Finally, after about 100 meters of semi-infinite scrolling, he says something important.
"Why Does DARPA Work? " covers DARPA program managers extensively, but the key points are worth reiterating both as a refresher and to emphasize that empowered PMs are the core thing one should not mess with. "What about managing programs through a committee?" NO. "What if performers just submitted grants and coordinated among themselves?" NO. "What about a more rigorous approval process to make sure money isn't wasted?" NO. "What if people could be career program managers?" NO. You get the point."
The point being that DARPA program managers are people who've done something good but are not primarily managers. Their role is somewhat like VCs, without the greed. The problems DARPA works on tend to be rather specific. Many reflect specific military goals. Here's the current project list.[1] Examples: Automated air combat. A transportable linear accelerator. "Persistent, wide-area surveillance of all UAS operating below 1,000 feet in a large city." "Gun-hard, high-bandwidth, high-dynamic-range, GPS-free navigation." Note how different this is from a list of start up companies. These are technical goals, not business goals. Most are hard engineering problems, not pure science. They reflect specific military problems.
The author's article doesn't reflect that tight focus.
DARPA has a customer - the US Department of Defense. The purpose of DARPA is to solve hard problems for DoD, sometimes if DoD doesn't know it has them yet, and sometimes because DoD has a big problem and needs it dealt with. A "private ARPA" as proposed by the author has no customer. That defocuses the organization. It's not clear what a "private ARPA" is for. Even after reading all that verbiage.
Then there's the problem, who does the work? DARPA funding generally goes to small parts of companies that do major work for DoD, or who have expertise making some specific thing. Not post-doc researchers. Not startups. DARPA does not create organizations to work for them. They use little pieces of existing organizations.
The paper looks almost entirely at US institutions. This needs more reach. China has been opening lots of research organizations. Some are boondoggles, some produce good results. Take a hard look at that. Look at what Korea is doing. Figure out why Japan's R&D stagnated.
There are two good books about DARPA - "The Pentagon's Brain", and "The Imagineers of War". I've read the first, but not the second. The first gives a good sense of how the organization works.
(It's been a long time, but I've worked on a DARPA program.)
This is a really important point. DARPA is one of the few funding organizations that can--and will--pay for experienced technical staff.
Most other funders like the NIH and NSF have an odd split. The principal investigator is rewarded for having a track record (e.g., a prof with a history of similar papers), but the bulk of the work is to be done by trainees. This is sometimes baked into the grant itself: involving students is a good way to meet the NSF's "Broader Impact" requirements. Other times, it's a de facto restriction based on the budget. The standard NIH grant, a modular R01, will barely stretch past the PI + one staff scientist; trainees are cheaper and can often be offloaded onto other fellowships or other training grants entirely. Training future scientists is obviously important, but we've also got to make good use of the ones we already have.
Other agencies are dropping that ball. The NIH has a staff scientist program, but it funds literally a few dozen people per year vs. thousands of trainees. Dramatically expanding this would, I think, produce better science AND ease the academic job market crunch at the same time.
> The bottom line is that if a young person wants to focus their career on invention—as distinct from scientific research, corporate engineering, or entrepreneurship—the support structure doesn’t exist. There isn’t a straightforward way to get started, there isn’t an institution of any kind that will hire you into this role, and there isn’t a community that values what you are focused on and will reward you with prestige and further opportunities based on your success. In short, there is no career path.
This resonated with me; long story short, that describes pretty well how I feel about my career so far. That being said, for software developers I think the situation isn't so bad. PARPA addresses the harder problem of invention in the "world of atoms" -- but in software it's feasible to do freelancing/consulting and then have flexibility to spend time on open source. I might be switching to that soon, after having spent the past few years on entrepreneurship. I wish I had thought seriously of freelancing + open-source as a career path while I was in college (or even better, before college; it could've saved me a lot of time on homework!).
"What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one- off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience, scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few mathematicians and social scientists do, too."
-- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006[0]
--
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20120711014452/http://williamtoz...
Yeah, I have invention that I feel would change energy generation world, but had to wait about 10 years already, because I can't spend enough time to build prototype because I have to earn some money first. Starting a company from your garage is a good idea, but I had to get a garage first.
Just FYI - I'm not whining, I just show obstacles for inventors. For me - I will succeed, it will just take more time.
I've worked several programs for DARPA and do not recommend it. The roughly 5 year maximum tenure of a PM there forces ridiculous schedules which culminate in a project that is passed on to the next PM to take the role. The new PM is busy with her own ideas and is completely uninterested in the old one's project. It's not that satisfying to work for these guys despite the fading cachet of their name.
"I want to break into this new market and I need something that satisfies constraints X, Y and Z. You have a fat budget and as many Fridays as you need to come up with a concept/prototype."
Once a concept is clearly valuable, additional time and resources should be immediately allocated. You could just say to the person who proposed it "this is your full time job as of next Monday, how many people do you need?"
The more aggressively you pursue new ideas the faster you will find the really good ones. You can't be afraid to call out shitty ideas either. Just make it clear that no one will ever lose their job over a bad idea invented in good faith.
What I describe here is basically how our company operates today. Having the flexibility to try scary new things in a supportive environment had yielded some incredible intellectual property over the years. Our customers still can't figure out how we are able to ship to production multiple times per day with a 7 person team while our 10,000+ employee vendors require 3 weeks for basic reconfiguration tasks and entire fiscal quarters for actual software releases.
This feels off to me... Otherlab is arguably one of the only working examples of what Ben is talking about here. This opinion feels not thought-through to me, and undermines much of the other opinions in the piece.
"concretely stating "I think doing this will work" opens you up to the terrifying possibility of being provably wrong"
I wish people didn't think this way. Be confident about your ideas and be willing to accept that they will be catastrophically wrong. It doesn't mean you're dumb it just means you were wrong
My current belief[0] is that most of the financial waste we observe in universities - the deep layers of middle-level administration, the expensive sports facilities, etc. - all have to do with attracting and managing students. Eliminate that requirement, and a big money sink goes away.
--
[0] - Though low-confidence, as I haven't studied this issue in depth.