Getting a paper accepted

I don't find this true at all in my experience, you and I apparently have very different perspectives when it comes to the research we consume. The things which you say are not cited absolutely should be, and if they are not that's a problem. In the papers I read, I'm often encountering citations to specific versions of libraries, specific industry created operating systems, industry created programming languages of which there are many, specific commercial lab equipment which were used. My friend in grad school used to do research on x86 machine instructions and he had a giant instruction manual on his desk at all times, which was cited thoroughly in his work. This is all part of doing good research.

Either way my point stands. Since they are citing the research as foundational in their papers, then we should take them at their word. The idea you put forth that they're only doing so as a matter of show puts a terrible light on them if true. They shouldn't be citing research as foundational if it really isn't. So I will choose not to believe your characterization, because I think very highly of the industry researchers I know, and that doesn't seem like something they would do.

The two are not as orthogonal as the cynical takes make it seem. This is also a bit like the idea that attractive people are less smart and vice versa, when the two are actually positively correlated.

The people who won the career game at top US universities in technical fields don't simply get there by making their plots fancier or using the right words in the abstract in otherwise trivial papers. The papers do make valuable contributions. Pursuing research for pure personal discovery is great, but if you don't tell others about it, why should they care? Most discoveries are not General Relativity or Evolution.

And there's also a component of "cope" in these lamentations. Oh, I'm a lone wolf genius, misunderstood by all, the contrarian who is rejected by the in-crowd yadda yadda because of career failure. It's a way to preserve ego. If only it wasn't for the social games, I'd be the next Einstein, my intentions are pure, while the establishment is rotten. It's a bit more nuanced than that. You have to do good work AND know how to present it and spread awareness about it. Both are needed.

I think it would benefit people to look a few layers above themselves, and to see the big picture of the system, who the different actors are, what their goals are, how they are pursuing them etc. Like the "follow the money" game where juniors in corporations are told to try to understand the flow of money and business value and revenue as soon as possible, in order to know how to advance their corporate careers.

In academia the equivalent is prestige. Who gets it and how? Who are the players? There are college students, PhD students, professors, administrators, grant committees, corporation-university industrial collaborations and consortiums, individual managers at corporations and their shareholders, university boards, funding agency managers, politicians allocating taxpayer money to research funding, journal editors, reviewers, tenure committees, pop science magazine editors, pop science magazine readers, general public taxpayers.

You should be able to put yourself in the shoes of each of these and have a rough idea of how they can obtain prestige as input from some other actor and how they can pass on prestige to yet another actor. You must understand the flow of prestige, and then it will be much less mysterious. (Of course understanding the flow of money also helps, but people tend to overlook prestige because one of the least prestigious things is to overtly care about prestige, it's supposed to seem effortless and unacknowledged)

The author has many other posts with solid advice, like "Don't Make Things Actually Work" https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-make-things-actually-wo...

It seems to go 180 degrees against what a smart starry-eyed junior grad student would believe. Surely, it's all about actually making things work, right? We are in the hard sciences, we don't just craft narratives about our ideas, we make cold hard useful things that are objectively and measurably better and can be used by others, building on top of it, standing on our shoulders, and what could be more satisfying than seeing the fruits of our research being applied and used.

However, for an academic career you want to cultivate the profile of a guru, a thought leader, a visionary, a grand ideas person. Fiddling with the details to put a working system together is lowly and kinda dirty work, like fixing clogged toilets or something. Not like the glorious intellectual work of thinking up great noble thoughts about the big picture.

If you want to pivot to industry, it could help you to build a track record of having created working systems, sure. But I've often seen grad students get stuck on developing bepoke internal systems that are not even really visible to potential future employers. Like improving the internal compute cluster tooling, automating the generations of figures in Latex, building a course management system to keep track of assignment submissions and exam grading and so on. Especially when you're at a phase where your research project is getting rejections and you feel stuck, you are most prone to dive into these invisible, career-killing types of work. In academia, what counts is your published research, your networking opportunities obtained through going to conferences where you have papers, getting cold emailed because someone saw your paper etc. I've seen very smart PhD students get stuck in engineering rabbit holes and it's sad. It happens less if your parents were already in academia, and you kinda get the gist of how things work via osmosis. But outsiders don't really grok what actually makes a difference and what is totally invisible (and a waste from a career perspective). Another such trap is pouring insane amounts of hours into teaching assistance and improving the materials, slides, handouts and so on. The careerists will know to spend just as much on this sort of stuff as they absolutely have to. Satisficing, not optimizing. Do enough to meet the bar, and not one minute more. It is absolutely invisible to the wider academic research community whether your tutorial session on Tuesday to those 20 students was stellar or just OK. Winners of the metagame ruthlessly optimize for visible impact and offload everything else to someone else or just not do them. A publication is visible. A research semester at a prestigious university is visible. Getting a grant is visible. Being the organizer of a workshop is visible. Meticulously grading written exams is invisible. Giving a good tutorial session is invisible. Improving the compute infrastructure of the lab is invisible. Being the goto person regarding Linux issues is invisible.

Packaging your research in a way that works well out of the box is in the middle on this spectrum. It may be appreciated by another stressed PhD student somewhere in some other university, and it may save them some time in setting things up. But that other PhD student won't sit on your grant committee or promotion board. So it might as well be invisible. Unless your work is so stellar and above and beyond other things that it goes viral and you become known to the community through it. But it's a double edged sword, because being known for having packaged your work in an easy to use manner will get you pigeonholed into the "software engineer technician" category, and not the "ideas person" category. Execution is useful but not prestigious. Like the loser classmate whose homework gets copied but isn't invited to parties.

The metagame winner recognizes that their work is transient. Any time spent on packaging up the research software for ease of use or ease of reproducibility once the publication is accepted is simply time stolen from the next project that could get you another publication. Since you'll likely improve the performance in the next slice of the salami anyway, there would be no use in releasing that outdated software so nicely. The primary research output is the paper itself, and the talks and posts you can make to market it to boost its citations, as well as the networking opportunities that happen around the poster and the conference. Extras beyond that are nice, but optional.

While you're working on making something "really" work, you're either delaying the publication, making it risky to get scooped (if done before publication), or you're dumping time into a dead project (dead in the sense that the paper is already published and won't be published-er by pouring more time into it post-publication).

My argument is time vested into this is time away from discovery and research. Communication is certainly a valuable skills. But by most accounts, significant effort is spent on grants and to make publications appealing to employers (the author himself argues for fun branding in a scientific paper). Instead, I argue the focus should be on advancing the field. Of course, you can argue that conference papers with fun branding and a neural network improvement in one benchmark (where selection bias makes the model look robust), is advancing the field. And it's all about getting paper accepted, so I can get a high h-index, so I can get a high paying job or a job in academia. But I believe the real impact of scientific research is in its footprint on the next generation, and I sincerely doubt any of these papers (using fun branding and focusing on the wrong things), will have an impact then. I hope I am proven wrong.