I work in a Federal Lab and I know a coworker that is working on his PhD in Computer Science. A lot of the local colleges allow lab employees to complete their research in the Federal Lab rather than at the school. Pretty sweet gig if you can land it because you are essentially getting a lot of the research out of the way while doing your job and getting paid at the same time.

I became concerned recently because I have noticed that this individual has a contractor perform most of the computer programming for his research and he has a paid intern run most of the experiments. The bulk of what he has to complete then is writing the papers.

I do not have a PhD myself, so maybe this is actually very common, but it did not seem honest to me. I had always assumed that Universities expected students to be hands on with most of their research. Is this person doing something unethical? or am I just being overly critical?