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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

Is this a US thing? a CalTech thing? or just one crazy professor? I know several research scientists in various places in Europe and they have nothing like this. Sure, when deadlines need to met they work longer or they get swept up in their work they end up sitting until 3 am and sometimes you have to drop by the lab on a weekend to check on an experiment, but all that is an exception rather than a rule.

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It depends entirely on the professor and the department. My adviser once said that he expected forty hours a week, but if we really wanted to be successful we should put in sixty.

I know plenty of other people with ridiculous horror stories though. Things like professors demanding to know why a postdoc was taking so much time in the bathroom, or confiscating a graduate student's plane ticket back to China until an assignment was completed.

Academics desperately need a ratemyprofessor.com for advisers and lab environments.

"confiscating a graduate student's plane ticket back to China" -- Theft. Possibly grand theft, depending on the state and how much the ticket cost. And possibly false imprisonment, if the student had no other reasonable way of leaving the country (e.g., if they were a starving grad student who didn't have the money for a second ticket).

When I was working in CS research in the UK in the 80/90s the prof I worked for probably wouldn't have noticed until someone had gone missing for a few weeks.

Some people worked long hours, some didn't, there wasn't any correlation between hours in the office and how successful people were.

However, other profs were known to be fascists. It all depended who you worked for.

Definitely varies by prof--- even in the US, which on average is less laid back, I know people who have to actively hunt down their professors if they ever want to see them. They could probably take a month off and nobody would notice. Seems especially common with fairly senior tenured profs who've moved into academic politics and PR type roles: when they're spending their days in strategic-direction meetings with deans, or giving invited talks at industry events or whatever, they can sometimes forget they have a research group and some students.

Yeah - the guy I worked for was heavily involved in EU level projects. We typically had no idea which country he was in let alone whether he was supposed to be in that day/week/month.

Another vote for "it depends on who you work for". I just got that a speech that's basically equivalent to that letter from my (CS) adviser. I think it was supposed to be motivational, but the only thing it's motivated me to do is send out resumes and commit to quitting grad school.

Edited, to add that I was already working 80 hours a week before the speech. I'm not even sure how I could possibly work more if I stayed.

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