| What's scary is that this represents a fairly luxurious set of pain-points relative to the ones I've seen junior faculty members in the biological sciences exposed to at Harvard. The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations: First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest. Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die. Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures. Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture. These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles. That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges. |
That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions.
Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills.
If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.