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Comment by blastbeat | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't surprise me. PhD students remain in a vulnerable position. They are not only intelligent and sensible, but also often exploited by the hierarchy and underpaid. The cynic in me sees the whole procedure of academic ordination as a kind of humiliating ponzi scheme, based on effort justification and the sunk cost fallacy.

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I think this should be extended to post doctoral fellows as well. People generally focus on PhD students but post-docs are even more vulnerable. Many academic places have some level of protection and oversight for PhD's. These proections are certainly not enough. But post-docs are treated as contract workers, where your supervisor can terminate you whenever they feel like for whatever reason they want. In this situation you really have no recourse and your institution owns your data so you are essentially left with nothing.

I think that's a bit of a mixed bag, really, and depends on the organization and how the post-doc is funded. Some are pretty dire, others quite good.

That being said, being a post-doc with independent funding (e.g. a national fellowship) is perhaps the best gig in academia, except that it can't last. You can actually spend all the time on research a PI wishes they could, and any leverage people have on you is not financial. Burning bridges could still hurt you of course.

Those are definitely amazing opportunities. I have had colleagues who have had those and they were incredible experiences for them. However, I am not sure what the proportion of post-docs are that get that level of independence.

Yep. The experience of postdocs is extremely varied, from the best job in academia (and one I end up looking back on fondly) to some genuinely hellacious stories.

I suppose some of it depends on the supervisor and how much they care about helping you develop your career versus greasing the pole behind them.

Compounding the power differential is what seems to be a "thin tweed line" in some universities or departments, akin to the "thin blue line" of protecting a cop who'd made a mistake or was corrupt. It's not just solidarity with one's status group, nor the not-unusual general bit of arrogance, but a (partly understandable) prejudiced suspicion of any student who alleges wrongdoing. There's also a willingness to dismiss gross, even illegal, abuses as merely "academic politics", and imply that the wronged person didn't merit not being wronged.

Having been around many universities, I've seen a number of grad students who believed in academic universal ideals (e.g., the professor as a brilliant and benevolent citizen of the university microcosm) get blindsided by imperfect reality -- when they have the misfortune to be on the receiving end of someone else's mistake/wrongdoing, were powerless, and were not able to find anyone who would help them.

But I don't mean to discourage people from pursuing a PhD. This is just one reason for advice you've already heard, about the importance of finding a good advisor, who'll guide you through the process, and have your back if/when anything goes wrong. (Actually, in all the cases people have told me, it seems the student's career would've been saved if their advisor had had their back, and/or had enough influence to get the department/university to fix the problem. One other student came close to getting scrod, but didn't, because their parent was a noted academic at a top university, who could not only give good advice, but could also have their back, and simply make a phone call, like a good advisor.)

You're not wrong. One problem in Ph.D. programs and workplaces alike is that supervisors control both funding and advancement, which grants them inordinate power. If you can get funding (like a multi-year fellowship) that is independent from your supervisor, you will have a lot more freedom.

Changing to any new job is hard, but changing Ph.D. advisors/labs/schools/etc. can require you to restart your dissertation research again essentially from scratch.

Ph.D. programs are basically lengthy gauntlets of flaming hoops to jump through to get a meal ticket which is unlikely to get you an actual meal, because of the pyramid scheme. Though like many ordeals, if you manage to survive then you will probably be able to overcome other challenges in the future. You will also teach yourself a lot of things and probably meet some interesting people.

It's not just the cost of changing, but even having that as an option.

As one of my wise mentors put it, having things not work out with an advisor, even if people have a sense it was the fault of the advisor, marks a student as both "having had their chance" and also "damaged goods".

Unless their department/university facilitates the move, or they already have great publications (great enough to get past the "damaged goods" suspicion).

Well put. Ending a PhD/Postdoc position prematurely raises red flags. Besides, accepting a new position often comes with relocations which might be pricey.

Assuming the people involved are intelligent and also aware of how the system works, why consider the student as “damaged goods” over something which is not their fault? I have no horse in the race but as an outsider it seems stupid so I have to assume I’m missing something. I can’t be more rational than all these scientists right?

I took "damaged goods" to mean traumatized by the experience.

Regarding awareness of how the system works... While everyone has some shared sense of the systems of graduate studies and career development, an individual probably doesn't have much information about instances of wrenches being thrown into the works, especially not outside their own department or university. (Though they might hear rumors about a particular department elsewhere having cultural problems, and they've formed superficial impressions of a number of other professors, from their behavior at conferences or in faculty meetings, but that's about it.)

Also, I'll speculate it's possible that there's an element of survivorship bias: you don't get to be a professor without a lot of hard work, but also bit of luck in enough things going your way. Wronged grad students, on the other hand, tend to quickly disappear from professors' environments.