I'm not very happy with that, but my colleagues tend to work on
their own and not to communicate much with each other. That doesn't
mean I'm deprived of communication. No, I can have several meetings
a day with different people outside the lab. I would rather talk
with other researchers but, alas, the process is organised in such a
way that we don't really need to. So that's for the role of a
project manager who talks, seeks data and useful contacts, tries to
understand clients and so forth.
Another role is a happier one. When the experiment is done, we need
to get some pretty looking package to give it away to a client. And
despite being routine, this code preparation resembles me my
previous job. Writing concise code is not less important than doing
some fancy experimental tricks with data, I believe.
