Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia?

Having been in both academia (albeit only for a Master's, so Ph.D. treatment I saw only from third-person perspective) and industry, the main difference is what happens when you do land in a bad situation (i.e. with a bad supervisor). If you are in industry with a job skill for which there is demand, if you have a bad supervisor you just start shopping for a new job. So, regardless of whether or not the % of bad supervisors is different, the effects on you are different. If you have a bad supervisor, start interviewing, even if you can't afford to quit the job you have until a new one is found.

The fact that Ph.D. students tend to be much younger than their bosses probably also has something to do with it; experienced employees are more likely to realize "this is not normal", and leave.

I'm a professor and have worked in industry.

Let me break down the issues a bit on the education side, first. Almost always by year 4+ most PhD students are fatigued and starting to get very weary. I was definitely one of them, and at times I did feel like my supervisor wasn't helping my career development or giving me enough mentoring. He is a wonderful, kind, and creative person and he spent 1-2 hours per week with me, but for whatever reason I still felt this way.

I eventually decided I felt that way because he didn't make his expectations for me finishing and tailoring those expectations to my career goals clear up front, and very few advisors do so. The first thing I did when I became a professor was write up an expectations document, and when students want to join my lab I walk them through it, and even then we do a trial run if they still want to. I think this helps a lot. Each semester I review career goals, progress to graduation, etc. with a student, and we include things like publication targets, internships, etc., depending on career goals. I think of my PhD students as my apprentices, and it is my job to get them to be strong scientists and to help them achieve their career goals, as long as they put the work in. Once I became a professor I was much more understanding and sympathetic to my own advisor. Until you have the job, you don't really understand the challenges.

All that said, I've seen very bad advisors who exploit students, fail to mentor them well, make them stay far longer than needed (ambitious new faculty), neglect to push them hard enough to actually achieve their career ambitions (tenured faculty past their prime), and various sorts of emotional abuse.

Industry is no picnic, though. Depending on the job, you may have little autonomy (you don't get to decide what you do, unlike academia), be abused in terms of work hours (many start ups), subjected to micromanagement, and verbal abuse definitely does exist.

Take a look at "Ask A Manager" and you will hear many many tales of abuse and drama in industry: https://www.askamanager.org/

Marketing agencies are not universally, but commonly abusive of young employees as they are seen as easily replaceable. The goal is to get a much work out of recent college graduates before completely burning them out and then firing or having them quit from stress and exhaustion. This typically takes 2-3 years of 50-70 hour weeks in a high stress environment.

They like recent college graduates, because they don’t know what a healthy work environment looks like.

Two things came to mind:

1. I don't think we can generalize to the whole of academia, based on a singular experience with one particular supervisor. It might just happened that your particular supervisor is like that. But there are a lot better supervisors out there and a lot worse supervisors. Same thing in industry.

2. About the supervisor "helping the student with career" - this is exception rather than the case, I think. In particular, when I had a supervisor, he said that, in his view, to successfully finish PhD means learning to be independent and do things on your own. And I agreed with him. This is not school anymore and at some time you have to get out of the nest and start doing things independently, without people assigned to watch over you.