Hacker News Reader

Comment by signaru | Hacker News Reader

I think the flexibility of academe allows opportunities for abuse. I've been in academe more than industry, but from what I can tell industry has clearer expectations, goals and structures in place. An academic supervisor is free to create his/her own arbitrary lab rules. Quitting a lab is also not as simple since you'll likely still need to stay in the same university and have a degree at stake.

What pisses me most in the academe is when supervisors behave as if they worked hard for your salary. Sure, writing ambitious promises (to be delivered by students) to a grant giving body is difficult. But that is peanuts compared to how money is generated in a company. And guess who gets recognition from the labor of students.

View on HN

Recognition of my work, at least earlier in my graduate program, was actually one of the few things I've been happy with -- good supervisors will be very clear in crediting their students for implementing projects (early in the students' grad careers) and figuring out how to extend projects and drive them forward (later in the students' grad careers). For instance, when giving conference talks, my PI and others will put a small photo of the student when presenting slides corresponding to the student's work.

Working with early-stage PhD students and helping supervise them has convinced me that the job supervisors have is legitimately hard. Sure, the supervisor wouldn't have anything to show for their efforts without students to do the grunt work, but understanding what the frontier of research is, and figuring out how to push that frontier in achievable ways that are relevant to the rest of the community, is extremely difficult. Most supervisors I know work insane hours to keep their labs running.

My issues arise with the personal mistreatment I've received from my supervisor -- none of what makes his job hard requires making abusive comments directly to me or other profs about my personality and work, nor does it require refusing to work with me for >12 months on the paper describing a project so we can get the work published.

I totally agree, recognition is a big deal, but also very ephemeral and kind of an empty gesture. My mentors always credit me in talks they give (they are excellent and I am happy with them), but I have spent months of my life creating data and figures for grant applications that were won or not, and I practically get 0 credit or recognition for that work. My name is not on the grant, despite me doing ALL of the work for it because I am phd candidate and cannot actually get the funding from an NIH R01.

The vast majority of my work will go completely uncredited (both inside and outside of academia) unless someone inside academia that I might want to work with happened to see my mentors talk. If I leave academia, I have no 'proof of work' for anything outside my paper and thesis (no one will read it). I can't claim authorship on very important 500K+ grants that I practically wrote and won myself, but others take credit for it. Those don't go on my CV/resume, and if they did then people looking could look up the grant and see I am not in fact listed as an author or contact. I've come to realize that this is a huge problem.

> Those don't go on my CV/resume, and if they did then people looking could look up the grant and see I am not in fact listed as an author or contact.

It's entirely expected to list accomplishments and responsibilities on your CV/resume. If you brought in $X, say so. If a prospective employer is skeptical they can call your references.

Edit: Many (most?) grants don't technically list any authors anyway, just recipients.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com