Looking back at my ASI years
It has been two and a half years since I stopped working at
Australian Scientific Instruments. I haven’t written or said much about it
since then. But I probably should. The best way to do that is probably to
focus on the positives. Here are several benefits that I
gained as a result of working at ASI for almost six and a half years:
Asia
Prior to working at ASI, I had never been to Asia, aside from airport stopovers. I managed to reach
all the other inhabited continents during my PhD back in the late 90’s, but
somehow I had managed to miss the big one.
And Asia is a big deal.
More than half the world’s population live there. Six of the cities that I
visited have populations bigger than Australia,
and thus were far bigger that New York, the
place I grew up thinking of as the Big
City.
The reason that these cities are so big is that Asia has been having an enormous economic boom. In my
lifetime, hundreds of millions of people ascended into the middle class. And
they way that they did so is fundamentally different than how European and
American technological societies developed. In many places, it seems like the
20th century, in which I grew up, was skipped over entirely, and 19th
century societies had jumped straight into the future.
The cultural differences are of course, both confronting and
educational. I have never realized what it is like to not be able to read
anything until I first went to China.
But even though the writing systems, history, and culture are vastly different
to the western world I’ve grown up in, the humanity and the science is still
the same.
I am not a city person, but the nature of the work we were
doing generally had us in capitol cities or other major urban areas. And while this was hard for me, it also means
I learned a lot by virtue of being challenged.
Family
Ever since I can remember, I have resented being a Junior,
and for most of my post-pubescent life I have been trying to distance myself
from my parents as much as possible. This has resulted in me settling down in Australia, which is about as far as one can get
from New Jersey
without blasting into space. It turns out that my dad is a scientist too, and
he is quite well respected in the field of surface and semiconductor analyses.
This doesn’t have a lot to do with geology- that was one of the appeals of
geology- but because he built one of the first SIMS instruments with a
quadrupole analyser back in the 70’s, when I started building SHRIMPs at ASI
this offered me an opportunity to reconnect with my dad. We even ended up
writing a paper together. If I had stayed working in Alice
Springs as a Central Australian fieldwork contractor, that almost
certainly wouldn’t have happened.
Technical awesomeness
The Australian Scientific Instruments teams were, quite
simply, ludicrously good at their jobs. A lot of the people I knew as an
undergrad went to work for NASA, my first job outta college was in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon
Valley. The ANU, where I did my PhD was at that time a world
leader in building technical equipment for geologic purposes. None of them
could hold a finger to ASI. I suppose it must have just been an evolutionary
necessity. After 25 years of competing against a 40 billion dollar multinational,
you need to be pretty good at what you do, and we were. Some highlights included:
All kids of multicollectors. The original SHRIMP
multicollector at ANU was eventually taken apart and simplified, but ASI
refined the design until it could be built, setup, shipped around the world and
set up all over again. When the discovery of 4 isotope sulfur fractionation meant that three head collectors were essentially obsolete, we built a cleansheet design from scratch on a shoestring, and
popped two on a couple of SHRIMPs in Japan with minimal complications.
The IRMS++. This is a 5 cup, Nier-Johnson mass spectrometer
with an electron cyclotron resonance source, which we built from scratch for
ANSTO. The original plan was for us to assemble it off of drawings they
provided, but at our first planning meeting, on of our engineers took a look at
what they were proposing, pointed out how many manufacturing and assembly
issues can be obviated by thoughtful design, and then just took ownership of
the project. There aren’t that many groups who can simply build all-new
multicollector magnetic sector mass spectrometers from an ion trajectory, and
I’m fortunate to have worked for one.
It was always strange to go to Silicon Valley, or Tokyo, of
Beijing, and be treated like royalty, only to disappear back into our Fyshwick
garage when we got home, but I guess that’s just one of the quirks of being a
world-class outfit based far off the beaten track. And honestly, that’s kind of
how we wanted it. ASI was a place of quiet achievement.
Culture
One of the lesser known highlights of ASI was the workplace
culture. When I first arrived there, the company was about half immigrants, and
half white Australian men brought up on the land. And the culture that evolved
there- part tech startup, part paddock, was amazing. There was an expectation
that everyone would do their own work well, without pride or preening, but
there was also a willingness to help out if you could do something better or
more efficiently than someone else. There was also a knowledge of who was good
at what and how things could most easily be completed. It was a culture of low
key, quiet achievement, and probably didn’t help the sales & marketing
folks much, but it directly lead to the technical excellence listed above. And
there was never blame, or finger pointing. It wasn’t until outside management
came in towards the end that the word “fault” meant anything other than a
broken electrical connection. And while everyone was fairly introverted- even
by my standards- that didn’t stop things from getting done, and done well, and
quickly.
In these days, with
the commodification of knowledge and know-how into intellectual property, the
ability to create and improve often gets overlooked. But ASI was an exemplary
example of a group of people who could do things, and I’m lucky to have been a
part of it for so long. But the broader issue, and one reason I’m sharing all
this, is that a lot of Australian ability suffers from similar dilemmas. This
country has a traditional culture of quiet, selfless achievement. And while
this can be very effective, in this day and age it is not always clear how this
can be utilized and advertised. The culture of quiet achievement does not always
mix well with the boosterism demanded by the short attention spans of some
people these days who don’t think deeply enough about what they are doing and
what can be achieved.
The Possibilities
The last thing that really appealed to me was how many
low-hanging developmental fruit there were in teaching the SHRIMP new
techniques. Because it has a two stage secondary acceleration column, the
extraction field at the sample surface is more like a quad SIMS than any of the
other magnetic sector SIMS instruments. So there are all sorts of analytical
setups which could be implemented with only a tiny bit of additional
engineering, which would allow the instrument to do types of analyses that simply
weren’t possible before. I’m a little bit disappointed that I won’t be the guy
to build and develop new techniques. But hopefully the new generation
instrument that they’re building now will be able to do some neat stuff.
With the acquisition of the laser ICP stuff, there was
obviously an opportunity to make all sots of cool multi-platform
microanalytical synergy. I’m a little less optimistic that will happen- even
though we did get a SHRIMP running on Geostar (as described in the technical
supplement of our Geology Paper), I don’t know that anyone is currently working
on following that work up. But it was promising enough for me to push it for as
long as I thought there was a chance it would work.
In the end, I left because it wasn’t clear what staying
would accomplish. In October of 2015 we had a round of layoffs, which included
a successful senior engineer who was the most outspoken person with regards to
resisting management’s attempts to put us on contracts instead of renegotiating
our Enterprise Agreement. I was next in line to take up the mantle of employment rights agitator,
and my value to the company was diminished by the fact that my boss had bailed
from the Silicon Valley meetings I set up for him to drum up business, thereby ensuring that I wouldn’t be bringing
any new work in any time soon. I still second guess my choice to leave- The
brave thing to do would have been to stay and try to bring a union in, but I
convinced myself that getting off payroll would maybe save someone else’s
job. And though I second guess myself
often, it isn’t clear what I could have done better.
The first 18 months of my new job has been settling in, and
for most of the last year I’ve been trying to be more involved with my family
and take better care of my health. As for what next? It’s hard to tell. But
suggestions are welcome.
