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Comment by trevor-e | Hacker News Reader

I think academia is a special brooding ground for this kind of people. Everyone is worried about their own professional reputation since it sticks with them for a long time — unlike a regular job where you can jump around easier — so very few people are willing to put theirs on the line unless they have undeniable proof. There's also a big power dynamic at play where underlings don't want to question a senior professor because obviously the professor knows what they're doing.

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>There's also a big power dynamic at play where underlings don't want to question a senior professor because obviously the professor knows what they're doing.

This exists much more directly in business. Questioning your boss can lead to you getting fired by that boss. A senior professor can't fire an adjunct. A dean can't arbitrarily fire a professor with tenure.

Do you believe a Phd student should risk questioning his supervisor? Which could likely end a planned career in science right there?

That's a better point, but the student still couldn't be expelled, which is the workplace equivalent.

Academia works the other way. The default is that you're fired, when your PhD scholarship/postdoc/research grant runs out. To keep your job, you have to get rehired every few years.

Some people have tenure, but some people win lotteries too.

The hiring process appears objective, what have you published and so on, but in reality it's set up for the bosses to game. When there's a letter to Nature, for example, it's very much up to the boss as to which student gets to be first author.

i cant imagine an academic group environment that toxic. Most groups ive interacted with in the sciences actively encourage everone to ask difficult questions of each other to further the collective understanding. One of the first things my advisor told me as a new student was to make sure i independently understood what was going on because he doesnt know everything. Now that im more experienced i also see the upside of having youger people around who are engaged and help catch my mistakes. Hearing horror stories about corporate power dynamics from people around me makes me never want to leave academia.

There are of course a few crazy/asshole PIs, but if you dont work for them they have no power over you.

You really should thank your advisor.

Most labs I've been in and seen are 180 the opposite. Due to Dilbert/Peter principal dynamics, most advisors at R1 universities aren't selected based on their management and teaching skill, but on their research publications. As such, they tend to be very lacking at many skills required to be 'good' at running a lab. In the hunt for tenure, they get very stressed out and tend to take it out on others, typically the students and staff as they are physically the closest people to them.

I may or may not have been around MeToo style situations, more germane management abuse and screaming, direct sabotage of students' work and presentations. On the light side were 6 hour long lab meetings, 2 am lab check-ins, requests to journals to reject student's papers, and complete mystification at why students and staff aren't sleeping in the lab (safety be damned).

That, in my limited US based experience, is the 'norm'.

I didn't go to grad school so I'm not super privy to this, but a bunch of my coworkers have and they even contrarily joked that once you start "managing up" and don't just blindly do what your advisor says it's time for you to graduate :)

can confirm. It took me a long time to confront my own suspicion that the so called tenured faculty around me are not as technically inclined as you'd think. Most of the line work is done by the grad students. Meanwhile the faculty plays a different game, maintaining an image, keeping the money in the wheel, "staying in the game." The primary skill of a tenured faculty is salesmanship, the most valued trait of a grad student is docileness.

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