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

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

#171

Post by Aachen »

SavageBeast wrote: post #146

I paused to think about OP's question and the results surprised me a bit. Looking back over my career in tech I can safely say that at every job I've ever had there has been at least one highly abusive person in some position of authority. One of them was a CTO but most of them were high on the developer ladder and at most middle management. Most of the abusive folks Ive had experience with skewed toward the lower mi…

I've rarely had someone act abusively to any employee by any definition, as far as I noticed. Definitely not in my current job, and some other jobs I had as a student not either. I wonder if I got lucky or if "at least one such person in every job" is the norm.

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

#173

Post by michaelmior »

chriskanan wrote: post #23

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…

Any chance you'd be willing to share some version of said expectations document?

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

#174

Post by dehrmann »

loceng wrote: post #39
chriskanan wrote: post #23

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…

Is 1-2 hours per week really that much? I suppose they also spend additional time reading what you've written, along with revisions, etc?

Working in industry, I found this pretty surprising. I'd expect to have around that much facetime with my manager, but also colleagues who know other, completely different things very well. That, and in industry, depending on the company and manager, the manager's role might be enabling your success and not being an expert on what you're doing.

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

#175

Post by mattkrause »

munin wrote: post #55
acdha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).…

Oh not to worry, academia innovated on this concept too and for non-US citizens advisors can simultaneously hold both a students F-1 visa and their career future over them. 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…

It's not that complicated.

PhD students in the sciences rarely pay for the professors; instead, students are often funded by the professors' grants. Research scientists could be funded the same way with a few (easy) changes.

1. Research grants are too small. The modular budget for an R01, the workhorse grant of biomedicine, just about covers a PI + staff scientist salary, with very little money left over for the actual research. Make it a bit bigger--it hasn't been inflation-adjusted since 2004(?). This might cost a bit, but we spend something like a penny per tax dollar on all research, even though it has a HUGE multiplier effect.

2. Expand the funding mechanisms. Students and postdocs are attractive not just because they're cheap, but because you might not need to pay them at all: there are myriad funding opportunities in addition to a project grant, ranging from individual fellowships to department/program-wide training grants. In contrast, there's ONE mechanism for funding staff scientists, the R50, only one of the NIH's institutes participates, and it fund ~28 people/year. Divert some money from training grants to this, which could be cost-neutral (grad students are surprisingly expensive when the grant pays their tuition).

I think this would have several beneficial effects: better science, but also a saner job market, which in turn would have knock-on benefits on trainees' success and morale (there is pretty clear data on this) as well as DEI.

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

#176

Post by headmelted »

It still exists, but as other replies have said, it’s worse in academia in general.

The reason isn’t specifically to do with academia - it’s because you’ve entered what’s effectively a state of modern indentured servitude.

Your career (and future) is directly dependent on the person you report to, which naturally leads to them abusing that because they’re human and therefore fundamentally horrid.

The same happens all the time with conditional visas like the H1B. Sure, you could push back, but it’ll mean your life as you know it is over, so you won’t.

I wish I had something nicer to say about this, but sadly I don’t, because humans.

It’s why I work for myself now (which I realise is not an option for many). I’ve too many stories of my own about being abused by employers.

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

#177

Post by zdragnar »

wayoutthere wrote: post #101
temp8964 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do those have anything to do with "white men"? I bet "asian men/women" advisors are probably even tougher.

I didn’t say they did; I just said that life gets harder the further your intersectionality is from “straight white man”. I’m explicitly not trying to blame white men for anything because that’s not helpful for the conversation. All I’m saying is that someone with different intersectionality might not understand the challenges in someone else’s life, so placing your expectations on them from a normative/conforming po…

> All I’m saying is that someone with different intersectionality might not understand the challenges in someone else’s life, so placing your expectations on them from a normative/conforming position isn’t necessarily fair.

Ironically (or perhaps just sadly) that is exactly what you did to "straight white men"- you put expectations on how they live their lives, deal with stress, and how much stress they have in general.

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

#179

Post by Loic »

I will write something most likely controversial for HN, but I think what you write is very North-America and computer related "centric".

As for the context, I am French, over 40, Master in France, PhD in Denmark and working in Germany. My work is chemical engineering at large, oil & gas, crop science, pharmaceutical but also food and flagrances. I am working with 50/50% men and women. My wife is working in oil & gas.

I haven't witnessed a single time abuse like there are in IT in the last 20 years. And I have been working, living and studying from California to Japan.

In fact I am still chocked to see all these codes of conduct to contribute to open source projects or attend conferences in computer related stuff.

How can it be that you need such things?

So yes, PhD is hard work. Yes you have moments where you lose faith. But life is like that too. Life is unfair and hard, but suffering abuse is something which never came back from all my friends doing PhDs in engineering in the EU. Both men and women.

To the point that I sometimes wonder if the word abuse has a different meaning for me as a non native speaker as for people from North America.

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

#180

Post by anm89 »

Loic wrote: post #179

I will write something most likely controversial for HN, but I think what you write is very North-America and computer related "centric". As for the context, I am French, over 40, Master in France, PhD in Denmark and working in Germany. My work is chemical engineering at large, oil & gas, crop science, pharmaceutical but also food and flagrances. I am working with 50/50% men and women. My wife is working in oil & gas…

I will say at a minimum, this issue is also very prevalent in the social sciences and humanities in US programs.
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