51–60 of 226 posts
An example of Sayre's Law: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
I think the flexibility of academe allows opportunities for abuse. I've been in academe more than industry, but from what I can tell industry has clearer expectations, goals and structures in place. An academic supervisor is free to create his/her own arbitrary lab rules. Quitting a lab is also not as simple since you'll likely still need to stay in the same university and have a degree at stake. What pisses me most…
Working with early-stage PhD students and helping supervise them has convinced me that the job supervisors have is legitimately hard. Sure, the supervisor wouldn't have anything to show for their efforts without students to do the grunt work, but understanding what the frontier of research is, and figuring out how to push that frontier in achievable ways that are relevant to the rest of the community, is extremely difficult. Most supervisors I know work insane hours to keep their labs running.
My issues arise with the personal mistreatment I've received from my supervisor -- none of what makes his job hard requires making abusive comments directly to me or other profs about my personality and work, nor does it require refusing to work with me for >12 months on the paper describing a project so we can get the work published.
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 they still had enough contributions for their thesis in their second year.
Needless to say, for the first guy almost any job in industry would be an improvement in working conditions. For the second? Not so much (although he is now happily working in industry)
> e.g., being grossly neglectful of the student's professional development
In my industry, while employers will provide some professional development, you'll have a better time if you don't depend on it.
Oh, they're generous in a sense - they pay for the training, and pay you to attend it as well - but it'll only develop the skills you need for your current job, and at the same rate your peers are developing theirs.
And you need to develop the skills for your next job, not your current job.
It’s not as common but the incentive structures in academia are uniquely enabling to abusers. In industry it’s much easier to leave tyrant bosses. I agree with your points. 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 abou…
> In industry it’s much easier to leave tyrant bosses. … and when that’s less true, you see the same dynamic. Most of the bad stories I’ve heard involve H1-B holders who couldn’t leave, locations where there wasn’t much other tech employment, or specialized skills which were only in demand by a handful of local employers (e.g. being a veteran COBOL employer in SV will not give you an edge for most of the open jobs).…
Your points are valid though.
> science would be healthier for having more staff scientist positions in larger groups
I think this is a good idea but not for these reasons. Big labs frequently do have research scientist type roles but those roles are harder to fund so it is sort of a "rich get richer" deal. As I understand it, just cast your eyes around in a university and ask "who pays for that." Professors are paid for by the students they teach and the grant money they bring in. A research scientist might not have either so why would the university commit to paying for them perpetually and how would they afford that?
They could commit to funding some number of research scientists at the expense of some well paid administrators (gasp) but I think this only adds a constant factor of slack to the system, and those research scientist jobs would quickly become as competitive and cut throat to get as TT prof jobs, perhaps more so because many TT profs really don't want to teach or do service work so if you gave them a role that was just research but with the job permanence and freedom of a TT position they would kill for it.
One thing I've noticed is that there is no systematic mechanism for supervising a professor and helping them develop as a manager. So the management skills of a professor are luck of the draw, and tend to be formed by their own PhD experience, and maybe things like coming from a business family, etc. To make it harder, managing grad students is weird because of the amount of independence that they're supposed to develop.
I haven't typically seen this manifest itself as abuse, but just ineptness. There have been times when the thought floating around in my head was: "You need to get some project management training." In contrast, when I became a manager in industry, my employer sent me for a bunch of training that was quite useful, and my own supervisor was observing my behavior as a manager. Also, industry in our better moments communicates norms about things like harassment and inclusion which, if you follow them, will serve you pretty well as a manager.
In fact I've told professors the following: "Your university probably has a career development program in the business school with courses such as basic supervision and project management. If not, check out your local trade school. You should sign up yourself and all of your students for one or two of those courses.
Consider if you had the very best of human beings as your supervisor, who has 30 students. If they did absolutely nothing but give an hour a week to each student they wouldn't even have time for a shit break in a normal working week. So you are quite literally not even vaguely on the priority list for that person, unless you are exceptionally brilliant and going to help bring in some $$$ to the group and hang around. Then this prof sits in this environment with a power structure to match the reality, taking essentially blind credit for others work for decades. It breeds a specific thought pattern in the prof and group that corrupts. So in this sense, no industry is not the same. Unless you go into an industry with the exact same dynamic.
I worked in a theoretical group with only about four or five other students with at least one or two postdocs. The dynamic was excellent, prof had an open door and would have the time. At that point the prof really is contributing intellectually, and also knows to what extent they have contributed to the work. So their belief in their own contribution as a leader is grounded in reality, typically they will also constantly see the student outgrow their own understanding by the end of the PhD every single time. That is a healthy environment for the profs development as well as the students.
Ultimately in a big group you are prof level resource limited, and this includes career important things like networks of good contacts and collaborators. How does a prof prioritize 30 students working on the choice projects, learning the new methods from the best postdocs, and working with the best collaborators? The biggest strongest chick at the start constantly gets the food. Doesn't matter that its then an increasing returns effect, and if you just gave the same level of opportunity to the others in the group everyone would be just as strong. The lab needs flux of workers not new leaders at bigger scale. The equivalent in industry would be a startup where everyone is trying to be CEO. That might work with like four or five people who know each other well and are equally competent and take it in turns but not going to fly in any other scale.
That's one data point... and work is frustrating for reasons other than abusive managers/supervisors.
One theory for the difference here is that, if you're good at your job, management loves you. You make your manager look good. Conversely, in academia, if you're very smart, you may end up embarrassing your supervisor by scooping them. I imagine incumbent academics are terrified of smart kids coming along and solving "their problem" that they've been working on for years.
My experience, PhD, 10 years postdoc, 10 years in startups (all in UK). 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…
In my view industry is often also toxic, just in very different and more variable ways. For example, fetishizing overtime or the volume of work to do, weird management: "never hire fit looking developers because fitness means they don't spend enough personal time on computers", "always give the worst employees the best references because they'll weigh down competitors", "let's talk about how terrible abortion is over lunch", etc.
Toxic culture and bad management occur in the private sector, but it runs a larger and less consistent gamut than what I've witnessed in academia.