I Didn’t Want To Lean Out | Hacker News Reader

I Didn’t Want To Lean Out

modelviewculture.com

149 pointsISL136 comments

My own experience from academia tells me that a big part of the problem is the fact that everyone is competing for a small pool of faculty positions and those positions are filled based on individual performance. This means you can never win as a team, only as an individual, and everyone needs to get their share. Only a professor can build a team, but even those teams are temporary. Add to this the fact that only new things count as science, which means that good work can easily turn out worthless if the desired results are not achieved. For this reason, science then is naturally elitist, and has big differences in the status of participants (tenured vs not), and heavy competition. Might it be that this environment breeds nasty behavior such as misogyny and bullying?

If a professor treats a student badly (I don't mean harassment, I mean overwork and bad guidance) then that is rarely punished in any way, it is probably beneficial for his career.

I think it's easier to have such an exploitative regime in sciences that depend on "big lab" research: a higher body of graduate-student subordinates trying to get PhDs makes it easier to treat them as interchangeable components; the success of the lab depends on maximisation of (competent) labour hours put in; the lab equipment is seriously expensive and a high return on the costs must be shown to justify the next round of research applications; the graduate students are rather more dependent on the PI's goodwill to get the research done for their PhD.

I agree, my own experiences in CS are not at all as bad as those of the OP, but still it took a long time for me to figure out how the system works, and why senior people might choose to leave students to their own devices when the student clearly does not know what to do, and how to be productive.

A very famous Harvard Nobel prize winning scientist had a phd student commit suicide while in his lab:

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-...

Still there, still incredibly famous, still untouched.

Oh, and speaking specifically of chemistry, who can forget this brilliant gem?

http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/a40...

That's real by the way.

here's one right out of my mailbox (edit added subject):

Subject: CORE HOURS -- effective NOW

Group,

It seems my efforts to communicate to you the importance of putting in the time and focusing on * your * research -- again, your, not mine -- are being ignored. I just saw a group of three graduate students going merrily to gym at 4 PM. At the same time, the lab is empty -- most of the day, not to mention evenings.

Here is what is going to happen, effective immediately:

The CORE HOURS for EVERYONE in the lab are from 10 AM to 6 PM. If you prefer to come early I can -- on an individual basis -- allow 9 AM -- 5 PM.

During core hours, I want to see EVERYONE WORKING, if you are not at your desk, you must leave a note where you can be found.

Saturday is the SAME core hours as the rest of the week.

The minumum number of WORK hours I expect -- not schmoozing around, going to gym etc -- is 60 per week, This means that in addition to 6 * 8 core hours, I expect to see you in the lab for at least additional 12 hrs a week.

Vacation in the group is TWO weeks a year -- in line with the Grad School policy. In special circumstances, I might consider an extra week.

There are NO exceptions to the policy outlined above.

If you have any questions s to the "legality" of these requirements, I suggest you talk to ____ or to the Graduate School officials.

I am sorry it had to come to that but it appears other means of persuation simply fail.

I'm currently considering graduate school, and have unfortunately read too many stories quite like this.

Do you have an idea of how prevalent this kind of micromanagement is for peers in your cohort? Do you just have a particularly unreasonable PI?

Our PI is renewed for being one of the worst in the planet, but he's also a really famous one. (average is 1 science + 1 nature / year)

Is hard to find someone this bad, but the worst part was not the micromanagement. That is pretty common. It was the constant lack of appreciation, being blackmailed over the visas, his holding papers hostage for years until your loyalty was proven. A colleague has been there for 4 years of post-doc, and has 0 papers published, 6 ready to go on his desk. And the first one is from 3 years ago.

I can go on all day over this.

I resigned yesterday at the second post-doc.

His name? It would be fair enough to warn people about the guy.

I hope you will understand if I don't tell his name.

My wife is still in the lab. And she's already facing enough shit, + the retaliations because I've betrayed the PI by leaving. We don't need any legal crap added to the mix.

However, I can tell you that there are many investigations ongoing, ranging from sexual to misconduct to stealing research money, and that he's in hiring freeze since few months.

There's a chance he will be fired. The university seems, for once, on our side. Then, it will be my pleasure to tell the world all the details.

Sunlight is the best antiseptic.

Good luck to you and your wife!

"Our PI is renewed for being one of the worst in the planet, but he's also a really famous one. (average is 1 science + 1 nature / year)"

The system may have helped create him, because I'd bet those two things are very connected. If the path to being published is via working other people nearly unto death, well, our history shows that there are enough people who don't have a problem that you need to rely on something other than their conscience to stop that from happening.

I can only speak for my lab (an established bioengineering lab) and from what I have seen at a few others, but this strikes me as being atypical. I think there is an assumption that you will work a minimum of 50-60 hours per week in lab (at least in bio) if you want to be successful, but when and if you choose to log those hours is up to you at least in my lab.

Well, everyone will probably experience this kind of micromanagement once in their grad school career, but you won't see it the whole time unless you have a truly bad advisor. Some of it just comes from forcing the grad students to work hard for a while so that you learn to work smart. A first year grad student will spend forty hours a week in the lab, pressing a button every ten minutes and recording count rates into a notebook. She'll get chewed out by her advisor for not spending enough time on research. She'll turn into a third year student who spends eight hours a week in the lab, pressing a button and recording count rates into a notebook. By the time she's a fifth year, she'll have made a little machine to press the buttons and OCR the count rates for her. That machine will run constantly while the grad student spends just forty hours a week in the lab doing practical research.

The usual attitude I've seen is: I don't care how much or how little time you spend in the lab, as long as you get the job done on time. Granted, "the job" may be winding twenty solenoids, each of which takes eight hours to wind, and "on time", may be seven days from now. Similarly, your advisor probably won't care if you take weekends off, but the calculation he asked you about at six on Friday still needs to be done monday morning. When you do it is your business.

I agree 100%. Our group is a very shitty case. Probably I've just bad luck, but is hard to believe:

In my former group there was no micromanagement, nor all this crap. There was however a shitty situation too where the bully was the golden-boy. That was the place where this happened:

    A, B, C write paper, submit to his pal D.
    D appoints E,F,G as reviewers.
    C, and E were in school together.
    F was a C student.
    G sends the paper back to C to auto-review it. 
    C cannot be bothered, so delegates the review back to A.
    A reviews his first name paper.

(sorry, I'm without shame self-quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329496)

I'd like to point out that my experience with european PhD advisers (I had two, one trained in France and my current one is German) has been completely opposite to this: I'm allowed to set my own hours, I'm actually encouraged to go to the gym, and while I am expected to work a bit harder when deadlines are near, this extra effort stops the very second the deadline has passed. I also get around 20 working days of vacation.

I don't know if it's either a different culture or if only we get to read about the bad experiences and never about the good ones - I read many stories like this one, but I've never heard it from a first-person perspective. In either case, there are places where you are treated decently as a grad student.

> I am sorry

I've never liked when people lie like that.

> your research -- again, your, not mine

I presume his/her name appears nowhere on the research papers, then?

and the follow up, 5 minutes later:

Subject: ONE OTHER THING RE: CORE HOURS -- effective NOW

If anyone has a problem follwoing the rules outlined below, I would certainly understand why you might want to leave the group and find a better advisor.

>If you have any questions s to the "legality" of these requirements, I suggest you talk to ____ or to the Graduate School officials.

It always appalls me precisely that academics and professionals are exempted from labor laws, and thus many of the most highly educated, highly trained, dedicated people on Earth, at the forefront of advancing the human species... get subjected to this bullshit.

>I just saw a group of three graduate students going merrily to gym at 4 PM.

Because obviously health and physical fitness are a net drain on productivity /sarcasm.

Wow, nice.

Ex-chemistry grad student here (ABD... then wisely moved to computer science). My wife who did finish her PhD and has gone through the Post-doc grind for a few years, can confirm all of the above.

In agree, the idea that science is a meritocracy is flawed. Working in a bioinformatics lab, I saw two PHD students, one motivated, smart and very hard working. The other, well I guess he was reasonably smart.

The second one chose a relatively easy subject, and got his PHD after 7 years, without really trying. The first one was in the lab late most nights for 6 years, but kept on being beaten to publish his results by other groups.

So after 5 years, one would have a few papers to his name, while the other wouldn't have. Which one would have made the better researcher, the one willing to put in the extra hours and dedication or the one who wasn't? Based on papers published (which is largely what science does), then the less dedicated one would have been chosen.

Good. Work smarter not harder. Don't cultivate a culture of competing for more hours.

In that case it's: solve an easy problem, forget the hard ones.

Whatever is the gain of solving each problem, is not relevant.

I agree in working smarter not harder, but they were both equally smart. Maybe the harder working one more so.

Seems like academia doesn't value reproduction of results and other corroborating research enough.

Wow. This stuck out so much: "My mother, who'd earned degrees in physics and electrical engineering in the 70's, cried when I told her that I was leaving and why but she never blamed me. She'd hoped that my generation’s experiences would be better than hers."

A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately, they didn't allow women into the program at the time. It was "simply not done." And this was a decade after the Civil Rights Movement!

Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her to take over a fairly critical position within a week.

He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him that he would need to submit to them her husband's notarized approval in writing before they would allow him to hire a woman.

To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in the workplace.

In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish) governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a result, political agencies were deluged with a series of ad hoc restrictions that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in "traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.)

If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a very short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent people who simply aren't aware of, but can be educated about, the superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.

It's interesting that the author describes an alienation from work that sounds exceedingly Marxist and appears to be the result of failed bargaining power. This isn't an article about the pressures of academia, but about how those pressures mount when universities wield disproportionate power over graduate students' unions, which reflects the overall defeat of unions in the US. It will be interesting to see how long and how inhumanely elite, highly qualified professionals will allow themselves to be treated before there is a collective response.

This is a bizarre comment given that the problem with science is that the funding model is coming from the government (NIH, NSF) and non-profits (ie, 501c3s).

They are wrong because graduate students have never had any relation to the unions or collective power. You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business with insufficient places for all to succeed and dog-eat-dog competition for funding and fellowships.

Regardless of where the money comes from most scientists are like small businesses trying to expand or startups seeking investment. If anything the pursuit of short-term wins gets in the way of free thinking or risky projects.

"You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business"

How is a government funded a non-profit anything like "business"? Its a political process, fundamentally. Politics is also competitive. I think the economics analogy is quite flawed (in th GP's comment).

Business is political. Non-profits are political. That's the connection.

What do you see as the difference here?

The lack of competitive markets on the supply side of research funding.

You might find these interesting discussions of universities as corporations:

"In California, the main universities -- Berkeley and UCLA -- they're essentially Ivy League private universities -- colossal tuition, tens of thousands of dollars, huge endowment. General assumption is they are pretty soon going to be privatized, and the rest of the system will be, which was a very good system -- best public system in the world -- that's probably going to be reduced to technical training or something like that. The privatization, of course, means privatization for the rich [and a] lower level of mostly technical training for the rest. And that is happening across the country." (http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20110406.htm)

"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on." (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars)

(As for economics vs. politics, we may wonder if it's ideological to separate them.)

Bizarre how?

Work is work, regardless of whom the work is done for or their income (taxes vs. sales). A worker can be as easily exploited by a state entity as by a corporate one, which is why teachers, firefighters, and police tend to have unions.

Can you elaborate on the 'bizarreness' of my previous comment?

I can't speak for 001sky, but I believe you misunderstand the origin of the problem here.

The means of production in academia is overwhelmingly socialized right now. This top-down decision making is both what causes funding to stagnate (since it's up to bureaucratic and political whims) and causes labor issues to fester (since the number of alternate employers is so low).

With that in mind, a call to unionization seems rather futile. There is no body to bargain with, just bureaucrats and budgets. What leverage would a union have against that?

Fixing loopholes in labor laws is overdue, but why unionize and create yet another special interest group? Workers in all sorts of industries, including tech, are exempted from labor laws. Why not start a broader movement to fix those loopholes?

The lack of bargaining power in academia exists in part because of the protracted period required to demonstrate productivity. A grad student or postdoc might have invested 3 years in getting a project working only to find that the PI has changed their minds about authorship (for example), or maybe the original idea was simply wrong. This person will now find it difficult to get a different position, and so stays on for a few more years in the hopes of demonstrating productivity, still at the whim of the PI. A Y-combinator funded startup might have gained it's first millionth customer in a third the time and be getting ready to cash-out with an IPO.

In the vein of your comment about Marxism, maybe PIs should be asked these famous questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”

I think you also have a problem with gross oversupply. In our industry, you see it in the games programming world. There's just too darned many programmers who think they want to make games, so it doesn't matter how badly they treat the programmers, there's always a line behind anyone who leaves.

It's worse in the sciences, though; a games programmer can go get a different programming job. A slight tweak to the career goals and you go from a realm of gross oversupply to a realm of significant undersupply. What does a highly-specialized organic chemist do?

Per some other comments, the source of the oversupply doesn't much matter to the people in the field.

Graduate student unionization has had a troubled past (in the US, the article's author doesn't reference her institution). From my research and what I know at institutions I have worked in, organization has been stymied mostly by a ruling of the National Labor Board that disallows any person receiving "training" who is labeled as a "student" from organizing, hinging on the fact that they are not working a wage job but instead a "fellowship." This distinction can be groan-inducing for academics, but alas.

I don't think this necessarily reflects the "overall defeat of unions in the US", but your philosophical argument does give some food for thought.

For more information, Wikipedia has a summary history of graduate student organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_unionization

I don't think it has much to do with unionization at all so much as that there is generally an overabundance of students applying to graduate school. Combined with the fact that the NIH/NSF more or less set the wages anyway, there really isn't anywhere for a union to lean. After all, unless you could organize a strike of a significant portion of the graduate student populace in the US, I doubt Congress or the NIH/NSF will take any notice.

Overabundance is definitely an issue, and one can indeed argue that in the biomedical sciences wages are set or guided independent of institution, and therefore similar work could expected from trainees. However, in the humanities (and whenever there's a teaching load involved), anecdotally it seems more ripe for abuse--the work you do in TAing a class may not at all benefit your future career but is just required of you.

That being said, the overabundance itself can also be a need for unionization after a fashion: can organized labor influence the number of new students to reverse the trend? Not to mention the general lack of increases in quality of life: wage levels of graduate students have been flat for decades (don't have a graph to point to, but it's in http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...).

It's getting harder and harder for me to rationalize staying in STEM.

I'm currently ABD, hoping to graduate next spring. My boyfriend of two years has an amazing job, and I have trouble finding it fair to force him to move around with me should I bounce from postdoc to postdoc for the next three to five years, especially when we currently live close to both of our families.

When I started my Ph.D., I was out to my peers because I figured anyone who was this high up in academia wouldn't care. I chose my adviser carefully, and we have a good working relationship, but I still haven't come out to him, or my coauthors. It just seems like too big of a risk when the rest of my career is on the line.

At the same time I have no idea what I'd do if I left. It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Blerg.

> It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview.

Don't convince yourself of that. A ton of companies are looking for smart people with good number and data skills who are able to expand their programming skills as needed. Being able to learn new skills IMO is a lot more valuable than being a 10 year expert in a particular language.

There are chopshops here in silicon valley that are taking entirely non technical people and placing them in jobs after a nine week crash course. I wouldn't recommend the 'schools' or their 'graduates' to anyone, but the fact that they exist and are placing people demonstrates the demand there is.

Neither of us wants to move to the valley. I've seen startup culture before; it's not for me.

I don't think the demand is just here. If anything it's probably greater in areas where there are fewer techies, but harder to find.

The past few years' trend of "data science" positions make for an awesome landing ground for people who are trained in science but don't want to do science anymore. The programming/statistics/analysis/visualization skill set is broad enough that nobody starts as a star in everything, and the value is in being able to create value with the skills you bring, and get better elsewhere.

Oh my God, yes. It is ridiculously hard to find good data analysts, because companies have recently come to realize just how much data they have, and how much can be done with it. And professional statisticians aren't always the right people to throw at the problem! Add machine learning -- where a solid math foundation is more useful than straight coding knowledge -- into the mix and you've got a pressing need for mathematicians. Or you can hit the financial market, where a graduate math background and some F# will land you a quant position in any major market you care to name.

Based on your name I'm assuming we're trying to find them in the same city...

Where are you looking for data analysts? Coming out of academia, it always seems strange to me that people can't find data scientists. I could throw a baseball and hit someone who has a masters in physics, hates their job, has written production code in at least three languages, and thinks $60k a year is an ungodly huge sum of money. I would guess that, if you sent a recruiter to the graduate lounge in any physics building on any campus and mentioned that you're hiring, you'd get at least three resumes from disillusioned students who'd love a change of pace. Hell, my resume would have been on that pile if you'd done it before this month.

This is horrible. It's also far from the first time I've heard of things like this happening.

My dad is a professor. I'm intimately familiar with the politics, backstabbing, and petty bickering that permeates academia. My dad survives by being positive, supportive, and staying out of the fray as much as possible.

I made a conscious choice to not enter academia. My degree is a B.A. in History; the only obvious career choice for that degree is to go through the hell that is history academia. I opted to fall back on my web development interests rather than use my degree or the network I'd built up.

Academia is abusive. The current state of things, as evidenced by the linked article and my own experiences, is holding back the real purpose of academia: a quest for knowledge.

I will reiterate: academia is abusive.

The problem is so systemic that I don't think there's any way to fix it. We need a new model, a new community.

Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford and became a proper scientist working for a proper company before starting her political career. This was during a time when equal opportunities for women was a controversial idea rather than a right.

One of Thatcher's more notorious beliefs was that there is no such thing as society and everyone had to be out for themselves. After reading this article I can see that she might have got this belief from academia where the culture is competition rather than collaboration.

Of course, the notoriety of the 'belief' is due to its deliberate and extensive misquoting.

"And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

In other words, entitlements come from somebody else (or many somebodies), not a magical cornucopia called "society".

That quote is an attempt to humanize the source of government resources.

>There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

In other words, people who don't work don't eat, except through the charity of people who have decided that they've earned enough to take care of themselves and their families.

More like, if you didn't pay for it, somebody else did.

That is, you can't honestly say you're entitled to anything from "society" because "society" doesn't own anything. Only living, breathing people own things. When someone feels entitled to something (note the passive voice), they are saying that someone else owes them something.

Maybe that's fair, but personifying the argument makes it much more honest, which I believe is the point of the quote.

Yeah, but Thatcher's capitalist-conservatism is open to the same Marxist critique as the American version: these whole "private property" and "owned capital" things are themselves social constructions in the first place, so claiming that you don't owe other people basic human welfare while society owes you a property system that benefits you at everyone else's expense is itself an unfair, uneven entitlement being made by a parasitical minority on the decent, hardworking majority.

Was it always the case that there was so much competition in Science? I graduated in 1996, and in those days it was only a few of the better people that went on to do PhD's, and there were not so many available. These days it seems relatively easy to get on to a PHD program (after doing a Masters) and the people I meet doing them do not appear to be the best and brightest.

They also don't tell you we're currently significantly overproducing PhDs:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...

How do you 'over-produce' phds... Society is getting 'too intelligent'? wtf?

Of course, when you are dumb as a brick, you will not finish PhD. However, finishing PhD will not make you "more intelligent". It will make you more knowledgeable in whatever you finished PhD in and it will make you prepared for doing science.

And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.

you miss my point to argue semantics.

What if the PhD is the ends (in and of itself), not just the means to some other end?

It's not. If it were, it wouldn't be called "training".

It's an academic credential to show an ability to do research, and to present that research, in an academically sound and rigorous method.

I would be quite surprised if the overflow of PhD holders in science spent that extra decade of double hours and crappy compensation just to say they did it, and expect that percentage is in reality negligible.

If more people are granted PhDs per year that want to do research than are needed, then there are too many produced. It's really that simple.

>And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.

The other way to look at it is that failing to employ 95 qualified scientists means society's leaving a free lunch on the table.

Or it's paying 95 people for years of free lunches without getting any return on that investment.

PhD is highly specific credential that has limited market value. But the "PhDs" in training are free labour. So schools "print labour" by over-producing students. The business model is "free tution" with indendtured servitude as the payment plan. This makes "sense" independent of the number of "professional" level jobs the schools have open or plan to hire for/fill. In fact, there is a sort of profit-maximization game that says minimize costs (paying jobs) and maximize profits (underpaid ones). So at that level it even "makes sense".

I would view PhDs as a pursuit, and achievement. Not a credential.

Unfortunately, in hard sciences, the world disagrees. There are many jobs that can demand a phD, and since there are plenty of phDs it doesn't detrimentally affect their hiring pool.

Database guy at an academic institute (MSc qualified).

A PHDs doesn't seem to be any sign of intelligence in the last two places I have worked. Quite the opposite at times.

You miss my point... how do you "over produce" education?

It is not a 'product' it is a pursuit. It's like saying "Over producing exercise, or happiness".

Actually, it is a pursuit for the individual but a product for society. Ultimately, there exist two productive paths for a newly minted PhD - either join academia or enter the workforce. Both paths are governed by the laws of supply and demand. Ergo, it is possible to over-produce education, from the point of view of society.

Why does one have to be productive ?

You are mostly talking about American society as far as I can tell.

Why does one have to be productive ?

For sustained survival. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who decides to do a Phd is motivated to explore the depths of a topic and push the boundaries of human knowledge. However, that knowledge has value only in the scope of the world we live in. This value is governed by society, by us, and manifests itself as research grants, job opportunities etc. So one needs to consider this IF one wants to be productive (by doing a PhD). And of course, the whole point is void if one does not want to be productive, ergo, is not interested in his sustained survival.

This is a general observation. I don't see why it should be mostly about American society.

I spent five years on a PhD programme at an elite institute in one of the top four research universities in the UK. Some of the graduate students there were genuinely brilliant. But some couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They still got PhDs, though, because they did everything their supervisor told them to.

Since leaving academia for industry, i have met a few more genuinely brilliant people. But they don't have PhDs, because that's not what you do in industry.

You can't make inferences about people's intelligence from their possession of PhDs. All it tells you is that they are capable of sustained hard work in trying conditions and on low pay, given a sufficient supply of coffee.

This comment is a bit off topic, but one of the ways to keep underrepresented minorities and women engaged with computing at the undergraduate level is through constant encouragement. Research [0] from some computing professors suggests that:

"Without encouragement even high ability women and under-represented minorities were unlikely to persist in computing."

And this really sucks because one of the professors from this referenced research has said that CS access in High School is limited to affluent students (who are mostly white and asian) and the only place in the education pipeline where the playing field is even is in college, but without encouragement a lot of women and members of the minority community lean out.

The second issue is the fact that these fields are dominated by men and you can't control everyone's behaviour. Sure we can figure out clever ways to encourage and engage when this group is most at risk of leaning out, but once they are already in the field, I'm not sure what can be done on a larger scale?

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl...

I'm shocked by the sexism evidence in this article, and I respect the author for removing herself from such a place. I often wonder how this hostility compares to other institutions, and other labs in the same institution (forgive the scientist in me). I think it speaks volumes about the unevenness of higher education across universities, and where each PI can rule his fiefdom with whatever mercy he chooses to provide.

I believe the pyramid-like structure of academic research combined with the winner-take-all nature of publishing results is a toxic mix for exploitation, and sexism would make it all the more unberable. For women in the biosciences, I strongly suggest tapping into a network of support from other successful women such as Women in Bio (http://womeninbio.org/) and AWIS (http://www.awis.org/).

>and whom I heard joke about “finishing up some chromatography” (chromatography is a purification technique that usually involves flushing a quantity of liquid through a long, narrow column) when we paused our consulting session for a bathroom break.

Is it offensive to make a chemistry joke about taking a piss?

That's the one thing you decide to make a comment about?

We were only given two facts about the person in question, and that was one of them. It stood out to me in the original post, because it highlighted the fact that what actually upsets people and what a disinterested observer thinks should upset people are different things.

It was definitely also one of the things that stood out to me as being an odd example for inappropriate behaviour.

Other topics have been covered already, duh.

I assume it's more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" in a constant barrage of problems. Dick jokes in a toxic environment only make the environment more toxic.

Which is sad, because it was a funny line.

I do not ever want to work with a person that does not see a joke as just that, a joke.

Is it just me who doesn't see the sexism? This is the typical experience of every student regardless of gender, it is messed up but working harder doesn't defeat the system it validates it you should never let yourself be manipulated into working more than you wish or can without endangering your health or passion for the field.

Even if you choose to leave you don't have to give up on your passions.

I for one would never give up chemistry if i really loved it, sure it would be a lot harder without getting a PHD but who the hell cares I'm doing it for myself and will do whatever it takes to get what i want without endangering my health or love for the field.

If it takes me building my own lab and my own company to support my financial needs then so be it.

There are two types of sexism at play here:

One is blatant - i.e. sexual harassment, prejudice, and discrimination.

The second is latent - i.e. the "typical experience of every student," as you put it, impacts people differently depending on a number of things including their gender. By not taking those individual differences into consideration, the culture of STEM forces women to work harder to fit in and balance their gender-specific circumstances.

OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD.

But reading her story I got the impression that she had been ground down or had been unfairly stepped over for years and was leaving in despair. I got the impression she chose to do an MS and PhD because she was being unfairly ignored despite a shining academic record ... but she started them in 2010 just 3 years after graduation.

So it reads like she has made a possibly sensible choice that academia is not for her. But it also seems graceless given here lack of experience to smear everyone around her.

What do you mean exactly by "graceless" here?

I think it's interesting to hear from people like her with both experience in academia, and industry experience (especially from people who went back into academia, not the ones who got industry jobs then never wanted to go back).

If you ask someone who spent 30 years in the Catholic church whether the priesthood is a good move, you'd expect them to say that the good outweighs the bad. The same is true of people who spend 30 years in the education sector.

I think it's great of her to detail her experience, which must be a difficult process.

She has made the choice that academia is not for her, yes, but that was not for any academic reason: if we have any interest in improving academia, we should look at those reasons and see if we can't be more supportive to human beings in academia.

It must be a difficult process for her readily identifiable adviser to realise he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years.

That said I'm all for a better deal for PhD students. They have a terrible deal.

You're suggesting it would be better if we cover up sexist behaviour?

(Aside: I personally agree with the female professor's comment - it would have been better if factually sexist behaviour was pointed out directly to the source to give them the opportunity to recognise it. But, behaviour like this needs to be called out somehow.)

Really? - I'm suggesting we cover up sexist behaviour.

No I'm suggesting if you are going to publicly accuse someone of sexism you should have something to back that up. I'm suggesting as you note yourself that it's unfair to say nothing and then suddenly post accusations on the internet. I'm saying that if her adviser is an asshole he wouldn't be the first - but there is nothing in her post or her circumstances that really indicates this.

Did we read different articles? Because I read multiple, very clear and specific accusations of sexist behaviour from several sources.

There is actually no comment about whether or not her adviser is an asshole: you are drawing that conclusion yourself, presumably from the behaviour described.

Its like this adviser is necessarily going to be a sexist douche to the author's face, yet this adviser never graduated a female PHD student (which the author had to find out from another channel) and the conference the adviser run hasn't had any women represented for a period of years.

Just because someone isn't directly disrespectful to you to your face doesn't mean they don't have bias or aren't sexist. It is not incumbent on the people with no power in that kind of relationship to provide evidence to satisfy your disbelief.

How do you know this is strictly because he is sexist?

What if I'm a hiring manager, and I had 50 applications, 25 Male, 25 female. What if all the female candidates were really bad, and I ended up hiring 10 men? Is that sexism?

People are really reaching. I have yet to see a direct case of male vs female sexism on HN. It's usually heavily extrapolated and begging for an implication.

he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years

The word "sexist" does not appear in the article. Not even once.

I am guessing it were examples such as, "My former adviser has never graduated a female PhD student", that made you think "sexist"?

Notice that the conclusion and the label are yours, not hers.

Found the academic! Your post comes off as highly judgmental, right from the start.

Her lack of experience does not mean she cannot have an opinion, and cannot point out that she's being abused.

If such a line of reasoning is common place in academia, then I'm extremely happy I didn't pursue further study.

Well I think your reply comes off as highly judgmental :P but hey its the internet.

I actually think her general points about the problems in academia are correct but her particular story just smelt wrong.

The common place academic line of reasoning is hopefully to check the facts behind claims.

Parenthetically, but recently it seems that academics have formed some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome regarding their careers, where a tenure-seeking goonswarm piles on anyone who points out how toxic academia has become.

Not that the academy ever needed an excuse for its viciousness(to paraphrase Sayre's law, the politics are so ugly because the stakes are so small), but these days it seems like many academics compete to prove that they deserve abuse. Philosophy professor? You deserve nothing more than to eat dogfood in an unheated flat! Grad student? Be grateful for the chance to be sexually harassed and/or emotionally abused by a credit-grabbing tenured sadist! PhD candidate? You're a worthless drain on productive society, just like the rest of us! How dare you try to negotiate a job offer! How dare you point out that grad programs are human-destroying slaughterhouses of hope!

I've never felt better about my decision not to go back to grad studies. And I've never felt worse about never feeling better.

>OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD.

"It's shit like this that ruins academia", or: notice how otherwise trained and educated scientists immediately fall into the Fundamental Attribution Error when evaluating publication records. Ceteris paribus, a scientist with more publications is probably better. However, it is quite rare for all else to be equal, and especially when someone can raise specific arguments regarding an atypically toxic work environment, we should expect that the toxic environment may have "artificially" hurt their publication record.

I see how being one of the first, who succeeds leading the others is to hard to do for most people.

What i do not get is, why she does not use her flexibility as a weapon against the unfair system. She obviously planned to change it, why not attack from another angle? Why not consider switching to another university or even take the chance and visit another country. There must be a competent professor in organic chemistry with more divers graduates somewhere in the world, where she could have an unfair advantage.

Get a Phd there, gain superpowers, come back and defeat the evil villains.

If you work 3 years in IT, and switch jobs, you get a raise. I don't think a PhD works the same way.

Academia for the most part sounds horrible, when I found out what string theorists get paid I was astounded, it was only slightly better than a tech support job I had 12 years ago.

Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.

I witnessed a lot similar stories in software companies.

Agreed. OP's story is terrible, but I see that sort of thing happening in the private sector all the time as well.

We need to have a broader discussion about closing the labor law loopholes that have been carved out over the years by special interests.

The story in software companies is utterly different. The software industry is a healthy market where if your boss is an asshole, you can say "bugger you, your loss," and go get a job someplace where the standards are better. Academia is a deformed industry where funding is inadequate, too many people are encouraged to try to crowd into the field, and the setup puts all the bargaining power into the hands of employers at the expense of employees, so if your boss is an asshole, there's very little you can do about it.

"Diversity is good. This woman is adding to diversity in STEM. Her leaving decreases diversity. Therefore, she is bad to leave."

That sounds ridiculous.

Not to me; I parsed it as "she shouldn't leave so that she sets a good example for other women" or "by leaving, she's not doing enough to support the cause".

Staying in job that treats you badly and pay less when you can get better one is not "setting a good example for other women".

Your second parsing is what I find ridiculous. What is the cause here? Why should she sacrifice her career and personal happiness to your goal of diversity?

I agree that's ridiculous! But it doesn't seem ridiculous that she actually hears that message.

It is ridiculous - and yet you still see arguments like this, or like that article in the NYT which spun exposing a pyramid scheme as racist because most of their low-level distributors (read: scam victims) were poor ethnic minority individuals. Basically, using the facade of fighting for equality to screw over the very people who're supposedly being helped.

I thought the "you need a PhD to do anything real in chemistry/bio/etc. research" was well understood. I guess SM + MD would be fine too.

(Chem Eng and industrial chemistry seem fine with an SB, and maybe an employer-provided SM, but that's not research.)

I agree, there are a lot of options in industry with a BS in ChE, but not so much in Chemistry. You're pretty much expected to get at least a Masters...

I wonder why this is so different in CS, where it's much more feasible to get a senior highly-technical job without formal credentials. What's the source of this cultural difference?

Jobs are in big organizations, and you have expensive multi-year projects which might be your first project, and highly conservative funding/approvals boards.

(Note: I have assumed you mean CS as in programming)

Because programming is not science. In fact its not even an engineering discipline from what I can see.

The process is not rigorous enough and few programmers can even hope to attempt something like formally proving that their code works. We need less people writing code, not more. And those fewer people should be held to a much higher standard than 'Bob's cousin once read a book on sharepoint so go ask him if he can create a cake ordering website for you'

You're right that programming isn't science, but parts of it are complicated in a way similar to math, with many intricate components that interact in complex ways. People with only a BS (or no degree) regularly get jobs writing this complex code. I'm thinking of things like browsers, databases, and video codecs.

> I'm thinking of things like browsers, databases, and video codecs.

I'm sorry to say that those are some of the most unreliable pieces of software that break often.

I think the exact opposite is true: Programming is more scientific than most science. A biologist often spends months experimenting before invalidating a hypothesis. A programmer's hypotheses are proven wrong dozens of times a day. By failing so quickly and often, we build mental models of code that closely correspond to reality.[1]

Also, our experimental apparati are more powerful than anything in the analog world. We have debuggers that can stop time and examine every aspect of a running process. No other field gets such tools. In fact, I'm not sure I'd feel safe if other fields had debuggers. The chemistry-equivalent of a debugger is molecular nanotech. The physics-equivalent is omnipotence.

1. A side note: I have a hunch that this perpetual feedback loop of failure messes with our heads. There's a certain je ne sais quois about many who write code. It's not just programmers who notice it. A few months ago, I overheard two finance people talking about me. One said, "Geoff's kind of a weird guy, don't you think?" To which the other replied, "You haven't met many programmers, have you?"

Douglas Crockford seems to agree. From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaEzHI9xyY#t=26m50s:

I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us.

>By failing so quickly and often, we build mental models of code that correspond closely to reality.

Okay, but those mental models are not close to reality since in 'reality' all those models consistently break in production use. We write code to work on platforms which run on top of other platforms, etc and each of those platforms breaks in weird inconsistent ways. The cargo-cult mantras like 'ship often' , 'move fast, break things' that people love to blog about are all useless here. (Note that I don't care much for the business aspect. For me, shipping reliable software is infinitely more valuable than making money shipping junk) I propose we don't ship _at all_ unless the software can be 'certified' to run for atleast a year.

>We have debuggers that can stop time and examine every aspect of a running process.

Its okay if you find that impressive. As someone who ships multithreaded embedded/systems code which has to run for months/years without crashing I find most tools to be rubbish for helping me catch the really hard to find bugs. It does not matter (from my customers POV) that the bug was in the OS or hardware or whatever.

Maybe that is an 'impossible' standard to hold someone to, but that is exactly what I'm proposing.

There are specific sub-fields of programming (embedded systems, real-time operating systems, etc.) that focus more on provably-correct programs and shipping non broken code.

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

> What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

I've read it before. It is a great article. Those guys are far more smart and rigorous than what I can hope to be with my own work.

Not sure why this is down-voted. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the comment, but it's definitely arguable.

I think we should be trying to boost developer productivity with better tools and less of the accidental complexity that turns "this should take a few hours" into a 3-week yak shave, even if this means developers need to learn some slightly more difficult tools and techniques at first (the 'tricycle vs. bicycle' principle mentioned here: http://worrydream.com/refs/Vannevar%20Bush%20Symposium%20-%2...). This might mean that individual projects could be completed by fewer developers, with lower communication overheads and a higher level of professionalism, and this would be a good thing.

My suspicion is that this would not lead to there being fewer developers overall, because quantity of good developers is still a constraint on growth - if we had more good developers, more projects would get funded/approved. However, rather than trying to persuade more marginally-skilled people into the industry we might do better by enhancing the productivity of the people we've already got.

Certainly we need better tools, but we also need a better process. I think many people who haven't been exposed to rigorous engineering processes that exist in manufacturing world to build durable products that keep on working year after year or even things like building bridges that have to really hold up to their specifications.

As people from the manufacturing world (some of whom are quite unaware of the buggyness of software) attempt to integrate more software into things - the so called 'internet of things' - we're in for a big surprise when most of this stuff ends up breaking. Software people have all too easily have accepted in their mind this 'inevitability' of having to run on the update/patch treadmill to make things work that should never have been shipped in the first place.

Personal view: because CS programs are highly variable (which, to be fair, is unsurprising in such a young field). Someone with a master's in CS might be great, or might have a lot of theoretical knowledge but be unable to apply it in practice, or have a deep understanding of the state of the art as it was at the time which is nevertheless borderline-irrelevant now. So we look to other filters.

I expect the same issues are present in a field like organic synthesis. It takes cleverness and skill to develop synthesis procedures, and I'm sure a lot of people graduate with PhDs who aren't particulalry great at it.

Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the fact that the resources needed to learn CS are very accessible, but this isn't the case with other fields. So self-taught experts are much rarer in other fields, but CS stands out since it's accessible to anyone with a computer and the interest.

"maybe it has something to do with the fact that the resources needed to learn CS are very accessible"

This is a great leveler. If you need to play with expensive toys, and those are only open to specific few, you may likely end up with a type of distorted "merit" system.

cue the downvoting of anyone critical of the OP....

She complains a bit about supervisors /PI's /consultants not graduating female students, without actually specifying how many females had the potential to graduate with the supervisor. To me this just comes off as some feminist whining, until you have actually shown that there is some sort of bias. If no females ever applied to work there, how could he / she graduate any females? I am guessing that (like CS) chemistry is a fairly male dominated subject.

I am not saying that the sexism doesn't exist, but please demonstrate it exists properly before complaining about it.

Do you realize how silly you sound?

Why is asking for more information considered "silly"?

Why is trying to get a more complete view of the situation considered "silly"?

I suggest you have a look at this if you think my comment sound silly:

http://vudlab.com/simpsons/

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