12 ms·

Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

97 points by andrewdon 10y ago

jostmey 10y ago
Hacker news has seen a lot of posts on this subject. The usual advice is to work in industry, where people are apparently treated like human beings. I am sure this is true, but the advice isn't helpful to me. Society benefits from scientific research. Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. Sadly, a lot of research is outsourced to universities because labor is cheap. Why pay someone loads of money when you can contract with a university lab? It might be good in the short term, but the talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  >talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures. I left my research position studying hereditary influences on cancer development to work in auto finance. Lots of people in my position doing the same. The talent pool is shrinking.
- Thriptic 10y ago
  > We cannot dismiss these problems in science if we want research to continue. The sad reality is that right now, those concerns can be dismissed. There is a huge supply of good researchers (especially foreign researchers) who are willing to work under poor conditions just to get a shot. Until there is more money in the system / more positions / fewer people in academic science, you are going to see PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it.
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    > PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it. Not only that, but they know the next lab down the road is working just as many long, hard hours.
- arcanus 10y ago
  > Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. It's far worse than this. In my field, even in industry I have had far more lucrative offers from quantitative hedge funds than any industrial research labor. Let alone staying in academia, where it literally starts to become a factor of four (or more) difference in salary between a postdoc and finance. The only reason I did not bite is because I am fortunate enough to have no college debt even after undergrad and phd. Most are not in a position to be so picky.
  - jostmey 10y ago
    Don't count on your research job in industry remaining stable if it can be outsourced to a university lab. The ceiling on your pay is that of a postdoc's plus university overhead.
    - arcanus 10y ago
      > if it can be outsourced to a university lab Thankfully, my work is sufficiently specialized and my background is strong enough I am not easily replaced. However, like many on HN I'm not representative of the general population and am certainly in a fortunate position. I am on a 'tenure track' in an organization where proprietary work and intellectual property I develop is legitimately valued. But broadly, I agree. And I've seen some pretty horrific results along the lines you alluded occur to several of my colleagues.
- projektir 10y ago
  The peril is already there. It's not created by those who leave. It's created by those who setup the conditions in such a way that all the people with self-respect leave. And this is how it should be: people should absolutely NOT feed a bad system. If all the best people leave, it sends a very clear signal. A lot of abuse and exploitation specifically happens because the best people are often too caring and good natured to leave. If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.
x1798DE 10y ago
Headline should say [2010], though the thing the post is about is from 1996.
akiselev 10y ago
I'm not surprised in the slightest. Caltech has a reputation as one of the best research universities in the world and getting a degree or doing research there requires a lot of work because it's so competitive. I've spent many nights as a kid running around Caltech in the dark while my mother worked on her experiments till midnight or later (all of the turtles come out at night!). Publish or perish goes tenfold for the elite schools which have a never ending supply of talented postdocs. Though I'm not surprised that this letter came from someone in the chemistry department. ChemE especially has a reputation within Caltech as one of the most difficult paths for both undergraduate and graduate work. The ChemE specific classes usually require a much bigger time commitment and the tests are notoriously difficult.
- saryant 10y ago
  I used to be in a long-term relationship with a chem undergrad at Caltech. I saw her all-nighters and stress first-hand. The workload drove her to attempted suicide (and had she gone through with it, hardly would've been the first suicide at Caltech). We split up and it took years for both of us to recover.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dekhn 10y ago
  I went to one of the greatest grad schools in the world- UCSF- and while there were lots of people who worked absurd hours, I can't say I found it was necessary. Some people in academia just overwork without it leading to greater productivity. I don't mind once in a while having to start growing cells in the morning and hanging around for until evening to collect the results. The expectation that you should always be working that kind of hours... well, it doesn't make any sense to me. The one that really bothered me is that some of the professors would come in on Saturday morning and call their students. It wasn't that they needed them. They were just bored and lonely.
x1798DE 10y ago
From what I can tell, this is much more common in synthetic labs than physical or analytical labs. I think most of the physical chemists I knew in two different universities worked fairly normal hours, the labs were mostly empty on nights and weekends.
- sseagull 10y ago
  Computational chemist here: I agree. I still put in long hours sometimes, but my "lab" is just one ssh away, so hours actually in the office are a bit flexible.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    That may certainly be true, but I wasn't just talking about in-office hours - the labs I'm talking about were hardware type labs (instrumentation, laser labs, that sort of thing). It's possible everyone was just going home to do data processing, but I got the impression that people worked maybe 40-60 hours/week mostly depending on what their teaching load was like and whether there were unusal time-sensitive demands on their experiments.
guelo 10y ago
It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  Actually, it allows both postdoc AND grad student unionization.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 10y ago
  Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work. You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
  - sndean 10y ago
    > You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
yomly 10y ago
The problem with academic science is threefold: 1: you are expected to feel privileged for doing something you vaguely enjoy. (how many people actually enjoy running columns and NMRs at 12am?) 2: you are expected to be altruistic in your ambitions. Curse those vaguely better paid lizard people who are working in industry to forward some profiteering enterprise rather than "science" 3: there are huge barriers to entry (tech excluded) so you will not do something entrepreneurial and make a name for yourself without the university. To make sure of this, we will name claim on anything you do for the next 10+ years anyway. It's no wonder to me that many of the talented people. Leave to go do banking or consulting - they work less for more!!
- cshimmin 10y ago
  1. That's like saying you couldn't possibly be passionate about cooking a big fancy meal because nobody really enjoys doing the dishes afterwards. If you're not passionate enough about chemistry/cooking to run NMR/do dishes, you're in the wrong place anyways. So you shouldn't worry about "feeling privileged", you should just do yourself a favor and get out. 2. Many forms of basic science cannot be done in industry. Take my field, high energy physics for example... there's only one supergiant particle smasher in the world and it's not owned by IBM. Anyways doing public science may or may not be altruistic, but I don't see that as a problem of science. In my case I just _actually_ enjoy what I'm doing (see 1) any benefits for the public good are just a bonus. 3. Entrepreneurial options vary pretty widely depending on the field. Regardless, I don't think most people get into science with the master plan that they will make a magical new discovery and then sell it and become a billionaire. If that's your plan, again you're doing it wrong. Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money. Many of the ones who go into banking either found out along the way that they weren't into it. Or regrettably often, they just got forced out of their field by competition so had to take a fat paycheck and boring job as a consolation prize.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    You've accurately described the status quo, but I'm not sure you've presented a good justification for it. There is no reason to believe the folks motivated by money are any less talented than the folks that aren't motivated by money. If science excludes people who don't want to work long hours for low pay, that's probably detrimental to society.
jknoepfler 10y ago
This reads like someone complaining about the time requirements to be a member of a top athletic club or top kitchen or top theatre or any other highly demanding discipline. The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them. If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and future intact. But don't pretend someone was wronging you by asking you to sacrifice.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  It is indeed partially true that doing high level work simply requires extended hours and unusual dedication to achieve anything. However, that is not what is primarily at work here. The main factor is a sort of culturally normative and ingrained rite of passage / hazing ritual / bullying / dominance effect, which primarily serves to inflate the boss professor's ego at the expense of the grad students. Getting a PhD was difficult and grueling for the professor, so they are damn sure going to make sure it's difficult and grueling for their own students. The only way they themselves got through it was internalizing the attitude that a grueling work and study schedule is simply normal and simply the price of success. This exercise of extreme and essentially arbitrary power over how the students live their lives, far beyond what any normal job could remotely require, is very gratifying to many professors. They've worked so hard, suffered themselves, and now THEY have this absurd power over others.. It makes them feel important and powerful at a very primal level to tell their students they have to live under these extraordinary conditions, and then see them obey. They can literally choose whose career will live and whose will die, whose dreams will happen and whose will be broken and swept away without a thought. To fix this, the professors need to have a lot less arbitrary power over their students. There needs to be another route to a PhD besides enduring poverty and years of ritual self-humiliation and long form ass-kissing. Only then will the culture shift, as the "grind mode" professors are replaced by new professors who didn't have to grind.
- quickben 10y ago
  Isn't labour law supposed to prevent abuses like this? I mean, I see your point, but the guy that wrote that letter had some characteristics of a textbook psychopath. We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee. So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.
pjlegato 10y ago
The root problem is shown in this graph[1]. Simply put, since the 1960s, expanded funding for higher education in the US has vastly increased the supply of PhDs, while the number of job positions open for professors has not significantly increased. "PhDs issued" grows exponentially (since each professor can issue PhDs to multiple students), but "job offers" grows only linearly. This supply and demand imbalance tilts the power balance almost 100% in favor of the professor in any interaction with grad students. Professors have acquired essentially unlimited and arbitrary power to dictate conditions, and grad students have no choice but to comply or leave academia -- throwing away a lifetime of work and preparation. More at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html [1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1.jpg http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1...
- benwr 10y ago
  I agree with your first paragraph, but the second one doesn't make sense: Only professors with jobs can be PhD advisors, therefore the jobless PhD's don't increase the rate of PhD granting.
  - anbende 10y ago
    True, it's merely a much faster rate, rather that a compounding effect.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  I don't know, but I wonder if having so many students here on a visa and hoping to immigrate is one of the main factors. (I'm not against immigration, I'm saying the visa can create a nasty power imbalance against the worker.) After all, a near-steady-state academic job market is not new these last decades, labor markets should equilibrate unless there's some kind of barrier, grad students are heavily foreign-born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_engineers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_en..., and many of them hope to immigrate (same source). What changes to the rules would improve the bargaining position of both native and foreign-born workers? (At the expense of employers like this one.) An alternative factor is people gambling they'll make it big, like musicians and athletes. This must be part of it, though professors aren't rock stars or drug dealers.
rdtsc 10y ago
My friend quit his postdoc in biochemistry over this shit. The head of the lab was abusive toward him, but mostly toward international students. Was treating them terribly, similar expectations regarding work "ethics", combined with threats regarding deportation and so on.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  >combined with threats regarding deportation and so on. People complain about H1Bs, but the situation faced by international postdocs is far worse.
WhoBeI 10y ago
Isn't this involuntary servitude? That's how I see it anyways. Whenever you are expected, and in this case required, to work against your will and for, I'm assuming, no pay under the threat of losing your livelihood it's involuntary servitude. Maybe I'm wrong about the "no pay" but even then I would still consider it involuntary.
- anbende 10y ago
  Except that it is in no way involuntary. It's never against your will, and its generally not for no pay. It's just long hours for low pay. It's hard to see what you mean by involuntary here. It's a work for education arrangement, and the amount of work is large, but people are free to leave. It's a bad deal in a bad system, but its hardly involuntary.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    There's another term for it: wage slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Wage slavery is about all waged labour, not just those which involve low pay for long hours.
throw_away_777 10y ago
This problem is very much prevalent in physics too. The mentioned article https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.tlnbcqbco https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.tlnbcqb... is well worth reading. I am currently transitioning from academia to industry, having just recently finished a PhD in high energy physics (looking for a job in data science). When I mention the lack of a job market in academia as a reason I am transitioning, people don't understand and look at me funny. If anyone is young and thinking of going into high energy physics, do yourself a favor and just don't. The glut of postdocs needed by the LHC, combined with the terrible failure of the SSC, has created a particularly terrible job market for high energy physicists in the US.

97 points by andrewdon 10y ago

Hacker news has seen a lot of posts on this subject. The usual advice is to work in industry, where people are apparently treated like human beings. I am sure this is true, but the advice isn't helpful to me. Society benefits from scientific research. Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. Sadly, a lot of research is outsourced to universities because labor is cheap. Why pay someone loads of money when you can contract with a university lab? It might be good in the short term, but the talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
>talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures. I left my research position studying hereditary influences on cancer development to work in auto finance. Lots of people in my position doing the same. The talent pool is shrinking.
Thriptic 10y ago
> We cannot dismiss these problems in science if we want research to continue. The sad reality is that right now, those concerns can be dismissed. There is a huge supply of good researchers (especially foreign researchers) who are willing to work under poor conditions just to get a shot. Until there is more money in the system / more positions / fewer people in academic science, you are going to see PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  > PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it. Not only that, but they know the next lab down the road is working just as many long, hard hours.
arcanus 10y ago
> Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. It's far worse than this. In my field, even in industry I have had far more lucrative offers from quantitative hedge funds than any industrial research labor. Let alone staying in academia, where it literally starts to become a factor of four (or more) difference in salary between a postdoc and finance. The only reason I did not bite is because I am fortunate enough to have no college debt even after undergrad and phd. Most are not in a position to be so picky.
- jostmey 10y ago
  Don't count on your research job in industry remaining stable if it can be outsourced to a university lab. The ceiling on your pay is that of a postdoc's plus university overhead.
  - arcanus 10y ago
    > if it can be outsourced to a university lab Thankfully, my work is sufficiently specialized and my background is strong enough I am not easily replaced. However, like many on HN I'm not representative of the general population and am certainly in a fortunate position. I am on a 'tenure track' in an organization where proprietary work and intellectual property I develop is legitimately valued. But broadly, I agree. And I've seen some pretty horrific results along the lines you alluded occur to several of my colleagues.
projektir 10y ago
The peril is already there. It's not created by those who leave. It's created by those who setup the conditions in such a way that all the people with self-respect leave. And this is how it should be: people should absolutely NOT feed a bad system. If all the best people leave, it sends a very clear signal. A lot of abuse and exploitation specifically happens because the best people are often too caring and good natured to leave. If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.

x1798DE 10y ago

Headline should say [2010], though the thing the post is about is from 1996.

akiselev 10y ago

I'm not surprised in the slightest. Caltech has a reputation as one of the best research universities in the world and getting a degree or doing research there requires a lot of work because it's so competitive. I've spent many nights as a kid running around Caltech in the dark while my mother worked on her experiments till midnight or later (all of the turtles come out at night!). Publish or perish goes tenfold for the elite schools which have a never ending supply of talented postdocs. Though I'm not surprised that this letter came from someone in the chemistry department. ChemE especially has a reputation within Caltech as one of the most difficult paths for both undergraduate and graduate work. The ChemE specific classes usually require a much bigger time commitment and the tests are notoriously difficult.

saryant 10y ago
I used to be in a long-term relationship with a chem undergrad at Caltech. I saw her all-nighters and stress first-hand. The workload drove her to attempted suicide (and had she gone through with it, hardly would've been the first suicide at Caltech). We split up and it took years for both of us to recover.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dekhn 10y ago
I went to one of the greatest grad schools in the world- UCSF- and while there were lots of people who worked absurd hours, I can't say I found it was necessary. Some people in academia just overwork without it leading to greater productivity. I don't mind once in a while having to start growing cells in the morning and hanging around for until evening to collect the results. The expectation that you should always be working that kind of hours... well, it doesn't make any sense to me. The one that really bothered me is that some of the professors would come in on Saturday morning and call their students. It wasn't that they needed them. They were just bored and lonely.

x1798DE 10y ago

From what I can tell, this is much more common in synthetic labs than physical or analytical labs. I think most of the physical chemists I knew in two different universities worked fairly normal hours, the labs were mostly empty on nights and weekends.

sseagull 10y ago
Computational chemist here: I agree. I still put in long hours sometimes, but my "lab" is just one ssh away, so hours actually in the office are a bit flexible.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  That may certainly be true, but I wasn't just talking about in-office hours - the labs I'm talking about were hardware type labs (instrumentation, laser labs, that sort of thing). It's possible everyone was just going home to do data processing, but I got the impression that people worked maybe 40-60 hours/week mostly depending on what their teaching load was like and whether there were unusal time-sensitive demands on their experiments.

guelo 10y ago

It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.

tnecniv 10y ago
Actually, it allows both postdoc AND grad student unionization.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dnautics 10y ago
Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work. You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
- sndean 10y ago
  > You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.

yomly 10y ago

The problem with academic science is threefold: 1: you are expected to feel privileged for doing something you vaguely enjoy. (how many people actually enjoy running columns and NMRs at 12am?) 2: you are expected to be altruistic in your ambitions. Curse those vaguely better paid lizard people who are working in industry to forward some profiteering enterprise rather than "science" 3: there are huge barriers to entry (tech excluded) so you will not do something entrepreneurial and make a name for yourself without the university. To make sure of this, we will name claim on anything you do for the next 10+ years anyway. It's no wonder to me that many of the talented people. Leave to go do banking or consulting - they work less for more!!

cshimmin 10y ago
1. That's like saying you couldn't possibly be passionate about cooking a big fancy meal because nobody really enjoys doing the dishes afterwards. If you're not passionate enough about chemistry/cooking to run NMR/do dishes, you're in the wrong place anyways. So you shouldn't worry about "feeling privileged", you should just do yourself a favor and get out. 2. Many forms of basic science cannot be done in industry. Take my field, high energy physics for example... there's only one supergiant particle smasher in the world and it's not owned by IBM. Anyways doing public science may or may not be altruistic, but I don't see that as a problem of science. In my case I just _actually_ enjoy what I'm doing (see 1) any benefits for the public good are just a bonus. 3. Entrepreneurial options vary pretty widely depending on the field. Regardless, I don't think most people get into science with the master plan that they will make a magical new discovery and then sell it and become a billionaire. If that's your plan, again you're doing it wrong. Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money. Many of the ones who go into banking either found out along the way that they weren't into it. Or regrettably often, they just got forced out of their field by competition so had to take a fat paycheck and boring job as a consolation prize.
- rayiner 10y ago
  You've accurately described the status quo, but I'm not sure you've presented a good justification for it. There is no reason to believe the folks motivated by money are any less talented than the folks that aren't motivated by money. If science excludes people who don't want to work long hours for low pay, that's probably detrimental to society.

jknoepfler 10y ago

This reads like someone complaining about the time requirements to be a member of a top athletic club or top kitchen or top theatre or any other highly demanding discipline. The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them. If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and future intact. But don't pretend someone was wronging you by asking you to sacrifice.

pjlegato 10y ago
It is indeed partially true that doing high level work simply requires extended hours and unusual dedication to achieve anything. However, that is not what is primarily at work here. The main factor is a sort of culturally normative and ingrained rite of passage / hazing ritual / bullying / dominance effect, which primarily serves to inflate the boss professor's ego at the expense of the grad students. Getting a PhD was difficult and grueling for the professor, so they are damn sure going to make sure it's difficult and grueling for their own students. The only way they themselves got through it was internalizing the attitude that a grueling work and study schedule is simply normal and simply the price of success. This exercise of extreme and essentially arbitrary power over how the students live their lives, far beyond what any normal job could remotely require, is very gratifying to many professors. They've worked so hard, suffered themselves, and now THEY have this absurd power over others.. It makes them feel important and powerful at a very primal level to tell their students they have to live under these extraordinary conditions, and then see them obey. They can literally choose whose career will live and whose will die, whose dreams will happen and whose will be broken and swept away without a thought. To fix this, the professors need to have a lot less arbitrary power over their students. There needs to be another route to a PhD besides enduring poverty and years of ritual self-humiliation and long form ass-kissing. Only then will the culture shift, as the "grind mode" professors are replaced by new professors who didn't have to grind.
quickben 10y ago
Isn't labour law supposed to prevent abuses like this? I mean, I see your point, but the guy that wrote that letter had some characteristics of a textbook psychopath. We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee. So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.

pjlegato 10y ago

The root problem is shown in this graph[1]. Simply put, since the 1960s, expanded funding for higher education in the US has vastly increased the supply of PhDs, while the number of job positions open for professors has not significantly increased. "PhDs issued" grows exponentially (since each professor can issue PhDs to multiple students), but "job offers" grows only linearly. This supply and demand imbalance tilts the power balance almost 100% in favor of the professor in any interaction with grad students. Professors have acquired essentially unlimited and arbitrary power to dictate conditions, and grad students have no choice but to comply or leave academia -- throwing away a lifetime of work and preparation. More at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html [1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1.jpg http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1...

benwr 10y ago
I agree with your first paragraph, but the second one doesn't make sense: Only professors with jobs can be PhD advisors, therefore the jobless PhD's don't increase the rate of PhD granting.
- anbende 10y ago
  True, it's merely a much faster rate, rather that a compounding effect.
abecedarius 10y ago
I don't know, but I wonder if having so many students here on a visa and hoping to immigrate is one of the main factors. (I'm not against immigration, I'm saying the visa can create a nasty power imbalance against the worker.) After all, a near-steady-state academic job market is not new these last decades, labor markets should equilibrate unless there's some kind of barrier, grad students are heavily foreign-born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_engineers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_en..., and many of them hope to immigrate (same source). What changes to the rules would improve the bargaining position of both native and foreign-born workers? (At the expense of employers like this one.) An alternative factor is people gambling they'll make it big, like musicians and athletes. This must be part of it, though professors aren't rock stars or drug dealers.

rdtsc 10y ago

My friend quit his postdoc in biochemistry over this shit. The head of the lab was abusive toward him, but mostly toward international students. Was treating them terribly, similar expectations regarding work "ethics", combined with threats regarding deportation and so on.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
>combined with threats regarding deportation and so on. People complain about H1Bs, but the situation faced by international postdocs is far worse.

WhoBeI 10y ago

Isn't this involuntary servitude? That's how I see it anyways. Whenever you are expected, and in this case required, to work against your will and for, I'm assuming, no pay under the threat of losing your livelihood it's involuntary servitude. Maybe I'm wrong about the "no pay" but even then I would still consider it involuntary.

anbende 10y ago
Except that it is in no way involuntary. It's never against your will, and its generally not for no pay. It's just long hours for low pay. It's hard to see what you mean by involuntary here. It's a work for education arrangement, and the amount of work is large, but people are free to leave. It's a bad deal in a bad system, but its hardly involuntary.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  There's another term for it: wage slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Wage slavery is about all waged labour, not just those which involve low pay for long hours.

throw_away_777 10y ago

This problem is very much prevalent in physics too. The mentioned article https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.tlnbcqbco https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.tlnbcqb... is well worth reading. I am currently transitioning from academia to industry, having just recently finished a PhD in high energy physics (looking for a job in data science). When I mention the lack of a job market in academia as a reason I am transitioning, people don't understand and look at me funny. If anyone is young and thinking of going into high energy physics, do yourself a favor and just don't. The glut of postdocs needed by the LHC, combined with the terrible failure of the SSC, has created a particularly terrible job market for high energy physicists in the US.