Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by kome » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

temp8964 wrote: post #63

sokoloff wrote: post #26

I think there’s a default assumption in academia that students bring the motivation and perspiration to their work. The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides. My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad…

Some people fail to grasp the idea that the world does not always work surround them. And they have a very different definition of "abuse" than others, which basically goes to: you are abusing me if you don't actively take care of my emotions. For those people, it is much easier to find "abuses". Academic supervisors are not your personal friends. They have no interest in observing your emotions, because they have a…

many academic supervisors are also just lazy to do what is part of their job tho, and they prefer focusing on the interesting part.

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

#72

Post by uselessphd » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

If you have a PhD, in industry you'll have the chance to be abused by someone much less educated than you, who might see you as a threat to her/his career and will do anything to clip your wings.

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

#73

Post by phdonewiththis » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #54

During my PhD, my fellow students reported radically different experiences with their supervisors. One person (studying biology) reported they were staying late every day, working seven days a week, and got cursed out by their supervisor for not coming in on christmas day. Another person (studying maths) reported they could only do about 3-4 hours of productive maths a day, leaving them with loads of free time, and t…

Thank you for this. I should have been clearer in my post -- with respect to "professional development", I meant primarily "dedicating time to finishing papers describing the students' work." Of course, publishing papers is directly in the interests of both supervisor and student.

The difference, though, is that the supervisor might publish four papers a year where he was the primary supervisor of the work, while the student might have a single first-author paper that he spent three years on. That paper is critical for the student to graduate and progress with his career, but for the supervisor, that one paper doesn't matter nearly as much, especially after hitting tenure. Both in my lab and others, I've seen projects stall for months or years because the supervisor is unwilling or unable to devote the time to revising a paper and preparing it for journal submission.

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

#74

Post by AtlasBarfed » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

Seems to me that professorships are so rare and prized that the academic underpinnings of earning them are being hollowed out of the original idealism. Marketing, perception, reputation, and funding are more important.

Huh, which is the exact same problems the foundations of the entire higher educational system in the US has rotted out from.

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

#75

Post by mattkrause » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #21

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 supe…

Age might be a red herring. A bigger issue is that you can’t leave with a fraction of a PhD: 5/6ths of a PhD is effectively the same as nothing (or maybe a master’s degree). It doesn’t “vest” until your defense.

Sometimes one can change groups, but that is often politically and financially tricky.

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

#76

Post by rapjr9 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

I've worked in both industry and academia and both can have severe abuse problems. PhD students are used as free labor to advance a prof's reputation so the prof's have no incentive to let them graduate, especially if they prove capable. I've seen students blackmail professors to get the prof to let them graduate (i.e., "no more work on side projects unless I get a clear graduation date").

  In industry your boss has some incentive to keep you productive and happy, but co-employees can be incredibly mean as there is often competition among employees especially if times are tough.  Everyone wants to keep feeding their family and will tear you down in sneaky ways if it helps them.  There are a lot of ambitious people as well who will try to climb over you and undermine you and use you.  When you interview for a job, pay as much attention to the nature of who you'll be working with as to your potential boss's nature.  That can happen with grad students also, but given the specialization in PhD's it's rare that students are actually directly competing with each other, although in a sense you are competing with all grad students for research impact.

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

#77

Post by andi999 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

I think selection process in industry is much stricter, so skill mismatch is much less, or even reduced by firing.

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

#78

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

benrbray wrote: post #70

sokoloff wrote: post #26

I think there’s a default assumption in academia that students bring the motivation and perspiration to their work. The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides. My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad…

I think you are perhaps downplaying the role that mentorship and collaboration can play in one's career. All of the most successful graduate students I know are very driven, yes, but they also, more often than not, have an advisor who is invested in their success and belong to a strong support system of other students. I'm not as quick as OP to start throwing the word "abusive" around, but I have witnessed a number o…

I agree very strongly with your second sentence (and your last sentence). Do you see those as being meaningfully different from an advisor guiding an already-driven grad student?

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

#79

Post by wayoutthere » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

temp8964 wrote: post #63

sokoloff wrote: post #26

I think there’s a default assumption in academia that students bring the motivation and perspiration to their work. The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides. My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad…

Some people fail to grasp the idea that the world does not always work surround them. And they have a very different definition of "abuse" than others, which basically goes to: you are abusing me if you don't actively take care of my emotions. For those people, it is much easier to find "abuses". Academic supervisors are not your personal friends. They have no interest in observing your emotions, because they have a…

> Some people fail to grasp the idea that the world does not always work surround them. And they have a very different definition of "abuse" than others, which basically goes to: you are abusing me if you don't actively take care of my emotions. For those people, it is much easier to find "abuses".

I promise you, we completely understand that the world doesn’t revolve around us. It is made painfully clear every day that the working world is built for white men who have buried their emotions.

There’s also a big difference between taking care of a persons emotions and giving them the space to have emotions. You can’t expect employees to be machines, and the further from “straight white guy” you are, the more work you have to do in every aspect of your life. But you have less energy to prop up those emotional walls and bury yourself in work.

It all depends what you’re optimizing for at the team level; pure speed and efficiency or quality of output. Are you able to measure their contributions, or are you just measuring things that are easy to quantify? What assumptions get backed into that? If you have so much work that it can’t be done in 40 hours a week, either hire more people or shift schedule. I do this all the time to protect my teams from the PHBs who would want them to do crunch time every week otherwise.

This generation is just fed up enough with the whole situation and has enough leverage to set some boundaries.

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

#80

Post by domk » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

Being a good manager is a skill like any other, something you have to learn.

In the industry, being someone's line manager and looking after their wellbeing and professional development is often considered a job in itself, and people in that career track get selected, rewarded and promoted on the basis of being a good manager.

In academia, lab leaders are leaders because of their academic qualities, and whether they are good managers is completely secondary. They probably receive very little to no training and aren't evaluated on their management skills. Understandably, they focus on growing as researches, not as managers.

That is why so many supervisors in academia are very bad managers.