Past me vs Future me
Past me must really hate future me. That's the only explanation for why that jerk would sign us up for so many things. She didn't have time for all this, but she thought I would. Past me was a jerk.Digression: Luck
Most of it is actually luck. I find the harder I work, the more I have of luck, just like the expression so commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Occasionally, I'll apply for an opportunity out of a sense of "duty," like "I am supposed to apply for this." Sometimes it out of solidarity, "My colleague is doing this so I will, too." Sometimes, especially when the application is out of "duty," I find myself overwhelmingly relieved when we don't "get" it. Hallelujah, the opportunity that gave us a requirement of a lot of work without any pay didn't get selected! Sometimes, it's less cut-and-dried.The Issue
You apply for things, and all are really beneficial to your career and you know you're not going to get any of them but you have to try. The selection rate on most proposals is about 10%. Usually, you don't get any of them. However, due to the low sample sizes of your submissions (the best I can do is about 6-12 submissions per year) and award rates (10% of that if randomized), very occasionally you will hit a "boom" year where you get way to many things funded. Suddenly, you have to hire people, often very quickly, for an award that goes only 1-3 years.What do you do if it's a bust year?
Well, hopefully you have some fall-back networks in-place. I can teach, my students can teach (only 5 at a time), and there's a number of ways I can ask for help as an early-career faculty. The help will only be there for students, and it will cost me immense political overhead, but at least I can get a little help for my people in a crisis.What do you do if it's a boom year?
Well, hopefully you know some really excellent people about to graduate from somewhere and can get them to write up and move to your university prior to the end of the first fiscal year of the award. Hopefully they are okay with job security commensurate with the lifetime of the award (1-4 years). If not, you hire graduate students, which are safer fiscally (they can teach if you run out of funds before they need to leave), but less-safe as an option to meet project goals (grad students have so many requirements on their time that they can't learn enough to be truly productive until the 2nd year or 3rd year, and then they work for a year or so, and then they focus on the thesis). No matter what you do, unless you had a funded team in-place and a funded project ready to roll the second the other one ran out, you are totally skey-rewed in personnel retention. I'm currently suffering the pain of my first personnel loss, losing one research scientist in July last year (went to grad school) and looking at losing the engineer by October (that's a funding thing from coming off a boom).How do you manage the bust-boom cycle?
You don't.You recognize that job security in industry is at an all-time low, with people mobilizing every 1-5 years anyway. It's not your fault that your people have this low level of job security, it's the system.
You bring total honesty to all your people. "I can hire you for X time. If we do Y, that makes X go to Z because of the spending required for Y."
It's NOT YOUR FAULT if it's a bust for you this year and you have to let people go. That's academia and soft money. You were writing proposals that weren't or haven't yet been funded. You only hired graduate students for projects that needed personnel rather than staff when at all possible. You started to let your staff go into jobs or further education like graduate student etc.. Maybe you lost a contract. Next year will be better, so you should place your "permanent" people in good labs that need temporary people so your "permanent people" will be able to come back to you full time when you get funds again.
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