App idea: a tool that displays a live "salary clock" showing how much was spent during a meeting.
Good for ditching useless meetings and contextualizing non-personnel spend
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A couple of meetings ago we accidentally used Zoom free-version, and had a 40min "countdown timer" appear on the screen. It was... strangely motivating. A feature, even.
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I guess the academic version of this shows how much grant money is being spent. I imagine it would surprise ~everyone except particularly conscientious PIs.
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Or if you're feeling especially impish, the amortized hourly wage assuming everyone was paid like an L3 new grad at Google, as a lower bound on the opportunity cost. 😈
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Haha, I don't know if grant money is the relevant finite resource here though. Maybe like "grad student time/sanity/flow"
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"This meeting decreases the expected number of neurips submissions of your group by 0.2"
Hit em where it hurts.
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I get the sense that many/most groups are pretty meaningfully constrained by funding. e.g., they wouldn't be able to take on more grad students/postdocs because of funding concerns.
Maybe the difference is that you don't (yet) pay your own students?
I think there is a meaningful difference in how effective money is at translating into productivity though (in academia vs industry). For example, even unconstrained by budget, I don't think "hiring tons of grad students" will necessarily make progress on problems I care about.
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