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Comment by jorleif | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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