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.
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.