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Ask HN: Is academia the opposite of self-employment since you have many bosses?

2 points by amichail ↗ HN
In particular, the people involved in peer review of your work could be considered not just bosses but bosses who don't particularly care whether you succeed.

In fact, they may not even want you to succeed if your research threatens their research.

3 comments

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PaulHoule
If you are self-employed and have 10 clients you have 10 bosses. Somebody like

https://www.youtube.com/c/techmoan

has no "boss" but he's at the mercy of his fans, the Youtube algorithm, etc. For instance in 2017 there was a moral panic over ads running against terrorist content so people like that got demonetized until Youtube improved their content filtering.

amichail
But having thousands/millions of "bosses" via self-employment is better than having tens/hundreds of academic peers.
marek_leisk2
If one of the ten bosses fires you, no big deal. This is the essence of self employment, not having a single source of failure in your income stream.