Being a professor at a research university is really multiple non-overlapping jobs all at once: managing your research group, bringing in funding and publicity, helping run your department and research community, and teaching classes. PhD programs really only prepare you for the nuts-and-bolts of research, and maybe teaching. Only if you're lucky, your advisor was thoughtful enough to make proper introductions to help you get started on funding and prestige out of the gate.

It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.

You can blame the bureaucrats for this multi-facted outcome. Their ever-increasing pressure of getting new funding and balancing your books with frequent budget updates is what leads to so much time spent on those activities. And of course they tie those activities to your promotion, instead of the importance of your discoveries which is what should be the only thing that matters.

From a certain perspective, there are two kinds of fields in the academia: "laboratory science" and everything else. If you want to make a career in laboratory science, you need to be a manager and a professional beggar. You need to bring in money to hire people to do your research, and you need to support the administration with grant overheads. If you are good at the job, you pay the administration more than they pay you. Long-term non-manager positions are rare, because they are more expensive for the university than successful managers.

Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.

Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ

I think the contention is that playing political games, as quoted in the article, is beyond the minimum amount of EQ normally expected for a non-management role.

Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.

I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months.

I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.

> Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions

Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.

There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.