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I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this. First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/e

I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this. First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships. The degree has to last years or else you get nothing, and there are no hard and fast terms of the relationship like there is in many jobs. The professors recommendation might be the most important thing you get, and that is always running in the background. So many professors treat their students like robots. Second, professors are essentially super students. We became professors because we have extreme standards. Your engineering manager became a manager because he was an engineer and got promoted, but having a professor as a boss is like if a famous open source developer was your boss. Nothing about becoming a professor selects for kindness or empathy, unlike a manager at an ordinary company who might be trained and evaluated—-especially in a large company—-on the happiness of his workers. So a lot of professors have essentially obsessive attitudes and no empathy. Add to this the fact that many students are escaping countries where they have little future. For example, the past few years, the Iranian economic crisis has caused a surge in Iranian applicants. Third, the professors themselves are under extreme pressure. Everybody knows this. Fourth, the work a professor outsources to students tends to be the stupidest and worst tasks, because the students usually aren’t good enough to make big contributions. This is depressing for the students: they’re smart people who signed up to work with a famous professor on work they cared about, but their day to day is to do things anyone could do for almost no money. Finally, the professors are under pressure to create these huge labs. We don’t make profits, so things like funding and number of PhD students are taken to be metrics for evaluating. The US news ranking absurdly includes phd’s per tenure track professor as one of their metrics. So a lot of people are accepted who really shouldn’t be there, and the research is designed to have tons of busy work.

cwbrandsma 8y ago
So few places I’ve worked did an engineer actually get promoted to manager. Mostly product managers with little technical expertise...they used to be in sales. I’ve had a few engineers as managers, they were mostly really good. Just not many.
king_magic 8y ago
Sorry, but candidly, this just reads as a bunch of lame excuses to continue a blatant cycle of abuse. Nothing in my professional 15 year career has come anywhere remotely close to the brutal, absurd reality of what I’ve seen graduate/PhD students go through. I think academia is nearing a kind of crisis akin to what the the Catholic Church is going through with rampant sex abuse. Diminishing, unimpressive returns in output (aside from a few bright areas), and dark secrets continually being covered up/brushed aside. Academia needs to do some serious soul searching.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year. What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contribute cannot be compared to the pressures in the industry where you basically just have to keep your boss happy if you want to stay in the money. It's a bit like an artistic career, really. You're constantly trying to hit the top 10. And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".
  - king_magic 8y ago
    This still sounds like a bunch of excuses to continue abusing people. Intense pressure exists everywhere: don't put academic work on a magical pedestal, there's a lot more to working in the industry than just keeping your boss happy (and uh, a lot more happens in the industry than just building the next Uber for X). Still no excuse to overwork people to near death (yes, there are extreme outliers like Goldman Sachs & whatnot, but this kind of overwork is a pandemic in academia).
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      I don't follow- where is the excuse? I left one of my junior dev positions in the industry with a stomach ulcer as a souvenir. I don't know what Goldman Sachs is like, but as a junior developer you're expected to do all the work for half the money it's worth and in half the time it would take your senior colleagues. Edit: and while youre senior colleagues treat your work like rubbish to justify their senior salaries.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Third, the professors themselves are under extreme pressure. Everybody knows this. I dont' think everyone appreciates this, actually. But, if it's bad for your mental health to go through the pressure of a PhD for three or four years- how much worse can it be to keep this up for the next 40 years or so, as a professor? And now you are under even more pressure because you're responsible for your students' careers also. This is my biggest doubt about continuing in academia after I finish my PhD (if I do). I realised that my advisor is always on a tight budget - on everything: funding, time, attention, interest... Do I really want to put myself in that position?
- matthewdgreen 8y ago
  It’s hard. During the pre-tenure time it’s hard not to burn out as a professor. I almost did. With that said, I’ve had all three careers: being a software developer (at a research lab, but building products), running a security evaluation company, and being a tenured professor. Being a professor has some downsides, but the redeeming element for me is that I love being my own boss and being able to pick the problems I work on — those that also interest me. I didn’t have that luxury in industry. Aside from the low pay, grad school was even better because I could spend a week thinking about a problem and make no progress, and I didn’t feel bad about it. I imagine that the experience of being a grad student is much worse when you have a terrible slavedriver advisor. I was fortunate to avoid that. Even so, the key to grad school (and academia) is to know when you’re having a bad experience and when to get out. In CS (in the US at least) you can leave with a terminal MS relatively easy and have no debt. Go into the program with your eyes open and an exit to industry as a fallback and you’ll be much happier.
  - stefco_ 8y ago
    Totally agree with the second paragraph (I'm a current grad student). My advisor is excellent, and while I've often had to push myself to the limit of what I can get done, I've also had a tremendous amount of freedom on how to get things done. And when things aren't as busy, I have more time to explore things in a self-motivated way. If I didn't have such a great PI and team, I would have strongly considered dropping out with the masters. What concerns me most about continuing in academia is the extreme uncertainty in living situation and funding. That seems draining both emotionally and professionally.
badpun 8y ago
What’s on opinion on prevalence of scientific dishonesty and fraud? Given how the incentives work, and that the publications are not checked thoroughly (peer revievers don’t redo the experiments to see if the results were not made up), it just seems to me that modern academia heavily incentivises people to produce fake science. From what I’ve heard, industries which should heavily depend on academic publications (such as ours, or pharma) are exteremely vary of them because, in their experience, the „findings” and ideas presented usually don’t replicate, or that the papers are just intellectually dishonest in various ways to present the author’s method as better that state of the art (salesmanship instead of science).
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- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I’d also add to this that the quality standards in academia are generally piss poor, and my own type A perfectionism was a big reason why I did not follow in my advisor’s footsteps after finishing grad school: I saw that he rose to fame and rank by essentially creating low-quality demoware to be pleasing to the eye at conferences, and had zero ambition to work on results or problems important to the field. Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else. In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications. Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism. By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.
  - kaitai 8y ago
    I think this really depends on the field. In mathematics, my field, you can argue that the work of various people is undervalued, but it's a bit harder to argue that certain theorems are overvalued. However, the metrics of evaluation for theorems are quite different than those for... 'demoware'...?
dominotw 8y ago
> but having a professor as a boss is like if a famous open source developer was your boss. This would be a dream for me :D. Instead we get 'jira assigners' as managers in tech.
- afarrell 8y ago
  What is your conception of what skills make someone: * A good product manager * A good team lead * A good career manager And why do you think open source development fame would correlate well with those skills?
lazyjeff 8y ago
I'm an assistant professor in computer science and have tried a few things to tune down the pressure in my lab. It's always hard to tell what works and what doesn't due to the very small N (N = number of phd students). I also run a small lab (N = 3 right now) so don't have the scaling and funding issues as larger labs. The thing that seems to be most successful is having every PhD student work with a couple of undergraduate students. Every project has undergraduate student collaborators, so it's never a solo endeavor. There's momentum from others in the project making progress so you're not pushing the boulder yourself. That way they can commiserate together when the results are bad or I'm being sucky. The other thing I'm starting to try is before I give any negative feedback in person, I ask them how they think they're doing. If they think they're doing great, then it's clearly a mismatch of expectations. I need to figure out how to make the expectations converge before giving negative feedback. I can't think of anything more demoralizing than thinking you're performing well, and then your advisor unexplicably saying you're not productive enough. Anyways, I think the environment varies substantially between groups. There's certainly some systematic problems (some department culture, some due to the advisor, and some because of being academia in general). But there's probably as many (or more) research labs as startups. So making blanket statements about advisors/advisees is like saying something like "all startups are under extreme VC pressure to monetize" or that "there's a toxic 24/7 work culture at disruptive startups" is similarly overgeneralizing (but probably true for some large number of them).
- musicale 8y ago
  Nice ideas. Isolation is definitely an issue, and having them work with undergrads will also remind them that they're not at the absolute bottom of the social status hierarchy. They might get jealous of people who actually have a life though.
aaavl2821 8y ago
Those points are all understandable and, as a non-academic, it's good to hear the perspective of a prof, while I usually see more written about the perspective of students Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the problems you pointed out? To an outsider with many friends who are grad students / postdocs, seem pretty difficult to address, like the metrics that inform tenure selection, while others seem like areas where one could make progress (more empathy, training etc)
musicale 8y ago
> the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships... So many professors treat their students like robots Power corrupts, apparently. > Nothing about becoming a professor selects for kindness or empathy... Quality of advising should be important, but of course that's not what they're selected for or rewarded for.

cwbrandsma 8y ago

So few places I’ve worked did an engineer actually get promoted to manager. Mostly product managers with little technical expertise...they used to be in sales. I’ve had a few engineers as managers, they were mostly really good. Just not many.

king_magic 8y ago

Sorry, but candidly, this just reads as a bunch of lame excuses to continue a blatant cycle of abuse. Nothing in my professional 15 year career has come anywhere remotely close to the brutal, absurd reality of what I’ve seen graduate/PhD students go through. I think academia is nearing a kind of crisis akin to what the the Catholic Church is going through with rampant sex abuse. Diminishing, unimpressive returns in output (aside from a few bright areas), and dark secrets continually being covered up/brushed aside. Academia needs to do some serious soul searching.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year. What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contribute cannot be compared to the pressures in the industry where you basically just have to keep your boss happy if you want to stay in the money. It's a bit like an artistic career, really. You're constantly trying to hit the top 10. And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".
- king_magic 8y ago
  This still sounds like a bunch of excuses to continue abusing people. Intense pressure exists everywhere: don't put academic work on a magical pedestal, there's a lot more to working in the industry than just keeping your boss happy (and uh, a lot more happens in the industry than just building the next Uber for X). Still no excuse to overwork people to near death (yes, there are extreme outliers like Goldman Sachs & whatnot, but this kind of overwork is a pandemic in academia).
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    I don't follow- where is the excuse? I left one of my junior dev positions in the industry with a stomach ulcer as a souvenir. I don't know what Goldman Sachs is like, but as a junior developer you're expected to do all the work for half the money it's worth and in half the time it would take your senior colleagues. Edit: and while youre senior colleagues treat your work like rubbish to justify their senior salaries.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Third, the professors themselves are under extreme pressure. Everybody knows this. I dont' think everyone appreciates this, actually. But, if it's bad for your mental health to go through the pressure of a PhD for three or four years- how much worse can it be to keep this up for the next 40 years or so, as a professor? And now you are under even more pressure because you're responsible for your students' careers also. This is my biggest doubt about continuing in academia after I finish my PhD (if I do). I realised that my advisor is always on a tight budget - on everything: funding, time, attention, interest... Do I really want to put myself in that position?

matthewdgreen 8y ago
It’s hard. During the pre-tenure time it’s hard not to burn out as a professor. I almost did. With that said, I’ve had all three careers: being a software developer (at a research lab, but building products), running a security evaluation company, and being a tenured professor. Being a professor has some downsides, but the redeeming element for me is that I love being my own boss and being able to pick the problems I work on — those that also interest me. I didn’t have that luxury in industry. Aside from the low pay, grad school was even better because I could spend a week thinking about a problem and make no progress, and I didn’t feel bad about it. I imagine that the experience of being a grad student is much worse when you have a terrible slavedriver advisor. I was fortunate to avoid that. Even so, the key to grad school (and academia) is to know when you’re having a bad experience and when to get out. In CS (in the US at least) you can leave with a terminal MS relatively easy and have no debt. Go into the program with your eyes open and an exit to industry as a fallback and you’ll be much happier.
- stefco_ 8y ago
  Totally agree with the second paragraph (I'm a current grad student). My advisor is excellent, and while I've often had to push myself to the limit of what I can get done, I've also had a tremendous amount of freedom on how to get things done. And when things aren't as busy, I have more time to explore things in a self-motivated way. If I didn't have such a great PI and team, I would have strongly considered dropping out with the masters. What concerns me most about continuing in academia is the extreme uncertainty in living situation and funding. That seems draining both emotionally and professionally.

badpun 8y ago

What’s on opinion on prevalence of scientific dishonesty and fraud? Given how the incentives work, and that the publications are not checked thoroughly (peer revievers don’t redo the experiments to see if the results were not made up), it just seems to me that modern academia heavily incentivises people to produce fake science. From what I’ve heard, industries which should heavily depend on academic publications (such as ours, or pharma) are exteremely vary of them because, in their experience, the „findings” and ideas presented usually don’t replicate, or that the papers are just intellectually dishonest in various ways to present the author’s method as better that state of the art (salesmanship instead of science).

deleted 8y ago

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mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I’d also add to this that the quality standards in academia are generally piss poor, and my own type A perfectionism was a big reason why I did not follow in my advisor’s footsteps after finishing grad school: I saw that he rose to fame and rank by essentially creating low-quality demoware to be pleasing to the eye at conferences, and had zero ambition to work on results or problems important to the field. Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else. In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications. Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism. By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.
- kaitai 8y ago
  I think this really depends on the field. In mathematics, my field, you can argue that the work of various people is undervalued, but it's a bit harder to argue that certain theorems are overvalued. However, the metrics of evaluation for theorems are quite different than those for... 'demoware'...?

dominotw 8y ago

> but having a professor as a boss is like if a famous open source developer was your boss. This would be a dream for me :D. Instead we get 'jira assigners' as managers in tech.

afarrell 8y ago
What is your conception of what skills make someone: * A good product manager * A good team lead * A good career manager And why do you think open source development fame would correlate well with those skills?

lazyjeff 8y ago

I'm an assistant professor in computer science and have tried a few things to tune down the pressure in my lab. It's always hard to tell what works and what doesn't due to the very small N (N = number of phd students). I also run a small lab (N = 3 right now) so don't have the scaling and funding issues as larger labs. The thing that seems to be most successful is having every PhD student work with a couple of undergraduate students. Every project has undergraduate student collaborators, so it's never a solo endeavor. There's momentum from others in the project making progress so you're not pushing the boulder yourself. That way they can commiserate together when the results are bad or I'm being sucky. The other thing I'm starting to try is before I give any negative feedback in person, I ask them how they think they're doing. If they think they're doing great, then it's clearly a mismatch of expectations. I need to figure out how to make the expectations converge before giving negative feedback. I can't think of anything more demoralizing than thinking you're performing well, and then your advisor unexplicably saying you're not productive enough. Anyways, I think the environment varies substantially between groups. There's certainly some systematic problems (some department culture, some due to the advisor, and some because of being academia in general). But there's probably as many (or more) research labs as startups. So making blanket statements about advisors/advisees is like saying something like "all startups are under extreme VC pressure to monetize" or that "there's a toxic 24/7 work culture at disruptive startups" is similarly overgeneralizing (but probably true for some large number of them).

musicale 8y ago
Nice ideas. Isolation is definitely an issue, and having them work with undergrads will also remind them that they're not at the absolute bottom of the social status hierarchy. They might get jealous of people who actually have a life though.

aaavl2821 8y ago

Those points are all understandable and, as a non-academic, it's good to hear the perspective of a prof, while I usually see more written about the perspective of students Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the problems you pointed out? To an outsider with many friends who are grad students / postdocs, seem pretty difficult to address, like the metrics that inform tenure selection, while others seem like areas where one could make progress (more empathy, training etc)

musicale 8y ago

> the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships... So many professors treat their students like robots Power corrupts, apparently. > Nothing about becoming a professor selects for kindness or empathy... Quality of advising should be important, but of course that's not what they're selected for or rewarded for.