The purpose of science publications is to share new results with other scientists, so others can build on or verify the correctness of the work. There has always been an element of “receiving credit” to this, but the communication aspect is what actually matters from the perspective of maximizing scientific progress.
In the distant past, publication was an informal process that mostly involved mailing around letters, or for a major result, self-publishing a book. Eventually publishers began to devise formal journals for this purpose, and some of those journals began to receive more submissions than it was feasible to publish or verify just by reputation. Some of the more popular journals hit upon the idea of applying basic editorial standards to reject badly-written papers and obvious spam. Since the journal editors weren’t experts in all fields of science, they asked for volunteers to help with this process. That’s what peer review is.
Eventually bureaucrats (inside and largely outside of the scientific community) demanded a technique for measuring the productivity of a scientist, so they could allocate budgets or promotions. They hit on the idea of using publications in a few prestigious journals as a metric, which turned a useful process (sharing results with other scientists) into [from an outsider perspective] a process of receiving “academic points”, where the publication of a result appears to be the end-goal and not just an intermediate point in the validation of a result.
Still other outsiders, who misunderstand the entire process, are upset that intermediate results are sometimes incorrect. This confuses them, and they’re angry that the process sometimes assigns “points” to people who they perceive as undeserving. So instead of simply accepting that sharing results widely to maximize the chance of verification is the whole point of the publication process, or coming up with a better set of promotion metrics, they want to gum up the essential sharing process to make it much less efficient and reduce the fan-out degree and rate of publication. This whole mess seems like it could be handled a lot more intelligently.
My results from several years, from a team lead, to post acquisition large company middle manager:
1.) It can be much more stressful and unpleasant working through other people than being an individual contributor. You must be able to deal with this in a way that doesn't cause too much unhappiness.
2.) You must be a strong distiller of information. You need to be able to understand what information is important and what is not as you will need to distill a very messy situation below you into something coherent to those above you. Developers can often get away with massive detail dumps that lack any sort of narrative. You will not.
3.) Your job is always to make the project successful. You need to have the confidence and leadership ability to make changes as needed on the fly, and explain them in ways so that everyone understands why what is happening is happening.
4.) You must be a strong communicator. You should feel like you are over communicating. I fail here most often, typically you will know it in real time. Do your best to correct it.
5.) You will have more interruptions and starts and stops in your thinking. Organization helps here.
6.) You will go long periods without feeling like you are doing a good job, or feeling like you arent adding anything. You are. Being a manager and a leader is large time periods of being a servant, most often to those below you.
7.) Focus on putting your team in good spots. Find what people are best at, help them excel. Give good people space to grow. Be on the lookout for your next manager below you. Try to help them along and hopefully beyond you.
8.) Large parts of it are just showing up. Asking the dumb questions. Listening. Saying that sounds good, go do it. Holding people accountable. Keep things fun whenever possible.
9.) Largely, it sucks. I do it because I havent found someone else I think could do better for the team yet. If they show up Id gladly get out of it.
In the distant past, publication was an informal process that mostly involved mailing around letters, or for a major result, self-publishing a book. Eventually publishers began to devise formal journals for this purpose, and some of those journals began to receive more submissions than it was feasible to publish or verify just by reputation. Some of the more popular journals hit upon the idea of applying basic editorial standards to reject badly-written papers and obvious spam. Since the journal editors weren’t experts in all fields of science, they asked for volunteers to help with this process. That’s what peer review is.
Eventually bureaucrats (inside and largely outside of the scientific community) demanded a technique for measuring the productivity of a scientist, so they could allocate budgets or promotions. They hit on the idea of using publications in a few prestigious journals as a metric, which turned a useful process (sharing results with other scientists) into [from an outsider perspective] a process of receiving “academic points”, where the publication of a result appears to be the end-goal and not just an intermediate point in the validation of a result.
Still other outsiders, who misunderstand the entire process, are upset that intermediate results are sometimes incorrect. This confuses them, and they’re angry that the process sometimes assigns “points” to people who they perceive as undeserving. So instead of simply accepting that sharing results widely to maximize the chance of verification is the whole point of the publication process, or coming up with a better set of promotion metrics, they want to gum up the essential sharing process to make it much less efficient and reduce the fan-out degree and rate of publication. This whole mess seems like it could be handled a lot more intelligently.