[lewis500]

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.

[lazyjeff]

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]

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.

[king_magic]

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.

[lewis500]

I don’t think they’re excuses. They’re explanations of how things happen. The asymmetrical relationship especially explains how professors can get away with treating students badly, but it isn’t a justification. If you read Bad blood, for instance, E Holmes and sunny treat everyone horribly, but ultimately lots of people quit because they have other options.

The pressure on the professor and the selection for obsessiveness explain motives.

[jdietrich]

There is an absurd oversupply of graduate students. Where there is an oversupply of labour, there are always abusive conditions. Academia can do all the soul-searching it wants, but the only meaningful solution is to rebalance supply and demand in academia; a very useful first step would be the provision of impartial and informed careers advice to high school and college graduates.

[afarrell]

How do you dismantle a cycle of abuse without first understanding the incentives and power relations which are the pieces of that abusive system?

——

I ask this as someone who has been accused of making excuses when I was explaining a problem ans asking for help in solving the problem:

What is it about the above comment that seems like excuses?

[throwaway9870]

Where were you a graduate student? I was a Stanford EE grad student for 8 years in the 90s (first year was for masters). You know why I was there so long? I loved it. Students returned from industry and said same thing: don't be in a hurry to get out. I worked for a hard-ass prof, they did not let anything slip. The hours I worked were insane, on one project it was literally every waking hour for almost a year. It was worth it to me, I would do it again. But I understand it isn't for everyone. After I graduated, I went to work for a chip startup and after a few months my boss made the comment that he was amazed how well trained I was. But that should not have been a surprise. I had a digital signal processing class with Teresa Meng (founder of Atheros), processor design with Hennessy (designed MIPS architecture), VLSI with Horowitz (founder of Rambus), OS programming with Mendel Rosenblum (founder VMWare), etc. I remember when Jerry and David got their funding to start a company with their little web directory. If that kind of environment doesn't excite you, maybe Stanford isn't for you.

As far as debt goes, I paid for my masters myself with loans (~29k) and the PhD was funded by my advisor with a stipend.

My strongest recommendation is two things: make sure you know why you are there and you are doing it for the right reasons, second, be part of a grad student environment. Don't go it alone. You are all in the same boat and can related to each other. We had a great research group, not everyone else did, spend time to build those relationships with other students or it will be more difficult than it needs to be.

But that isn't just advice for grad school, it really applies to most difficult challenges that we take on in life.

EDIT: one thing I see in other posts I want to address, you do have free time in grad school. Not always, but you do have it. I skied at Tahoe, hiked in Yosemite, toured Napa, visited Carmel & Monterey, went to Half Moon Bay many times, travelled to LA and San Diego. Also, get involved in some sport, physical excursion can really help reduce stress. I played a lot of b-ball in grad school.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

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".

[badpun]

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).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> 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]

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.

[mlthoughts2018]

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.

[aaavl2821]

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)

[dominotw]

> 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]

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?

[musicale]

> 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]

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.