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Comment by araes | Hacker News Reader

Rather common question on Academia StackExchange for exactly the scary reasons mentioned. Almost every time, the rational is something close to "my professor will ruin my life if I don't do what they say."

My own research is creepy and I want to leave (except my professor will ruin me): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...

My professor is using us to rig the IEEE elections (except afraid of losing scholarship and grad courses): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/69486/what-shou...

My professor is rigging nanotechnology data and plagiarizing (except I don't stand a chance against him): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/31265/my-profes...

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Those are terrifying

What a mess.

After the "metrics" revolution we started to measure and incentivise everything. It has not worked well for science.

Measuring the wrong thing, even if it is highly correlated to what you really want to measure, often results not in a slightly suboptimal result, but in the worst possible result.

It's not a failed system ism.. But the sad truth is, we should go back to the 1800 were proof was travelling with others to the lab and watch the experiments happen life. Reproduction by the author under expert supervision and with a camera recording of the whole ordeal.

That and reputations trees. The tree that spawned this rotten apple, root to roof, has spawned many more.

The first one is odd, but far less scary than the other two.

That's unfortunate.

There are bad professors in academia just like there are bad bosses in industry.

Hopefully anyone with bad ones will find better ones.

The big problem in academia very often is that you cannot simply take your research and finish your PhD elsewhere. With jobs you mostly can switch without losing much. Obviously depends on the situation.

> With jobs you mostly can switch without losing much

Seniority, bonuses, equity vesting, resume damage

> Seniority, bonuses, equity vesting, resume damage

Relatively minor. Most senior people I know who leave with bad blood end up with equally senior roles, and often "fail upwards" to even more senior roles in another company.

Bonuses/Vesting: Very common to get good vesting at a new company to make up for what you're losing. Of the people I know who've moved, it's the exception that didn't get decent replacement for vesting.

Resume damage: What? Person spent 4 years at a company and left. What resume damage? Your experience still counts.

Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.

Still, this is the good outcome - I've often seen students leave an advisor or school and succeed elsewhere. The real danger is when you get your PhD and the advisor will not write letters of recommendation. Unless you've made some really special connections, it means your academic career is over. You won't get a post doc. You won't get an academic position. You won't get into a national lab. And depending on your field, you won't get a research position in industry either.

In the industry, no boss has that power.

> Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.

When I relised this kind of power inbalance during my PhD resulting docile behaviour of my collegues and partly myself, I even did not even wanted to chage my supervisour nor make a protest as the power inbalances are normalized. This awareness made my PhD easier as I did not put false hopes and did not invest my leisure time into becoming more specialised or come up with my own ideas which could latter be turned down to not allign with funded project as my collegues did. I found the remedy in fight for a better tooling and investing my leisure time in completely different field in which papers were still not been written by robots.

Those are a thing but probably not as bad. You may gain seniority. The second is unavoidable. The last can be dealt with and there are levels of ethics around that.

Yeah, that doesn't work.

Once you are in a PhD program you are locked in for 5+ years. It's almost as bad as the green card timeline.

I think it's much worse for a grad student. It may have to do with the cultures of industry and the academe.

In industry, competitive hiring and job-hopping are considered to be normal. Confidentiality is assumed, for the most part. There are some stock, face-saving reasons why you're leaving your previous job, that don't open cans of worms. There are lists of questions that you don't ask. And It's not weird if you're changing jobs after a couple of years. Your seniority and promotion clocks don't typically get reset to zero.

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