Advice to Young Scientists Series #2
Paranoia Is Not Always Bad

When you are work­ing in indus­try one issue you are likely to strug­gle with is hav­ing suf­fi­cient con­fi­dence in your efforts to take a posi­tion and com­mu­ni­cate it when you have not fully com­pleted your work. You will be faced with both tech­ni­cal and non-technical senior man­agers who will seek your input to help them assess the sta­tus of the project. Trust me, I know, since I am one of the peo­ple who always ask for this input. Qual­i­fy­ing your answers is accept­able, within lim­its, but you should always enter any dis­cus­sion pre­pared to at least offer an assess­ment on the sta­tus or pre­lim­i­nary results of any effort in which you are participating.

I have seen many, many young sci­en­tists who were so afraid that they might not be exactly right that they never would offer input to a dis­cus­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, I have seen what I sus­pect were some extremely capa­ble peo­ple have their careers held back by this behavior.

On the other hand, I have also seen many young sci­en­tists who eagerly joined in and offered input into most dis­cus­sions. Granted, there have been a small num­ber who just open their mouths and spoke dis­play­ing pre­cious few work­ing brain cells between their ears^{†.} How­ever, the vast major­ity of those who did speak up went on to rea­son­able suc­cess in their cho­sen career. This was true even if they were not always right when they spoke up. What dis­tin­guished those indi­vid­u­als who were even­tu­ally suc­cess­ful from those who were not is actu­ally quite sim­ple. The suc­cess­ful indi­vid­u­als could be counted upon to cor­rect any bad infor­ma­tion they might have passed on. In fact, the most suc­cess­ful indi­vid­u­als would actively go back and con­firm any infor­ma­tion they had the slight­est doubt about^{‡}.

So, the les­son is:

Do not be paranoid

that what you say might be wrong,

be just a lit­tle paranoid

that what you did say was wrong.

Speak up. Par­tic­i­pate in the con­ver­sa­tion. But never for­get, peo­ple will likely act upon what you say. Espe­cially as you gain cred­i­bil­ity. If peo­ple learn that they can count on you to pass on cor­rect infor­ma­tion or to cor­rect infor­ma­tion that you pass on that is incor­rect, your career will pros­per. Con­versely, a rep­u­ta­tion for pass­ing on bad infor­ma­tion is a sure path to career death.

♦ Is Still Here

^{â€Â}  I sus­pect you can guess what became of their career in the job they were work­ing in when they made the con­tin­ual mind­less comments.

^{‡} There is one par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tist who has worked for me in the past who I would con­sider a moderately-skilled exper­i­men­tal­ist. How­ever, I would choose this indi­vid­ual as part of any team need­ing a ded­i­cated lab­o­ra­tory per­son for one rea­son. This indi­vid­ual has con­tin­u­ally proven that any data they pro­duce can absolutely be trusted. It will either be taken as reported or this per­son will iden­tify the error and report it.