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?
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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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Possibly, although I think they're pretty similar in that money mostly doesn't translate into increased productivity in industry either (at least in the "hire more grad students" sense).
I think there's a synthesis, though: it is usually harder to trade off time and money against each other in academia, so the money comparison is less salient.
For example, PIs can't turn money into higher salaries for grad students so that they can outsource domestic labour.
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