on a boat, RV, or you can travel...
or do a combination. None involve significant rent, or taxes
and when you want to travel that stuff goes into storage for
100 dollars a month... you cant do that with a house.
Phil Scott
>
> \/
>
Phil Scott
--
Phil Scott
Ideas are bullet proof.
"Straydog" <a...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:Pine.NEB.4.63.06...@panix3.panix.com...
The personnel trick seems to be.. when you are young that you
have no experience and they start you at a low salary.
Mid career, you want the experience ..HR offers you a better
salary but not high end money... or they test you on areas out
of your expertise range then claim you are not well qualified
enough to for the top money...you take the job hoping to gain
that edge.
Late in your career, after you have all this experience,
accomplishment and skill sets... they simply dont hire
you...if you are working and have earned a high paid position
HR lays you off with the stated objective of getting rid of
these high paid positions.
Meantime that HR algorithm has decimated US industry and its
middle class. Impressive these people.
Myself...Im outta there. The mind set will produce decades
if not centuries of miseries for anyone working in a
corporation.
Phil Scott
>>
>>
Phil Scott
>> As the company "matured", they started bringing in the
>> "professional
>> managers."
40 years ago I was working for Johnson Controls in Sacramto
calif. doing well, they liked me..I was learning a lot fast.
About two months into the job the division head anounced with
great excitement that they had found a new a manager for our
office, just retired US marine corp drill sargent... I gave
notice the following week. :) Even then I could smell the
rotting carcass.
Its not a bad company though, even today. As best I can tell
the talent it takes to keep HVAC controls operating in the
field precludes terminal idiocy.
Phil Scott
rrc
> Although I really enjoyed practicing microbial physiology, the new economy has little
> room for someone to do that on my level. All the hiring in biotech these days is in QA,
> QC, Regulatory Affairs and Clinical Development, stuff which doesn't interest me.
Oh, Threeducks has got to read this! This is someone, who I don't even
remotely know, and he's corroborated my observations about biotech.
To 3D... just admit it, you've failed miserably in your strawman
argument about biotech and the great work that ChemEs do in it.
Straydog
I always thought "Ducks" was pretty weak in most of the stuff he ever
talked about. I would have thought an "engineer", in general, should be a
pretty sharp guy. I wonder....
rrc
> I always thought "Ducks" was pretty weak in most of the stuff he ever talked about. I
>would have thought an "engineer", in general, should be a pretty sharp guy. I wonder....
Na, he's one of those "Oh, I got a 98% on my Fluids final, what did you
get?"
type of goof ball you meet, from time to time, in engineering who can't
function outside of academics. He's lucky because if he'd ever joined
biotech with that attitude, the biologist in charge would have him
programming his spreadsheets' macros all day, instead of letting him in
the pilot plant to run equipment. You see, every 3D in industry has had
his exam smarts ego bruised within months of joining the ranks.
At best, a one dimensional book smart/linear thinking person can become
an assistant "quant" in finance, assuming that those jobs stay in
greater NYC/London for a few more years. Or perhaps the NSA is a
possibility?
Industry is more for the engineering-business type who knows about
scheduling, operations, meetings, etc which gets him the work he needs
to advance (or even initiate) his career.
Straydog
On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, rrc wrote:
> Straydog wrote:
>> I always thought "Ducks" was pretty weak in most of the stuff he ever talked about. I
>> would have thought an "engineer", in general, should be a pretty sharp guy. I wonder....
>
> Na, he's one of those "Oh, I got a 98% on my Fluids final, what did you
> get?"
You think he got that high? Or, are they watering down the exams these
days? ;-)
> type of goof ball you meet, from time to time, in engineering who can't
> function outside of academics. He's lucky because if he'd ever joined
> biotech with that attitude, the biologist in charge would have him
> programming his spreadsheets' macros all day,
Ahhhhhahahahahah
instead of letting him in
> the pilot plant to run equipment. You see, every 3D in industry has had
> his exam smarts ego bruised within months of joining the ranks.
>
> At best, a one dimensional book smart/linear thinking person can become
> an assistant "quant" in finance, assuming that those jobs stay in
> greater NYC/London for a few more years.
I don't know, I read in the WSJ how people are forming their own hedge
funds these days. They are barely regulated.
Or perhaps the NSA is a
> possibility?
Hmmmm, what would they want a ChE for? Figure out if India/China has
enough tea to flood the world markets and manipulate the stock exchange?
> Industry is more for the engineering-business type who knows about
> scheduling, operations, meetings, etc which gets him the work he needs
> to advance (or even initiate) his career.
I thought they just outsource all the stuff to India these days.
>
rrc
> On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, rrc wrote:
> > Na, he's one of those "Oh, I got a 98% on my Fluids final, what did you
> > get?"
>
> You think he got that high? Or, are they watering down the exams these
> days? ;-)
Well, whatever an A+ is on his grading scale. I had a friend like that
who couldn't function outside of running models on his simulator; he's
a lifelong postdoc today and is happy w/o having a life.
> > At best, a one dimensional book smart/linear thinking person can become
> > an assistant "quant" in finance, assuming that those jobs stay in
> > greater NYC/London for a few more years.
>
> I don't know, I read in the WSJ how people are forming their own hedge
> funds these days. They are barely regulated.
True, but they tend to hire engineers to tune the trading triggers.
> Or perhaps the NSA is a
> > possibility?
>
> Hmmmm, what would they want a ChE for? Figure out if India/China has
> enough tea to flood the world markets and manipulate the stock exchange?
Simple, the NSA boss says... "script something to code/decode this
message and like ones or you're demoted" and the engineer replies, "Yes
sir!"
> > Industry is more for the engineering-business type who knows about
> > scheduling, operations, meetings, etc which gets him the work he needs
> > to advance (or even initiate) his career.
>
> I thought they just outsource all the stuff to India these days.
Those guys actually do the work whereas the local eng/business types
pilfer the credit.
Straydog
You mean, like Bill Gates saying "Hey, look what I did!" or Steve Jobs
showing, in big advertising pictures holding an iPod, and looking cool,
can imply "Hey, look at this cool new gadget!" Whereas portable music
players have been around for quite a while and Creative Labs had something
very close to the iPod two years earlier (now the two outfits are in big
litigation "show downs").
rrc
It's like being Bill Gate's bellhop at a convention or a consultant at
a client site promoting MS solutions during a rollout.
Afterwards, when the requirements are procured, the secret test site in
Kenya tests the code and makes alterations. You drop the code off at
the client site and tell them what a great job you did in making them
successful w/o having to increase headcount.
Straydog
Reminds me of a "story" I heard some time ago about some guy who was
looking for a job. So, what did he do? He got a copy, on a Friday, of
"Unix for Dummies," read it over a weekend, and got a job Monday morning
as a sysadmin. Can you believe that one?
Here's the real secret: that story came to us in one of those Xmas card
"letters" that some people send out and that was the "story" for one of
their kids who was having a lot of trouble finding work and they didn't
want to say that. So, all the recipients, including us, got a "politically
correct" "story".
Phil Scott
--
Phil Scott
Ideas are bullet proof.
"Straydog" <a...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:Pine.NEB.4.63.06...@panix1.panix.com...
I was on a training seminar in LA about 25 years ago. I sat
next to a babe at the hotel bar, she asked what I did for a
living...I told her I was an engineer...
she said 'You are being used by people with no scrupples' she
said she knew a lot those guys doing the using, but wouldnt
elaborate.
She may have been a call girl.. she made it clear that even if
I thought I was hot shit, certifiably smart and all that I was
being used to the core by scum to the highest levels.
That hasnt been fully obvious until the last few years... she
was way ahead of her time...she had an inside view of the scum
apparently.
Phil Scott
>
>
S. 'Trash' Ny Fui
rrc wrote:
> I had a friend like that
> who couldn't function outside of running models on his simulator; he's
> a lifelong postdoc today and is happy w/o having a life.
It appears to me that a certain proportion of people (around 10%) has
an aptitude to logical thinking. They make good programmers,
theoretical physicists and numerical modellers. (In fact, the rest of
population does not make good programmers at all). Such people are
concentrated on logical conceptual re-thinking of the world, and as you
noticed well, they live within running models on their simulator. The
complex outside world does not fit their simple and understandable
models, and they do not like to venture "outside".
Here, at our natl lab, all the managers say that it is important in the
new hirees to have a capability to learn new things quickly, because
the projects typically last for a year or two, and then the staff
scientist has to switch to a task in a different area of science. I
like what they say because I have experience of working in several
areas of science where I had to learn the concepts quickly and become
productive quickly.
But I noticed that our management likes to hire humerical modellers and
assigns them higher-level (higher-paid) positions than to the
experimental staff. It is sort of understandable for me, because it is
cheaper to model an event on computer than buy tons of 100
thousand-dollar equipment. By the end of the day, the reports can be
written about finishing the work using either of modelling or
experimental methods. One modeller is capable to calculate all sides of
a phenomenon, where it would be required several experimentalists with
expertise in each narrow area.
This attitude came to bite them. They are now forced to develop some
experimental apparatuses, and hire the experimental scientists. They
wanted to hire me into a numerical modeller position, but to give me
both numerical modelling and experimental jobs (I am good at experiment
and no good in modelling). They are still geared towards hiring
numerical modellers, but they want them to do a multitude of tasks
including the experimental work. However, as was said above, the
numerical modellers tend to live in an one-dimensional universe, and
are incapable of existing in a complex real experimental world _at
all_. Such an attitude of the management to give experimental tasks to
numerical modellers is doomed for unsuccess. Why do the management
still do it ??
Regards,
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