There are no prestige occupations where authority figures can’t preclude opportunities. Academia, medicine, law, any large bureaucracy, in any one of them if yo

There are no prestige occupations where authority figures can’t preclude opportunities. Academia, medicine, law, any large bureaucracy, in any one of them if you piss off the wrong person your career is over. There are bad fields for this and worse ones. You could work for Citibank, realise that your career was being deliberately destroyed by a superior and you might be able to move to a competitor and get over it. Same for the private sector more generally. But if you work in fields that are either directly government run or depend on government funding, like medicine or academia, if you realise someone with power has it in for you just leave. You’re not going to win. The idea that extreme bullying is anything other than a normal feature of bureaucratic organisations with no competition is farcical. It’s like believing in fairness or the tooth fairy.