Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there was a minor scandal in the community because postdoc who struggled with reproducing the effect and complained about the results was abused and railroaded by the PI in charge of the project. Shortly thereafter the PM didn't seem to be a PM anymore.
Author here. It's an important question. I would argue that DARPA does not work as well as it did in the 1960's but that your experience with PMs isn't representative.
Even though it's less than other government orgs, DARPA still has more process than it used to. Additionally, the opportunity cost for people who would make excellent PMs has become steadily higher over time.
Oh to make things even funnier, last I checked, said ex-DARPA pm was working on a biotech startup around diagnostics frommicro-blood draws. You can't make this shit up.
Yes, after being promoted to the head of the division with several people speculating that they were being groomed for even higher posts. And it took a scandal to get rid of them. Person should never had been a PM in the first place.
You never hear people say "it's proof that Congress works because they ejected that pedophile (sending lewd messages to the pages) from their seat".
Hate to break it to you, but "an incompetent person rising through the ranks quickly before crashing and burning" is something that happens in pretty literally every large org.
Any 60 year old organization with a large budget is going to have multiple instances of this happening.
Perhaps I have a flair for the dramatic, but consider my statement that I haven't met a competent pm in the division I was in (n~5). The incentives are not that well-aligned. Think about it this way. If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI?
Yes there are a few good reasons, but the population it applies to have largely been selected out by the postdoc phase (where I would say you have had sufficient experience with crushing scientific and engineering failure onself and watching others to be effective) and the pool of candidates therefore is vanishing.
> If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI?
Reasons are myriad.
100% of the PMs I've worked with had tenure and successful labs prior to becoming PMs, and went back to their institution & restarted their labs after leaving DARPA. The reason for leaving your lab to be PM is fairly obvious: controlling the funding gives you a lot of leverage for shaping the priorities of the field, in a way that merely running your own lab doesn't.
Maybe your division sucked. I've only ever worked with highly competent PMs, and all of the programs I've worked on ended in commercialization.
Anyways, prosecuting individual cases doesn't seem like a particularly good way of evaluating the effectiveness of an agency.
Well, it's pretty obvious that DARPA has different standards in different divisions (division I was in was relatively new), then. Which still makes me wonder wtf they are anymore.
It however matters quite a lot what it takes to removed them from such position and how often does that happen. It also depends whether there is a system that can identify such people people and minimize damage they cause. In this case apparently, it took a lot and there was no system.
Facebooks building 8 was run by a former darpa chief and went up in smoke. Also anecdata but it was enough to make me question how good their process really is
That’s a fair point. For what it’s worth the complaints I heard about her management from PI at building 8 were strictly about her style of extreme micro management which seemed to be pretty different from the rest of Facebook, he never mentioned any of the corruption allegations. For example laying out years of research with what she called “inch stones”of weekly expected progress in the initial proposal. I’ve never worked with DARPA myself so I can’t say whether that was something unique to her.
> I’ve never worked with DARPA myself so I can’t say whether that was something unique to her.
Up to the PM. DARPA is definitely more heavy-handed than other funding orgs, for whom annual reports are pretty common. But monthly check-ins is on the extreme end of things even for DARPA. Quarterly/six month are more common. Never heard of weekly, and I doubt many PIs would put up with that for very long.
