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

I actually didn't get any hassle as a PhD student, possibly since I was a mature student and wouldn't take any shit, I didn't need to get into any fights but I was willing to and I guess that comes out as confidence.

As a postdoc I experienced several attempts at bullying, all worked out in my favour as I was sensible enough to join the union on my first day at work. I'd say that 90-95% of tenured academics are reasonable and often pleasant people, but high-achievement does also tend to attract a proportion of arseholes, and it's pretty random as to whether you come in to contact with them. How you handle it is up to you of course, I always fight back. The union is your friend.

I find that startups are much more mellow places to work, finding an aggressive and unpleasant manager seems to be really quite exceptional; businesses tend to have "processes" in place in a way that academia just doesn't. An aggressive manager is quickly identified as a bad manager and then an ex-manager, they can't just claim "I'm really clever so suck it up" in the same way as in academe.

I don't regret being a postdoc at all, I met a load of interesting people and worked on a lot of interesting projects. But it's not the whole of the world. I'd recommend exploration of the rest.

A lot of important people also lend themselves to bullying either because they are not aware of their importance or because they have some psychological affinity to exploitation.

But it's definitely less in a competitive job market where you leave one company and find another one same week at a different company.

Many of the positive incentives don’t exist in industry though, an “up and out” culture is rarer in industry. When it works in academia your supervisor is positively invested in your growth, in general in industry your supervisor doesn’t care about your growth. If they need someone with new skills and you learn them fine but they can also fire you and hire someone with those skills (even though this is probably a net negative for them due to retraining on job specific stuff, it’s still seen as a net positive by management)

There is less abuse though. Full stop. Sorry you’re in this situation.

- if you can make the computers go beep boop in industry, then you can much more readily leave and take your skills elsewhere, and you won't have to put up with the abuse. you don't usually have to stick it out to finish a project or degree.

- your manager's success is probably tied to your success a little better, and you're more likely collaborating on the same deliverables. also, your manager probably hasn't been in place for nearly as long, as industry is much more dynamic in terms of staffing.

- you're less likely to encounter top down abuse. you're more likely to encounter team cultures where the entire team casually engages in mild hazing, as a sort of frat-ish way to build camaraderie, particularly at the smallest firms. you can usually avoid being part of such a culture, if you push back gently but firmly and bring a positive attitude of earnest appreciation of the people around you instead, and you will probably be valued for that — however, this will be work, and may drain you emotionally as you do it.