Academia and VC-funded startups in this "M&A has replaced R&D" era seem radically different but are actually similar in structure.
You have a massive wealth of mostly passive capital with vague desires behind it. For the VCs, it's "invest in small businesses and get me a high return", the passive capitalists being administrators of teachers' pension funds in Ohio who delegate the small-business investment decisions to a bunch of well-connected "experts" and kingmakers in California. From the government, it's "invest in research that benefits the national interest". You have talent that wants to do the research and exploration. And you have politically-adept middlemen who manage to leverage the principal-agent problem native to passive capital for personal gain.
In technology, those are the venture capitalists, the well-connected people who can be founders whenever they want by placing phone calls, and the buy-side executives at Hooli-type companies who have the authority to acq-hire mediocre "talent" at $10 million per head.
In academia, they're the bureaucrats who administer grants and the most successful academics who transfer out of an IC role into a professorship that is mostly a management role with a high degree of credit. (That's what the OP's discussing when he talks about the people doing the work getting the least credit, having it taken by advisors and full-timers.) Power goes not necessarily to the best scientists, but to those who are most able to direct the flow of passive investment capital (from the government) in a direction they find favorable.
It's upsetting and perverse, but it also shouldn't be surprising. People sell their votes for pennies and wonder why they don't have power. Ohio pension funds invest their wealth in Silicon Valley VCs and wonder why none of the jobs being created are within 500 miles of them. Academics and startup engineers who work based on "idealism" or "changing the world" are likewise selling their votes by taking jobs that underdeliver in compensation and career support. And, of course, people pay taxes into the federal grants that keep universities afloat (let's be honest: even "private" universities breathe on taxpayer oxygen) and tuition to get their kids stamped as "approved for admission into the middle class" and that's the biggest bit of cut-price vote-selling in all of this.
Part of me says "fuck this noise" and the other part of me doesn't know what the solution is, for startups or for academia. I think the end goal of all societies should be (just as political vote-selling is illegal) to make passive capital a bit less passive, so that the salesmen who make careers of buying and selling cheap votes at a profit are (what is the word?) disintermediated.
You have a massive wealth of mostly passive capital with vague desires behind it. For the VCs, it's "invest in small businesses and get me a high return", the passive capitalists being administrators of teachers' pension funds in Ohio who delegate the small-business investment decisions to a bunch of well-connected "experts" and kingmakers in California. From the government, it's "invest in research that benefits the national interest". You have talent that wants to do the research and exploration. And you have politically-adept middlemen who manage to leverage the principal-agent problem native to passive capital for personal gain.
In technology, those are the venture capitalists, the well-connected people who can be founders whenever they want by placing phone calls, and the buy-side executives at Hooli-type companies who have the authority to acq-hire mediocre "talent" at $10 million per head.
In academia, they're the bureaucrats who administer grants and the most successful academics who transfer out of an IC role into a professorship that is mostly a management role with a high degree of credit. (That's what the OP's discussing when he talks about the people doing the work getting the least credit, having it taken by advisors and full-timers.) Power goes not necessarily to the best scientists, but to those who are most able to direct the flow of passive investment capital (from the government) in a direction they find favorable.
It's upsetting and perverse, but it also shouldn't be surprising. People sell their votes for pennies and wonder why they don't have power. Ohio pension funds invest their wealth in Silicon Valley VCs and wonder why none of the jobs being created are within 500 miles of them. Academics and startup engineers who work based on "idealism" or "changing the world" are likewise selling their votes by taking jobs that underdeliver in compensation and career support. And, of course, people pay taxes into the federal grants that keep universities afloat (let's be honest: even "private" universities breathe on taxpayer oxygen) and tuition to get their kids stamped as "approved for admission into the middle class" and that's the biggest bit of cut-price vote-selling in all of this.
Part of me says "fuck this noise" and the other part of me doesn't know what the solution is, for startups or for academia. I think the end goal of all societies should be (just as political vote-selling is illegal) to make passive capital a bit less passive, so that the salesmen who make careers of buying and selling cheap votes at a profit are (what is the word?) disintermediated.