Alex Elliott: I'd suggest that you can't be a really successful scientific research type unless you're good at one-to-many communication both in writing (journal articles and stuff) and in person (conferenes, colloquia, etc.). Most research jobs are offered to people who write good papers. The final "interview" for these jobs usually takes the form of "come give us a talk about your work". This doesn't just hold true in academia, but also in national labs and such places.
I guess my workplace is very different from most. This has not been the case there, at least since I started 19 years ago this week. For example, our senior scientist has not had a second author on any of his papers in three decades, publishes a manuscript approximately once every ten years, and rarely goes to conferences, yet he is considered a world-class scientists who has led the way in hurricane research and modelling. In recent years, he has won numerous awards including top lifetime achievement awards from the American Meteorological Society. In maybe two or three days each year do I see anyone in his office talking about science.
Another cow orker has an extremely wooden speaking style such that people rarely attend his talks. He has never learned what a verb and a noun is, making anything he writes very difficult to get through. Still, he is a world-renowned expert in his field and even in certain engineering fields and is our biggest winner of grant money.
Another colleague rarely interacted with other scientists and was even homeless most of his life. He never published, but was so dedicated to the science that he lived in a library and left extremely influential notes that are the basis of a current extensive research project. His ashes were dropped into the eye of a hurricane in 1998 in an extremely moving ceremony. He had no known family.
Alex: There was a post-doc in my group back in grad school. He did pretty good work and wrote pretty good papers, but gave some of the worst talks I'd ever seen (he always seemed to have know idea what he was talking about and was easily flustered by even the simplest questions). Last I heard, he was on his fourth post-doc.
I think this is a waste. I guess I work in a very unconventional
field and workplace.
