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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

Nooo :-) If you find yourself in a PhD program with an advisor who thinks like the above, it's really important to not internalize their viewpoint.

It's not a job. A job would pay much better!

It's not your advisors money, and they aren't paying you to advance their career.

Independence is critical, but so that you can avoid becoming someone else's cheap labor, and can instead focus on doing work that educates you and moves you forward.

(Thankfully I had a great advisor, but many try and just take advantage of the power imbalance to exploit students).

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Hard disagree. I made every possible mistake that can be made related to being too idealistic about grad school; for example, I believed:

- My advisor and collaborators have my best interests at heart

- My primary role in graduate school is to develop novel, useful, reproducible ideas

- Grants, fellowships, and stipends are generous donations freely given in order to enable the above

- Quality is more important than quantity

These kinds of sentiments caused more damage to my career than any other mistakes I have made (fortunately, I survived...so far). When someone gives you money, they definitely expect something in return, even if that something is not always clearly stated, and that something is almost always related to the donor's own career advancement.

There are PIs who absolutely prey on this kind of idealism. They can find certain kinds of idealistic students, use them up, and discard them. Graduate students should be told from day one that they need to look out for their own interests, because no one else will. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are just that.

The best that can be reasonably hoped for from an advisor-advisee relationship is a clear understanding that it is a mutually beneficial transaction with bidirectional expectations. It makes me uncomfortable that the OP document obscures this fact.

> they aren't paying you to advance their career

What are they paying you for, then?

I think your perspective is very pragmatic and reasonable. However, I think it still highlights only the _worst_ kinds of advisers, and if we're talking about looking out for your own self interests, then picking a good adviser is your highest priority.

There are two kinds of advisers I think are missing in your analysis. First, are the idealists, the probably newly minted professors who view there students fondly and their mentorship responsibilities very seriously. These are bad for you too, because you need to be pushed to obtain results on occasion, you can't always have someone who is feeling guilty about their own efforts and not being straight with you about your weakness.

Second, is, in my opinion, the ideal adviser. One who views the relationship as an apprenticeship more so then a manager/employee or mentor/mentee. An apprentice has to learn the craft, but they're still producing work for the artisan (adviser). If the student fucks something up they need to be told, because learning the craft is the highest priority.

The "manager" type of adviser is in my opinion the worst. A good manager is only a useful adviser if a PhD is otherwise a waste of time for you anyway (because you already can do research). Moreover, most manager-types are bad at being managers as well, compounding the horrible situation.

To avoid giving the impression that I had a horrible advisor who twisted me into cynicism, I should say:

My advisor was definitely one of the "idealists". I was his first graduate student. He always treated me well, with respect and reasonable expectations, and we are friends to this day. He did have some of the weaknesses you mention. He looked out for me as well as could reasonably be expected, but he did occasionally throw me to the wolves if the stakes were high enough -- for example, if we had a collaborator who was giving us substantial money, and they asked me to do the impossible or the unreasonable, he'd tell me to grin and bear it, and do my best, rather than informing the collaborator about reality.

In short, he was way above average, but still, his interests and mine occasionally came into conflict. But it can get so much worse -- I have seen numerous graduate students and postdocs absolutely exploited (department chairs and big shots are the most frequent offenders), and the most vulnerable targets were always those who assumed that we are all but brothers-in-arms in the great Scientific Enterprise.

What I mean to say is that even if a grad student lucks into or intelligently selects a good advisor, idealism is still a problem because as your collaborations and career expand, the probability approaches 1 that you will run into someone who will absolutely exploit you if given the chance. Someone who has enough leverage on an otherwise good advisor can also exploit a student by proxy. Students should be prepared for this inevitability.

In my view, when we read a document like the OP, what we are mainly getting is a window into how a PI likes to view himself -- i.e., the benevolent master lovingly and altruistically shepherding his apprentices into independence -- rather than any relevant form of reality. I'm sure OP came by this delusion honestly, but one of the primary qualifications to become a PI is the ability to spin, and no one is easier to spin than oneself.

I definitely think there is a grain of truth to everything you've said, but I do have to comment that the diction used is a bit dramatic.

For instance, I 100% agree that the posted document is how the PI views himself, without question. I also agree that this probably doesn't perfectly reflect reality.

But, at the same time, I think this is more just a human problem, not a PI specific problem. Moreover, I think a lot can still be gained from such a document, especially when the document is made public. It lets you point out inconsistencies and in the worst case share a negative experience with evidence to back it up.

> I do have to comment that the diction used is a bit dramatic.

Fair. I wouldn't use this kind of language when talking to colleagues in person, for sure. In fact, I wouldn't address the subject at all.

> But, at the same time, I think this is more just a human problem, not a PI specific problem. Moreover, I think a lot can still be gained from such a document...

Absolutely. I think the OP has good intentions and believes what he writes. But I wanted to warn prospective grad students not to take this kind of thing completely at face value.

> What are they paying you for, then?

To abide by labor laws, I'd imagine

I wasn't advocating being naive about conflicts of interest.

But the solution to a conflict of interest is not to internalize your advisor's point of view!

So don't think of them as your manager, in some traditional sense.

Think of them as your mentor, not your boss. Most of the time it's hard for them to fire you. Think long term, don't be tricked into optimizing their need for a stream of low quality papers to inflate their indices, or whatever pathology they may be pursuing.

I had a great advisor who didn't do any of this. But if my advisor was just trying to exploit me, and I had no way to effectively ignore it, it would substantially decrease the value of doing a phd, to the point where I'm not sure id recommend it in terms of expected value.

>What are they paying you for, then?

They aren't paying you. It's whatever body awarded the Grant's money. And they probably didn't set out to increase your advisors hindex.

I think treating it as a job where 75% of the salary is experience is probably the right attitude. FWIW I worked with a lot of grad students and anecdotally saw the best outcomes from people who within 2-3 months of showing up knew exactly what they wanted to do, were in the lab 10-8 to do it, graduated in 4-5 years and immediately got top-tier jobs.

I knew people who spent (7, 8, 9, 10, 11) years as a PhD student and they sure didn't seem happy or end up particularly good places...

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