[throwawaymaths]

yeah well i worked with a high level DARPA PM that it turned out her phd was overinterpreting noise and her PI (francesco stellaci) railroaded the postdoc that tried to call foul. by the way, that PM, last i checked had left DARPA and was working on a microfluidics nanodrop blood diagnostics company -- you cant mke this shit up!! and a DOE biotechnology pm that was excited to be on the project -- but by his own admission couldn't remember what a promoter was. fucking clown cars.

> you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.

not at all the same. the point here is about incentive structure. If you're a great scientist, why aren't you doing the science? something made you decide instead to be a career bureaucrat.

[rsfern]

sure - there are absolutely lousy PMs as well as great PMs, but this kind of situation happens in all kinds of organizations and I think you are overgeneralizing.

There are lots of reasons that excellent scientists might not want to actively do research anymore. Being a PM seems like a nice way to get a broad exposure to cutting edge research without dealing with the (IMO) overwhelming incentive structure in academic science, driving a narrow research program at a national lab, or leaving the world of open science to as an industry researcher.