Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia?
* Maybe students have conditioned themselves to get paid little and be treated with a lack of respect?
* Maybe the sunk cost of a partially completed graduate degree compels students to remain to completion, even when the work environment is toxic?
* Maybe the "flat" management structure of most labs (3 to 30 grad students report directly to their supervisor) allows more abuse?
* Maybe tenure insulates supervisors from consequences for treating their students poorly?
Among my late-stage PhD friends, it feels like 80% are unhappy, either because of deliberate abuse from their supervisors, or because of the supervisor's neglect of what the student needs to finish her degree and progress to her next career stage. Is this abuse as prevalent in industry as in academia?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadI 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.
I’m currently getting a PhD in my late 30s and the contrast is pretty funny sometimes... I keep asking my advisor if he regrets accepting me as a student lol
That's part of general "people skills". Many of us in STEM have a shortage of them, to be honest, and thus it's a "solution" that's not always easy to come by.
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.
… 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). Academia is just unique in having enshrined that dynamic for almost everyone: the job market is brutal and an abusive or careless advisor’s support for finishing and finding jobs has a huge impact.
I’m not an academic but have spent a fair amount of time being the only person in the room who isn’t a grad student or have a PhD and there’s been a lot of commentary that science would be healthier for having more staff scientist positions in larger groups, both to reduce the degree that many careers depend on one person’s decisions and simply to recognize that there’s a huge mismatch between the number of people needed on many projects and tenure track positions available. Everyone I know who left for industry is happier but that’s skewed by most of them having had the skills to go into data science & ML and thus significant income multipliers.
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.
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.
Well, there is a lot of industry we collectively turn a blind eye to.
Meat packing facility jobs is a hot topic right now due to stories about COVID conditions. The workers in the facilities are treated like the human equivalent of the livestock they process. But the employer is often the "only game in town" for those workers. Even if it's not impossible for them to leave they may be practically stuck and this is reflected in their treatment.
Your larger point is true though and it would be great for there to be equity and dignity for all people of all professions!
However "industry" has not been thoroughly qualified and it has been used throughout the comments in a very general way.. Plus, I'm sure Tyson Foods employs some PhDs among its 141,000 workers :)
This isn't to say that the industry is perfect compared to academia; in fact, the conventional focus on the bottom line at the expense of long-term R&D at the average firms is a well-trodden trope. But tech is still an expanding universe, and so the leverage of voting with your feet remains quite strong for individual contributors. Far stronger than in academia according to much of my network.
I encourage you to reach out to data scientists and research engineers who have made the transition. If you don't have a LinkedIn, I recommend making one, adding whoever you can and talking to whoever you can that might have gone down a similar path to you. The academia to industry path is not a one-way door, and indeed, there's a lot of research science inside the industry that appears to be more well run than much of pure academia. You're smart enough to have gotten into a PhD program in the first place -- that enough will make you a very attractive candidate for a wide range of roles inside the industry that can be really fulfilling. It's virtually costless to start exploring.
Good luck. I'm sorry you have to go through this unnecessarily common experience, but on the plus side, it's better to figure it out now than later.
- 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
My friend of course eventually let other profs and the department head know, but nobody was willing to actually do anything, so she limped along like this for years with other profs quietly helping on the side. She eventually graduated with her PhD, so by the stats the system worked, but it was miserable.
For all tech's flaws, nobody expects you to put up with a miserable asshole boss for 6 years just to be allowed to stay in the industry. And unlike my academic pals, whose options at any point were generally ~0 and would sometimes spike up to 2-3, there are just an ocean of tech jobs. I'm about to start hiring again and competition is fierce.
I wonder if part of this process forces out anyone not willing to put up with the environment earlier on. At least in a program where this is the eventual circumstance?
In business it'd largely depend on the environment fostered at the outfit. But if you're allergic to that kind of behaviour you'll have a much easier time (as you assume) seeking different employ. As long as you do something multiple companies will employ you for.
Further annoyances in industry:
- Teams can suck you dry, you begin to lose your identity and get mediocre (since that is the safest and most valued option).
- Managers take the credit for your work.
- Managers can be entirely unrealistic, often demanding things that are not possible from a CS point of view.
- Too many meetings and "communication" to serve those who thrive on that sort of thing (i.e. the talkers).
As others said, in this job market you can move to another company without issues, which is the greatest advantage.
As for managers being entirely unrealistic and demanding things that you as a developer consider to be computationally impossible, I think it's important to push back. This is what meetings should help to do. Surface the problems early rather than struggle with the problems long and quiet and then fail to solve them anyway.
I don’t really know the dynamics of academia, but my impression is that there are a lot more people who want PhD’s and tenured professorships than there are openings for those roles, so knowing nothing else I would expect the work environment to be worse compared to software engineering.
Not that I've seen. I experienced a lot of "abuse" like OP mentioned in the last few years at my last job, and it was a common complaint from my peers at other companies around the country. It sounds to me like you're really lucky.
By the same token, I try to take excellent care of my teammates and coworkers who report to me. The primary way I do this is by reporting to them as well.
So I always interpret such anecdotes very sceptically unless it's a particularly egregious account, unless I've witnessed it directly, or unless I know that I can trust them.
My experience is perceptions of abuse and abuse are very different. What passes for abuse in software engineering would be a dream job in e.g. retail, education, construction, or many other segments of the economy.
Jerks and nice people are everywhere, but the underlying baseline is set by power dynamics.
Guy was pretty hated by students. Someone tried breaking into his office one year. Part of me respects that he was trying to keep standards high, when there are so many bleeding hearts now. Still think it was a power trip.
As an academic your best career choice is to work your way up in one organization. As an engineer the expected strategy is to hop jobs every 2-4 years.
In (American) business, barring some unions, there is no concept of tenure and it is understood you will be fired the moment you screw up or you will quit once the abuse surpasses your level of tolerance.
Either way, as a worker, expect to be abused by management and peers. As an entrepreneur expect to be abused by creditors, vendors and investors.
The only way to avoid the abuse is to be born wealthy and not work.
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.
Sometimes one can change groups, but that is often politically and financially tricky.
It would be hard to switch if you have a year's work invested in some research that's not published yet, in that case much of that effort "wouldn't count", so switching once you're a year in or so loses progress, but if you're 5/6ths ready, then that's different. Also, what's 5/6ths ready at your institution probably is completely sufficient at a bit less prestigious institution - not optimal, but it's important to know that there is a reasonable exit, a Plan B that allows you to leave abuse.
As for transferring, other than a lab moving, I've never heard of someone switching just to defend. Most programs have "residency" requirements of a few years (ours is two years after a master's and at least 2/3s of the coursework, for example).
In industry, you need to produce. A manager is measured by how much he/she produces, which means how much his/her team produces. So, you could have an asshole manager, but push it too hard and you'll cause too much churn (people leaving your team), which then greatly reduces your productivity until it hits zero. If you're an asshole on top of not making the team produce, you'll be very quickly out of a job.
Probably more common is that managers are polite but incompetent. You might have ones who do as little as possible and stay out of people's way, or those that try to micromanage everything. Either way, not providing a lot of value, but as it's about par for many companies, they'll keep their jobs. And then sometimes you get managers who really are great and you love working for them and they help everyone on the team grow and become super-productive. And you might even follow them around as they switch companies just so you can continue to work for them.
Oh, sorry, so I will add that this depends on the company culture, so there might be companies where the culture is just abusive, and everyone at the company is just an asshole. People will show up, decide they don't like it and leave right away, leaving only the assholes to all enjoy each other's company.
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/
Also they are your advisors, not teachers. At PhD level, you are supposed to make a meaningful contribution to the discipline on your own.
(sigh...)
1st year: we had a 1 hour meeting every week
2nd year we had a 1 hour meeting every 2 weeks
3rd year (1t hslf) we had a 1 hour meeting every 2 weeks
3d year 2nd half onwards we had a 1 hour meeting if I emailed them and asked them for it
If I needed more time I could always knock on their door. And oftentimes we went to have lunch for informal meetings.
Now, i always felt my supervisors were absolutely amazing. But i quickly understood that to complete my PhD, i needed to scratch with my own hands and that my sups were there only to guide me.
All in all my experience was great. Nevertheless after finishing and doing 4 years as a postdoctoral i decided the "publish or perish" mentality was not for me, and moved to industry.
What professors at research universities do:
1. Mentor PhD students (and often also MS and BS students)
2. Write papers and edit student papers
3. Write grant proposals
4. Deal with a lot of administrative issues
5. University service committees - some are on multiple some are on none (admissions, COVID response, undergraduate program, graduate program, etc.)
6. Review papers from others
7. Teach one or more courses
8. Develop new courses (takes 1-2 days to make a good lecture)
9. Update lecture materials (I spend probably 2 hours per lecture for courses I've already taught)
10. Meetings
11. Conference/Workshop organization
12. MANY miscellaneous duties
13. Budget management
14. Prepare talks
15. Serving on MS/PhD proposal/defense committees for students not in your lab
16. Staying on top of the scientific literature
17. Making homework assignments (some can delegate to TAs)
18. Grading (some can delegate)
19. Write letters of recommendation (I write around 10-15 per year)
Of course you can get this load down by learning to say "No" in some cases. But a professor during their first couple years when they start the job can easily expect to put in 60-80 hours per week. It gets a lot easier after that.
Mentoring by more senior folks in the lab certainly helps everyone (https://www.pnas.org/content/116/42/20910), but it's barely measured or rewarded for PIs and not at all for postdocs. Changing this would be an easy fix though--ask for a reference from a junior colleague when hiring.
More generally, there's a huge disconnect and sudden between the skills needed to get a faculty job (i.e., publishing a high profile papers as an individual contributor) and the skills needed to do well at it (e.g., management). Everyone is all antsy to shorten postdocs, but I'd actually be in favor of making the career path more gradual with so people get some mentored management experience.
A relative of mine got his PhD with a prof who was kind of famous for such a document, and all of his students continued that tradition in their own labs. Of course you know the drill. Part of it is to influence your students, but the other part is to influence yourself.
Currently experiencing this weariness and my output isn't great. Covid restrictions + WFH are making it worse I feel but ultimately it's my responsibility to do well. Any tips for not looking like a hopeless case to your supervisor at this stage?
After we went to remote work, my students have been making weekly presentations to me, which serves to update me on their work and helps them become better communicators of their research.
They recap what I suggested, they give a status update on what I asked them to do and whatever else they did, they compare the results of their experiments to past experiments (baselines), and they propose next steps and I make suggestions with regard to what I think makes sense.
In my field, machine learning, we often stitch multiple papers together, so each project is aimed at being a paper in the dissertation. For my lab, we come up with the idealized main contributions for a paper, and then work toward those goals. We may not meet them, but it provides structure and their informal presentations to me facilitate organized discussion and analysis of results.
One additional thing I want to mention is, that the job of the supervisor is not only to guide the student to the PhD (i.e. the mentor role), but also to ensure that the student actually has done sufficient work to earn the PhD (the role of a gatekeeper). Which can lead to the situation, that the student thinks they should be graduating now, but the supervisor is still asking for more work. Now there are some supervisors that are abusing the gatekeeper role. Furthermore even for supervisors that are not consciously abusing the role there is also a conflict of interest, because it is in the supervisors interest to keep successful students as long as possible. So this is difficult to manage.
I think of my PhD students as my primary "product" I am creating as a professor. Not to say I don't think that teaching is valuable, but I'm by far proudest of my PhD students who graduate and go on to have fantastic careers. That said, I'm proud, but also sad, and worried because once they become good they leave. I let them depart once they have met our agreed upon goals, which are pretty much the bare minimum for being competitive for research-oriented jobs in industry (not "just a coder," but designing and doing independent research).
1) 1 journal paper as the first author, so that they learn how that process (often is a review or perspective paper on their field, which goes in their dissertation)
2) 2 first author papers in top-tier machine learning venues (goes in dissertation)
3) 1 first author paper in a top-tier or second tier venue (goes in dissertation)
4) 1 collaborative paper with another PhD student (have to learn how to collaborate)
By the end, they have at a minimum around 4 first author papers and 1 additional paper. They can then turn these into their dissertation and these are signals to employers that they are competent scientists. If a student tells me they want to be a faculty member, we increase the numbers a bit (need at least 10 first-author papers to be competitive).
I also require that they be organized when we have our one-on-ones in terms of their experimental output.
That's pretty much it. It may sound like a lot, but I try to put training wheels on for the first couple projects and make them as tractable as possible because I fleshed out the project and found some low-hanging fruit, before I start trying to make them be more independent and drive the process.
In my stints around Denmark and Japan (Computational Chemistry) you basically need ~1 top-tier or ~3 mediocre papers during your 3-year PhD.
In the US, PhD students in Computer Science and similar fields usually require 5-7 years to finish. They typically do not have MS degrees, unlike in Europe, where the expected graduation time is 3-4 years and they must have MS degrees.
You would be surprised how often there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'm good at asking "easy" questions that nobody knows the answer to, so a student just has to put in the work to get the answer. Many advisors don't give as much initial hand holding as I do.
So far my PhD students have taken 3-6 years to finish. Those that have graduated so far have finished with 3 papers (3 years), 9 papers (3 years), and 12 papers (5.5 years). The senior ones still in my lab (year 4 or 5) are on track to have around 3 first author papers in top-venues and about 9 papers total each. Their first author papers are in CVPR, ICCV, ACL, ECCV, BMVC, NAACL, ICLR, AAAI, etc.
I come at this from a different field (the biomedical sciences), wherein it is rare to find clearly-articulated career goals from the PhD students, and even harder to find supervisors who care. This problem is made worse when supervisors often rely on their students' naivete to keep their labs staffed.
The students can be forgiven for this naivete: they often start their degrees with the assumption that, if they work hard, a tenure-track or similar position will be available to them at the other end. Of course, reality is that they may fail to achieve that goal no matter how hard they work, simply because they have the wrong project/wrong mentorship/poor funding/etc. The supervisors, on the other hand, are often quite happy for their students to remain naive, as the incentives of students and supervisors are often misaligned.
The solution is probably twofold:
First, it should be essential for prospective students to come in with a very clear idea of their career goals (e.g. "I want a tenure-track faculty position in a leading research university" or "I want a dedicated teaching position at the community college level").
Second, said prospective students should be given clear, objective advice, along the lines of your expectations document, on what it takes to achieve those goals. This advice should help guide students in choosing a lab that will help them achieve these career goals, and ideally should come from a neutral third-party. One can't expect supervisors to be unbiased in this regard.
They like recent college graduates, because they don’t know what a healthy work environment looks like.
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 student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”
Academic supervisors are not your personal friends. They have no interest in observing your emotions, because they have a millions other things to take care of. Negative comments about you is very likely based on their subjective assessment of you. And the reason they don't talk about those to you and give you advise, is probably that you have a history of failing to accept negative assessments. Your have "needs" to finish your degree and progress to your next career stage doesn't mean you are qualified for advancing, nor you are entitled of help from your supervisors who may not be satisfied with your work or talent.
I think it is also part of fault on the cultural. Teachers / advisors just can't directly tell you how bad you are. This creates generation of students are only used to positive comments and can't take negative comments.
----
Another point to add: because of the political environment and MeToo movement and such, it becomes more dangerous for academic supervisors to develop personal relationship with their graduate students. Especially those graduate students who need emotional support, can appear to be way more dangerous to get involved with than other students. And nerdy professors' confidence of appropriately handling relationship with those students could be zero. So the potential risk of taking private meetings to talk with you through things is just way too high to overlook.
Second, the expectation of coddling is a very very recent phenomenon. Graduate students are usually expected to be functioning adults, not teenagers. Absorbing negativity and handling them by yourself is usually expected to functioning adults.
Third, academic supervisors are very likely to be people good at things, not good at handling people stuff. The major reason they are supervisors of their labs is they are good at things they do, not they are good at taking care of people.
I think the expectation of (and complaints about!) coddling are actually historically very well trodden. There's a great reddit thread about this [1] which details historic complaints from the Greco-Roman era all the way to the present.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7btv14/the_more_th...
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.
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.
This is probably the only falsifiable part I could find from your comment as the rest seems to pertain to unfalsifiable speculation about "kids these days" -- so with that said, I'll say that academic supervisors and especially business managers /do/ have a very specific interest in observing your emotions if they're remotely competent.
Human personnel burnout and underperformance risk is extraordinarily expensive. One approach to risk management is to simply delegate it to the subordinate, and if anything goes wrong, fire that subordinate. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well in practice. For one, the agency to actually address the root culprit of burnout and/or underperformance usually lies disproportionately with leadership. It has to, otherwise, hierarchical human organizations could never logistically scale.
But what that means is that you're flat out wrong. Not only do business managers have a vested interest in managing the emotions of their subordinates, but it's ostensibly one of their strongest interests because it's one of their most dangerous risks. You realize this when you begin to accrue experience either being bitten by this first hand, or watching your peers become bitten by this. And you know the old saying. Once bitten, twice shy.
For academic advisors the situation is different because graduate students come and go naturally.
If you find yourself meeting with a single student anywhere but the office, discussing things that aren’t related to work, for any significant amount of time, then you need to at least carefully examine the situation. Save that for your friends and family.
Good managers know that developing personal relationships with your team members is not how you lead a team.
It was a bit unusual but it seemed to work, I mean he was one of the most popular professors and you felt like you could approach him about anything.
Although to be fair, I suppose that wasn't a single student, and they probably spent most of the meal discussing Physics and their goals at University.
The issue in my mind comes when you are having INDIVIDUAL meetings in social contexts, with either employees or students. The first question to ask yourself is, "could this be construed as a date". The second question is, "if I wouldn't have this meeting with someone in my romantic attraction group, because it wouldn't be appropriate, then am I unfairly disadvantaging my students who are in that group"
I'm not as quick as OP to start throwing the word "abusive" around, but I have witnessed a number of unhealthy student-advisor relationships. Sometimes it's because the advisor is facing a busy period in their own career and doesn't have time for the student, sometimes it's just personalities clashing.
I think you are missing the point if your belief is that the majority of students who don't succeed in graduate school just aren't driven enough. Even a motivated student needs assistance to focus that motivation on something productive.
I think we are in agreement about the role of an advisor, but I sense that maybe we disagree about how active a role the advisor can be expected to take.
(forgive me below for exaggerating a bit to make a point -- I recognize we are literally arguing semantics :) )
When I hear "the student pushes and the advisor guides", it sounds to me like the advisor plays a passive, almost automatic role, like a mirror or like bumper rails in a bowling alley. Just by virtue of having received a PhD, one automatically becomes qualified to advise, and doing so requires so little effort that it is ridiculous to describe them as "good" or "bad" at it. Whether the student succeeds or fails is up to the student alone, and in the latter case, the advisor doesn't really mind, since there are dozens of fresh applicants waiting to fill the spot.
On the other hand, an advisor who is "invested" in the success of their students plays a more active role, like a coach. They see collaboration with and among students as essential to their own success, or at least as essential to their duty as a professor. They bring students into their own research, sharing their own knowledge (without spoon-feeding), successes, and failures. They put effort into building positive interpersonal relationships with students, perhaps through frequent group meetings and social events. Despite their busy schedule, they make an effort to give their students the impression that they are always available to chat.
With a few notable exceptions, most advisors I've observed make an effort to invest themselves in their students. They know what "good" advising looks like, but sometimes their career aspirations or administrative duties pull them away, leaving students neglected. In these situations, I think the structure of academia is more to blame than either the student or the professor.
The people who make it through PhD are either 1) lucky enough to find mentors/collaborators who are willing to play an active role in their PhD experience or 2) so motivated by external factors such as the need for a work visa that they are willing to push through a bad situation even if it takes 7-8 years to finish a 5-year program.
I now see where my use of “guide” could have been read to be passive (like your bathroom vanity mirror or a gutter-blocker in bowling) where I intended for it to be periodically actively influential (while still being absent hour-to-hour of the work). Your last sentence of your GGP comment was much closer to my intended meaning.
Minor comment but in the university I work for you can't be a primary supervisor until you've seen a student through to completion as secondary advisor. I'm not sure how widespread this requirement is though.
My previous academic advisor would take out his aggressions and frustrations on his students. One specific instance, he began yelling at the lab because there were footprints on the couch - (I had taken a nap last night after finishing work, whoops). “Whose responsibility is this?!” Obviously I didn’t come forward. It took half a second to brush the dust off the raggedy couch after he left. He expected some student to step forward and get reamed in front of the lab? I was in the military and I’ve never seen such a clear example of leadership incompetence or pure aggression. At least drill instructors had a reason to yell at you nonstop. Folks like this capture the aggression and ignore the point. DIs would always give you proper direction, they never reamed you for their relief alone (even if it seems that way).
I have a decent amount of experience with tough leaders: “One can only expect perfection if you practice it yourself”. Blaming your followers is the mark of an incredibly, incredibly poor leader.
Bad managers are bad. They take out their anger and incompetence on you. And the second you start complaining all the folks like you give the side eye and hem and haw and hmmm and hurrr. No matter how clear the anecdote or straightforward the abuse, there is always some way the student should have taken it in stride. That’s not what leadership looks like.
You’re bullshitting to confirm your biases about students. Thinking they expect to be coddled is just a bias formed through idiocy and if I had to guess, too many “oversensitive college students” stories.
I think we can agree that there are abusive advisors, and immature/unmotivated students in academia. Can abusive professors get away with more than they otherwise could due to the culture of academia? Yeah, I’d probably agree with that. But that doesn’t mean academia is full of such people, or that every student who complains of abuse is actually experiencing objective abuse.
But in academia it can be true, and when it is true, there is nothing that can be done. To a further extent than industrial roles. Granted some jobs have the same problems, and I’ve felt much more powerless within corporate structures than any military one.
Determining objective abuses is for determining objective guilt - not for nudging the system. You can’t possibly believe that all claims of abuse are the imagined fictions of so many students in some sort of shared state of madness. Perhaps some, but that many? It’s ridiculous.
I've got a PhD, as does my spouse. I think this gives too much credit to the advisors. Some of them make you push a lot harder than others. Some actively derail your life.
Sometimes each person has a totally different experience with a advisor than others because the advisor treats people differently.
When I was in grad school, one of the rockstar professors had a clear bias towards a particular gender and ethnicity. He had a formal complaint filed against him that sucked up a lot of the students time, but basically resulted in his life getting easier (they said he would be relived from all teaching duties for a year).
My advisor was a perfect fit for my research interests. He was an amazing teacher. But he was basically anti-social and never had any desire to do any of the networking stuff other professors did for their students. The networking stuff is really important for your career if you want to stay in academia.
Some advisors would almost drag their students to conferences and introduce them to other researchers, professors, etc. My advisor just shrugged his shoulders and had no interest.
>I often hear details about the grad student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”
I think the difference is that in industry you can more easily change jobs and switch to a manager that is aligned with your personality. In Academia, there's typically only 1 or 2 advisors who are a fit. The only choice is to switch schools, which is a lot more difficult than changing jobs.
I’m also at least 10 years older than any other student in the lab, and I can see how someone in their 20s who hasn’t had a lot of jobs/bosses might have certain expectations about an advisor and be highly disappointed or even feel wronged.
On the other side of things, I've seen extremely abusive colleagues, with recurring problems with grad students (and faculty). All sorts of abuse, from just outright aggression, including physical aggression, to coercion into academic fraud, you name it. In a couple of cases things have gotten attention but most of the time nothing happens, or the student just eventually exits the program without a degree because they've had enough.
I agree with others that the primary difference is that it seems like in the nonacademic world people have more flexibility to move elsewhere. There's a lot of fuzzy overlap between the academic and nonacademic world, but at the moment even in the best circumstances academics is rife with corruption and problems, depending on what field you're in. When you erect a pyramid scheme and come to institutionally depend on it, you're bound to run into problems.
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.