Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia?

It’s not as common but the incentive structures in academia are uniquely enabling to abusers. In industry it’s much easier to leave tyrant bosses. I agree with your points.

Many of the positive incentives don’t exist in industry though, an “up and out” culture is rarer in industry. When it works in academia your supervisor is positively invested in your growth, in general in industry your supervisor doesn’t care about your growth. If they need someone with new skills and you learn them fine but they can also fire you and hire someone with those skills (even though this is probably a net negative for them due to retraining on job specific stuff, it’s still seen as a net positive by management)

There is less abuse though. Full stop. Sorry you’re in this situation.

I'm a professor and have worked in industry.

Let me break down the issues a bit on the education side, first. Almost always by year 4+ most PhD students are fatigued and starting to get very weary. I was definitely one of them, and at times I did feel like my supervisor wasn't helping my career development or giving me enough mentoring. He is a wonderful, kind, and creative person and he spent 1-2 hours per week with me, but for whatever reason I still felt this way.

I eventually decided I felt that way because he didn't make his expectations for me finishing and tailoring those expectations to my career goals clear up front, and very few advisors do so. The first thing I did when I became a professor was write up an expectations document, and when students want to join my lab I walk them through it, and even then we do a trial run if they still want to. I think this helps a lot. Each semester I review career goals, progress to graduation, etc. with a student, and we include things like publication targets, internships, etc., depending on career goals. I think of my PhD students as my apprentices, and it is my job to get them to be strong scientists and to help them achieve their career goals, as long as they put the work in. Once I became a professor I was much more understanding and sympathetic to my own advisor. Until you have the job, you don't really understand the challenges.

All that said, I've seen very bad advisors who exploit students, fail to mentor them well, make them stay far longer than needed (ambitious new faculty), neglect to push them hard enough to actually achieve their career ambitions (tenured faculty past their prime), and various sorts of emotional abuse.

Industry is no picnic, though. Depending on the job, you may have little autonomy (you don't get to decide what you do, unlike academia), be abused in terms of work hours (many start ups), subjected to micromanagement, and verbal abuse definitely does exist.

Take a look at "Ask A Manager" and you will hear many many tales of abuse and drama in industry: https://www.askamanager.org/

I think there’s a default assumption in academia that students bring the motivation and perspiration to their work. The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides.

My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”

From personal experience in both, I would say academia is worse, and I think it's due to the lack of choices. Also, when academics are getting paid less, I feel like they gain some of their status by lording their power over other people, which is known to be part of the academic game. In industry, I feel like everyone is there mostly just to make money. Don't get me wrong, bad people exist in both, and people are people.

In general though, industry is a lot more competitive. You can just move on and get another job, and likely get paid more. Rather than the typical 2 body problem of academia, where one person is taking a job knowing it's just because the other person needs a job. (Yes, I've seen this happen where you hire someone's spouse so that you can get them to join. It's almost certainly not legal, but it happens in academia. I've never seen this happen in industry though.)

In industry there is also a little less gate-keeping. You've already got the job and there aren't really any more hoops to jump through to get paid. Sometimes getting a promotion is about as likely and easy as academia due to those above you in the management chain though.

I believe that abuse is more common in academia.

A relationship between a supervisor and his direct reports, both in academia and industry, is impacted by the power that the supervisor can exert. The relationship between a supervisor and his PhD students is not the same as a manager and his direct reports in industry because:

- The students are invested and committed into their PhDs for several years. It is much harder to change path or mentor compared to just change jobs. The energy and resources that the student needs to invest to apply a change are significantly higher, often involving moving to a different city.

- The reward of a job is, for the most part, the monthly paycheck. A PhD is a long-term investment that must be completed in order to have value. An employee that quits a job after one year is not an issue, and it is considered "experience", but quitting a PhD half way through can be perceived as a failure.

- Professors in academia have almost unlimited decision power in how they manage their budget and their reports. It can almost feels like an absolute monarchy.

- This may be anecdotal, but I feel like the role of professor in academia can attract people with larger egos and smaller empathy, especially in scientific subjects.

All of these points, combined with a bad supervisor, are fantastic fuel for anxiety and unhappiness. There is no worse thing that, after so much work, feeling that you have no control over your situation and you have no margin to improve it, without significant additional sacrifices.

My experience, PhD, 10 years postdoc, 10 years in startups (all in UK).

I actually didn't get any hassle as a PhD student, possibly since I was a mature student and wouldn't take any shit, I didn't need to get into any fights but I was willing to and I guess that comes out as confidence.

As a postdoc I experienced several attempts at bullying, all worked out in my favour as I was sensible enough to join the union on my first day at work. I'd say that 90-95% of tenured academics are reasonable and often pleasant people, but high-achievement does also tend to attract a proportion of arseholes, and it's pretty random as to whether you come in to contact with them. How you handle it is up to you of course, I always fight back. The union is your friend.

I find that startups are much more mellow places to work, finding an aggressive and unpleasant manager seems to be really quite exceptional; businesses tend to have "processes" in place in a way that academia just doesn't. An aggressive manager is quickly identified as a bad manager and then an ex-manager, they can't just claim "I'm really clever so suck it up" in the same way as in academe.

I don't regret being a postdoc at all, I met a load of interesting people and worked on a lot of interesting projects. But it's not the whole of the world. I'd recommend exploration of the rest.

It's hard to really, really, deeply compare what's more common and less common, because there's not really a lot of meaningful reporting. If we could report on the problem in earnest, we'd be fixing it. What I can say is:

- if you can make the computers go beep boop in industry, then you can much more readily leave and take your skills elsewhere, and you won't have to put up with the abuse. you don't usually have to stick it out to finish a project or degree.

- your manager's success is probably tied to your success a little better, and you're more likely collaborating on the same deliverables. also, your manager probably hasn't been in place for nearly as long, as industry is much more dynamic in terms of staffing.

- you're less likely to encounter top down abuse. you're more likely to encounter team cultures where the entire team casually engages in mild hazing, as a sort of frat-ish way to build camaraderie, particularly at the smallest firms. you can usually avoid being part of such a culture, if you push back gently but firmly and bring a positive attitude of earnest appreciation of the people around you instead, and you will probably be valued for that — however, this will be work, and may drain you emotionally as you do it.

I will write something most likely controversial for HN, but I think what you write is very North-America and computer related "centric".

As for the context, I am French, over 40, Master in France, PhD in Denmark and working in Germany. My work is chemical engineering at large, oil & gas, crop science, pharmaceutical but also food and flagrances. I am working with 50/50% men and women. My wife is working in oil & gas.

I haven't witnessed a single time abuse like there are in IT in the last 20 years. And I have been working, living and studying from California to Japan.

In fact I am still chocked to see all these codes of conduct to contribute to open source projects or attend conferences in computer related stuff.

How can it be that you need such things?

So yes, PhD is hard work. Yes you have moments where you lose faith. But life is like that too. Life is unfair and hard, but suffering abuse is something which never came back from all my friends doing PhDs in engineering in the EU. Both men and women.

To the point that I sometimes wonder if the word abuse has a different meaning for me as a non native speaker as for people from North America.

I've worked in both industry and academia and both can have severe abuse problems. PhD students are used as free labor to advance a prof's reputation so the prof's have no incentive to let them graduate, especially if they prove capable. I've seen students blackmail professors to get the prof to let them graduate (i.e., "no more work on side projects unless I get a clear graduation date").

  In industry your boss has some incentive to keep you productive and happy, but co-employees can be incredibly mean as there is often competition among employees especially if times are tough.  Everyone wants to keep feeding their family and will tear you down in sneaky ways if it helps them.  There are a lot of ambitious people as well who will try to climb over you and undermine you and use you.  When you interview for a job, pay as much attention to the nature of who you'll be working with as to your potential boss's nature.  That can happen with grad students also, but given the specialization in PhD's it's rare that students are actually directly competing with each other, although in a sense you are competing with all grad students for research impact.

I would say it depends on the industry. In software engineering, in general, companies take extremely good care of their workforce because labor is very scarce and expensive. My other life experience is in architecture, and people are not treated nearly as well there, mainly because there’s a lot less scarcity of labor.

I don’t really know the dynamics of academia, but my impression is that there are a lot more people who want PhD’s and tenured professorships than there are openings for those roles, so knowing nothing else I would expect the work environment to be worse compared to software engineering.

An example of Sayre's Law: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

I had a decent experience in grad school, though it took a long time. I now live in an academic town, so I know a lot of professors, have worked with quite a few due to my day job, and so forth.

One thing I've noticed is that there is no systematic mechanism for supervising a professor and helping them develop as a manager. So the management skills of a professor are luck of the draw, and tend to be formed by their own PhD experience, and maybe things like coming from a business family, etc. To make it harder, managing grad students is weird because of the amount of independence that they're supposed to develop.

I haven't typically seen this manifest itself as abuse, but just ineptness. There have been times when the thought floating around in my head was: "You need to get some project management training." In contrast, when I became a manager in industry, my employer sent me for a bunch of training that was quite useful, and my own supervisor was observing my behavior as a manager. Also, industry in our better moments communicates norms about things like harassment and inclusion which, if you follow them, will serve you pretty well as a manager.

In fact I've told professors the following: "Your university probably has a career development program in the business school with courses such as basic supervision and project management. If not, check out your local trade school. You should sign up yourself and all of your students for one or two of those courses.

The good thing about industry vs academia is that it's fairly easy to change things in the industry and to beat your fists on the table when things go wrong.

Simplest case: you switch jobs. Harder case: you sue your employer.

This is not the case in academia, where things are basically transactional: either you pull through the whole thing and get out with a PhD, or you basically wasted n years of your life. Yeah you can sue people around, but I've hardly seen people lose their job even on serious issues (eg: a professor saying racial slurs during a lesson, recorded via microsoft teams. some generic apology by the university dean headmaster and it ended there, no real/actual consequences. she's still there teaching, afaik).

A lot of smart people smell this during their 'thesis-in-the-lab-with-the-prof-and-the-phd-candidates' and politely decline the invite to apply for a phd-candidate position.

Not sure this answers your questions, just wanted to add my 2¢.

I've only been in industry, not academia, though I have heard many anecdotal stories similar to yours.

In industry, you need to produce. A manager is measured by how much he/she produces, which means how much his/her team produces. So, you could have an asshole manager, but push it too hard and you'll cause too much churn (people leaving your team), which then greatly reduces your productivity until it hits zero. If you're an asshole on top of not making the team produce, you'll be very quickly out of a job.

Probably more common is that managers are polite but incompetent. You might have ones who do as little as possible and stay out of people's way, or those that try to micromanage everything. Either way, not providing a lot of value, but as it's about par for many companies, they'll keep their jobs. And then sometimes you get managers who really are great and you love working for them and they help everyone on the team grow and become super-productive. And you might even follow them around as they switch companies just so you can continue to work for them.

Oh, sorry, so I will add that this depends on the company culture, so there might be companies where the culture is just abusive, and everyone at the company is just an asshole. People will show up, decide they don't like it and leave right away, leaving only the assholes to all enjoy each other's company.

I think you should look at the incentives...

In the academic world, tenured professors are rarely fired for bad behavior. Their primary incentive is to create grad students who cite their work. (“Expand on the path they’ve laid”). This means they can tune out or abuse anyone not part of their citation factory with relatively little cost. As long as there is a ready supply of new students each year they are fine.

In the professional world the incentives are from the market. If you can’t generate revenue or funding you die. Leaders of small companies can be abusive to get things done. As the companies scale, abusive leaders find it harder to attract talent and bad managers tend to get weeded out by the market for talent. (Jobs and Musk are exceptions) As companies turn into monopolies focused on scale there are less external pressures and toxic behavior can return as turf wars trump market pressures.

I'd say that the issues in your first paragraph also occur in industry, albeit with plausible deniability and not directly.

Further annoyances in industry:

- Teams can suck you dry, you begin to lose your identity and get mediocre (since that is the safest and most valued option).

- Managers take the credit for your work.

- Managers can be entirely unrealistic, often demanding things that are not possible from a CS point of view.

- Too many meetings and "communication" to serve those who thrive on that sort of thing (i.e. the talkers).

As others said, in this job market you can move to another company without issues, which is the greatest advantage.

I think the flexibility of academe allows opportunities for abuse. I've been in academe more than industry, but from what I can tell industry has clearer expectations, goals and structures in place. An academic supervisor is free to create his/her own arbitrary lab rules. Quitting a lab is also not as simple since you'll likely still need to stay in the same university and have a degree at stake.

What pisses me most in the academe is when supervisors behave as if they worked hard for your salary. Sure, writing ambitious promises (to be delivered by students) to a grant giving body is difficult. But that is peanuts compared to how money is generated in a company. And guess who gets recognition from the labor of students.

There are abusive people in academia and there are abusive people in industry. And there are respectful people in academia and in the industry.

I had the displeasure of choosing an abusive supervisor. And I left him, started fresh with a different supervisor, and everything worked out nicely. That is possible, although people don't talk much about that. During my studies, I heard about some very abusive supervisors from colleagues, and also heard about good supervisors as well. In one of my exchanges, i worked with an awesome supervisor. She was brilliant, respectful, always helping, and invited us to many outside activities like hiking and other stuff.

My first job outside academia had an environment that was more toxic than with my abusive supervisor. Not only the boss had some "weird" behavior, but also the coworkers were complicit and accepted that as "standard boss behavior". Now I work at a different company, with an awesome environment.

I know people happy in academia, and I know people happy to have left it. I also know people unhappy in industry :/

The title sneaks an assumption in. My experience as a PhD was different: I did not see any abuse, and my supervisor - who had a reputation as a grumpy old man - was exceptionally kind and supportive. I don't claim that my experience is typical either, and I've certainly heard some nightmare stories. But I'd want to see more evidence before assuming that abuse is common all over academia.

Having been in both academia (albeit only for a Master's, so Ph.D. treatment I saw only from third-person perspective) and industry, the main difference is what happens when you do land in a bad situation (i.e. with a bad supervisor). If you are in industry with a job skill for which there is demand, if you have a bad supervisor you just start shopping for a new job. So, regardless of whether or not the % of bad supervisors is different, the effects on you are different. If you have a bad supervisor, start interviewing, even if you can't afford to quit the job you have until a new one is found.

The fact that Ph.D. students tend to be much younger than their bosses probably also has something to do with it; experienced employees are more likely to realize "this is not normal", and leave.

In industry, if my boss started abusing me I would quit and get a job elsewhere. I'm free to leave at any time with no consequences. There's such high demand for developers that I have no reason not to- I'll have another job in 3 weeks.

Because of this, my company has gone to pretty incredible lengths to ensure managers who abuse employees are identified and removed. It's cheaper to remove abusive bosses than it is to constantly hire new developers.

Academia has none of those problems. It's hard to fire an abuser with tenure. PhD students are not hard to replace (it's hard to get into academia!). No one is financially obligated to prevent this kind of abuse. Ethically, morally, yes definitely. But not financially.

I paused to think about OP's question and the results surprised me a bit. Looking back over my career in tech I can safely say that at every job I've ever had there has been at least one highly abusive person in some position of authority.

One of them was a CTO but most of them were high on the developer ladder and at most middle management. Most of the abusive folks Ive had experience with skewed toward the lower middle of the spectrum between Janitor->CxO.

From outright verbal abuse in meetings to quietly trying to sabotage my projects and in a few cases outright trying to get me fired for standing up to them (and failing each time I might add). I would later learn that one of these guys, my boss at the time, directly blocked me from a promotion that would have surely altered the course of my life at the time. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?

I think the modern term to describe these people in tech is "Brilliant Assholes" though they are seldom "brilliant". They have some skills usually but more or less they're just bullies by nature and taking advantage of a situation where they can get away with it.

I can say from my own experience, there is usually at least one person like this in every shop. You're likely to run into one of these if you work in software development.

During my PhD, my fellow students reported radically different experiences with their supervisors.

One person (studying biology) reported they were staying late every day, working seven days a week, and got cursed out by their supervisor for not coming in on christmas day.

Another person (studying maths) reported they could only do about 3-4 hours of productive maths a day, leaving them with loads of free time, and they still had enough contributions for their thesis in their second year.

Needless to say, for the first guy almost any job in industry would be an improvement in working conditions. For the second? Not so much (although he is now happily working in industry)

> e.g., being grossly neglectful of the student's professional development

In my industry, while employers will provide some professional development, you'll have a better time if you don't depend on it.

Oh, they're generous in a sense - they pay for the training, and pay you to attend it as well - but it'll only develop the skills you need for your current job, and at the same rate your peers are developing theirs.

And you need to develop the skills for your next job, not your current job.

I’ve experienced no abuse as a PhD student. However things have happened around me that could be interpreted as abuse. For example our group leader used to love confronting people who didn’t understand certain concepts. I don’t think that’s abuse but some might

I only spent a brief time in academia before becoming a software developer. This is my personal experience:

Academia: abuse was literally everywhere and it was a daily thing. Even some lab "assistants" whose career highlights were cleaning the lab and moving some objects around routinely bullied students (or at least tried to). Overall a very awkward and unsatisfying experience. Also this wasn't an isolated thing, it was happening at several departments of the same faculty.

Industry: I only experienced similar stuff in my first software development job, which was at a small startup. And the only guy who behaved like this was one of the engineering managers. As a developer -at least in my area- once you are considered mid level most companies treat you with serious respect.

Two things came to mind:

1. I don't think we can generalize to the whole of academia, based on a singular experience with one particular supervisor. It might just happened that your particular supervisor is like that. But there are a lot better supervisors out there and a lot worse supervisors. Same thing in industry.

2. About the supervisor "helping the student with career" - this is exception rather than the case, I think. In particular, when I had a supervisor, he said that, in his view, to successfully finish PhD means learning to be independent and do things on your own. And I agreed with him. This is not school anymore and at some time you have to get out of the nest and start doing things independently, without people assigned to watch over you.

The OP is bringing up a very specific form of PhD here. That of the "big lab", these are inherently exploitative. You are training for yesterdays skills on something no one cares about (most of the time). Then you finish, there is no career from there unless you were exceedingly good at rising above and building a network and upskilling independent of the crappy structure around you.

Consider if you had the very best of human beings as your supervisor, who has 30 students. If they did absolutely nothing but give an hour a week to each student they wouldn't even have time for a shit break in a normal working week. So you are quite literally not even vaguely on the priority list for that person, unless you are exceptionally brilliant and going to help bring in some $$$ to the group and hang around. Then this prof sits in this environment with a power structure to match the reality, taking essentially blind credit for others work for decades. It breeds a specific thought pattern in the prof and group that corrupts. So in this sense, no industry is not the same. Unless you go into an industry with the exact same dynamic.

I worked in a theoretical group with only about four or five other students with at least one or two postdocs. The dynamic was excellent, prof had an open door and would have the time. At that point the prof really is contributing intellectually, and also knows to what extent they have contributed to the work. So their belief in their own contribution as a leader is grounded in reality, typically they will also constantly see the student outgrow their own understanding by the end of the PhD every single time. That is a healthy environment for the profs development as well as the students.

Ultimately in a big group you are prof level resource limited, and this includes career important things like networks of good contacts and collaborators. How does a prof prioritize 30 students working on the choice projects, learning the new methods from the best postdocs, and working with the best collaborators? The biggest strongest chick at the start constantly gets the food. Doesn't matter that its then an increasing returns effect, and if you just gave the same level of opportunity to the others in the group everyone would be just as strong. The lab needs flux of workers not new leaders at bigger scale. The equivalent in industry would be a startup where everyone is trying to be CEO. That might work with like four or five people who know each other well and are equally competent and take it in turns but not going to fly in any other scale.

No. It's not. From a simple numerical perspective, the labor supply and demand forces are completely different and far less favorable to abuse in the industry. People will vote with their feet.

This isn't to say that the industry is perfect compared to academia; in fact, the conventional focus on the bottom line at the expense of long-term R&D at the average firms is a well-trodden trope. But tech is still an expanding universe, and so the leverage of voting with your feet remains quite strong for individual contributors. Far stronger than in academia according to much of my network.

I encourage you to reach out to data scientists and research engineers who have made the transition. If you don't have a LinkedIn, I recommend making one, adding whoever you can and talking to whoever you can that might have gone down a similar path to you. The academia to industry path is not a one-way door, and indeed, there's a lot of research science inside the industry that appears to be more well run than much of pure academia. You're smart enough to have gotten into a PhD program in the first place -- that enough will make you a very attractive candidate for a wide range of roles inside the industry that can be really fulfilling. It's virtually costless to start exploring.

Good luck. I'm sorry you have to go through this unnecessarily common experience, but on the plus side, it's better to figure it out now than later.

Marketing agencies are not universally, but commonly abusive of young employees as they are seen as easily replaceable. The goal is to get a much work out of recent college graduates before completely burning them out and then firing or having them quit from stress and exhaustion. This typically takes 2-3 years of 50-70 hour weeks in a high stress environment.

They like recent college graduates, because they don’t know what a healthy work environment looks like.

I think fundamentally the difference is that the professor might not need you as much as you need them. They have their own research they want to be working on and students are little more than annoyances that need to be taken care of. For their real helpers they might have postdocs. In industry, you can typically get another job. But it's not so easy to replace a development team. So that makes the relationship more equal.

That being said negative comments still happen and I certainly don't think Academia is all bad. Academics work on stuff they are interested in. They get to go to conferences, make friends across the world and have a much more free lifestyle. These are privileges that should not be discounted.

Workers can be unhappy too, despite generally decent management. Burn out is a thing and you might want to read the threads on agile/scrum that often appear on this forum before deciding. On hacker news it's often said the half life of an engineer is only five years.

I worked as a staff engineer in an academic research lab for 7 years and got to observe a wide range of interactions between grad students and faculty. I would characterize most of the bad relationships as a combination of neglect and poor communication (in both directions), plus general exhaustion on all sides. But there were definitely worse situations outside our department that I heard about secondhand. Life sciences seemed to be particularly prone to huge egos and abusive attitudes for reasons that I still don't quite understand.

In the 13 years I have subsequently spent in industry, I've been at large companies, small established companies, and startups. One thing I've seen a few times is that people who successfully finished a PhD and end up in technical management have a tendency to be ineffective, tyrannical managers. Kind of a "passing on the abuse" situation, sadly.

I believe the biggest one is sunk cost which you have already mentioned.

> Among my late-stage PhD friends, it feels like 80% are unhappy

The industry is much better, not because it's inherently less abusive and there are still a lot of abusive employers, but because people can easily leave without too much sunk cost and go find non-abusive workplaces.

I've never experienced or even heard of anybody experiencing anything I'd consider abuse in the industry - with "industry" meaning developing software for ordinary businesses.

IMO, this is all due to the conditions of the labor market. Any position that a lot of people want to do and doesn't require a lot of skill or experience will be a bad time. If you get into such a position, expect to be paid little, worked long hours, replaced on somebody's whim, and various types of abuse will be common. On the other hand, positions that aren't that sexy and require skill and experience tend to pay well and treat people well.

Once you understand that, a lot of things become clear. You can predict the sub-areas of the industry that are likely to be worse work environments - game development, startups, etc. Boring line of business development is a much more pleasant environment.

IME a lot of people on the tenure track are abused and overloaded. There is a lot of politics and backstabbing as well. This passes down to students.

When I was in grad school, I had more than one tenured professor tell me they would have never been able to survive if they had to do what we had to do to get a tenure track job. One of the tenured professors was a terrible human being and actively mocked the conditions her students were in and how nice she had it when they were a student and on the tenure track.

I left academia and have no regrets. I was on an H1-B and was trapped in that situation for a while, but even then I was getting paid decently and not the other way around, where I got $1100/month to do the work a tenured professor wouldn't do even though they were paid a lot more.

I think the big variable is how fast your organization is growing, and not so much the "kind" of organization.

If you are in a place where everything's growing (more funding, more revenue), all your peers will get promoted with you, and you won't have to compete (or behave in a zero-sum way) to do it. Cultures develop "politics" in different ways, but I think the unifying theme is zero-sum behavior.

The average age of tenure has gone up over the last 30 years, which suggests fewer early-career opportunities and more competition. But there are tech companies that double their employee count every year, which has a very different feel.

I've witnessed the dark side of academia be extremely abusive to people.

In my view industry is often also toxic, just in very different and more variable ways. For example, fetishizing overtime or the volume of work to do, weird management: "never hire fit looking developers because fitness means they don't spend enough personal time on computers", "always give the worst employees the best references because they'll weigh down competitors", "let's talk about how terrible abortion is over lunch", etc.

Toxic culture and bad management occur in the private sector, but it runs a larger and less consistent gamut than what I've witnessed in academia.

I had a CS prof that boasted of only giving two As his entire career. And would structure tests so that wrong answers would be subtracted from right answers. He also did the blackboard thing where you needed to go up to the blackboard show that you understood some confusing algo paper he assigned, with him asking you questions to throw you off.

Guy was pretty hated by students. Someone tried breaking into his office one year. Part of me respects that he was trying to keep standards high, when there are so many bleeding hearts now. Still think it was a power trip.

I find it curious to see a university student asking in a manner that invites almost exclusively anecdotal evidence. I'm not sure those answers will be to accurate unless someone finds an actual survey about this. Looking through the top 20 or so comments, I don't see any statistics or surveys mentioned.

I wonder if an HN poll, or tallying the current comments, might be better than nothing or if the result would be misleading and biased (HN is obviously not a general population sample) to the point where it's more harmful than useful.

I think an important caveat is that, at least in American academia, your advisor should not have the same role as a supervisor, depending on the field and research arrangements. As a PhD student, you are expected to have care and motivation for your own research and situation: as sokoloff points out, the idea is that the student pushes and the advisor guides. You can, and in many cases are expected, to disagree with your advisor, and your advisor should not have complete control over what you are doing and how you do it. Similarly, it is usually seen as the student's responsibility to do what they need to finish their research and degree, not the advisor's responsibility to manage it. Ideally, an advisor is more of a mentor and senior collaborator than a supervisor.

Some situations I have known:

- A student who talked to many of their committee members as much as or more than to their advisor, and generally took their advisor's views on their research as suggestions to be weighed against their own and their committee members' views. In this case I actually think there could have been a reasonable complaint that some of their committee members paid more attention to the student's research than that of their own students. (A distinguishing factor here may be that the student was writing and receiving their own grants and fellowships, and was publishing papers and presenting at conferences on their own, however.)

- A student who disagreed with their advisor on a number of work, approach, neglect, and other questions, and switched to having another committee member as their advisor shortly before defending. (This student was supported by their old advisor's grants or by TAships, I believe.)

- A student where their committee disagreed with their advisor on dissertation readiness and pushed the advisor to allow a defense. (This student was entirely supported by their advisor's grants, and continued to work with their advisor after graduating. The advisor did not see the disagreements as attacks, but as an expected part of academic collaboration.)

- A student who outright had a nominal advisor (for departmental politics reasons) who had little role at all in their work, and who worked almost entirely with a committee member.

While I have never worked in industry, I assume that if your supervisor tells you to do something, you can't simply disagree and have this be the right choice, and you similarly can't decide to ignore your supervisor and do something else, or change supervisors on your own accord. In academia with advisors, the situation is different. Depending on funding situations, an advisor may actually have very little formal authority over a student at all.

Since you have a throwaway account, why not name and shame? At worst, it would give some information any student who was thinking about applying to your department.

Lab sciences tend to have accepted "the way things" go: your advisors got through some abuse too, so they think it's natural. I think some additional fuel comes from that you have to have an advisor to get into grad school. I'm from a field where the order is reversed (we have two years before finalizing our advisor, and changing is less of an hassle) and such abuse is much rarer. It might also have to do with my field's obsession with freely flowing information: people can just avoid advisors who are documented to be problematic.

As some kind of glue to bind this together, I offer you the plight of HB1 workers. They are tied to their jobs similarly to the way PhD students are tied to their advisors. Yes they could change their jobs, but it's a big hassle and leaves you at the risk of having to leave the country/dropping out of the program. And we also see tons of abuse directed specifically toward these workers, even when others have it good.

So my point is as long as you haven't forcibly bound yourself to a job, you're less likely to receive that kind of abuse. And in the worst case (if you encounter one of many, many shitty bosses), you can just leave for greener pastures.

Based on my experience in grad school, working in industry alongside people that have been through various PhD programs, and working in different domains, I think there are a number of factors at play.

1. Breadth of work experience. People that have worked different jobs in different industries have more perspective and are less likely to be assholes. A career in academia tends to discourage breadth of work experience. The counterpoint are people that have transferred into academia from industry and these people tend to be wonderful to work with.

2. People that are leading research programs are focused on impressing people outside the department in order to acquire research funding and improve their group or school's reputation. They care much less (if at all) about what anyone internal to the department thinks unless that person is above them or critical to their success. This applies to academic programs as well as programs in industry (see point 3).

3. Research programs in industry tend to be shorter-lived than programs in academia, hence people working in industry need to be more flexible and have a broader network of goodwill than academics. Research is not a zero-sum game and if you can help someone with minimal effort that may result in unforeseen rewards many years later.

Almost all of the people I have worked with in both academia and industry I would work with again. I don't think there is a difference in ratio of assholes to non-assholes across academics and industry. The main difference seems to be that people working in academia seem to feel trapped, which certainly intensifies the experience unfortunately.

“Industry” is much larger and diverse than academia. Abuse exists but is usually easier to escape from.

That said, managers embarrassing and ignoring employees could be described as widespread. Not necessarily high in distribution nor intensity, but common enough that engineer culture usually is lukewarm at best regarding pointy hair bosses, sales people, project managers and so on.

Then, Hanlon’s razor to the rescue, that’s mostly out of ignorance than malice.

Perhaps some of the perspectives offered are discounting the role that gender, race, immigration status, national origin play. I have witnessed comparable levels of abuse and discrimination across academia and industry

- woman grad student removed because of pregnancy.

- senior woman in management harassed because posing a threat to male subordinates

- pregnant H1B engineer harassed

a few cases witnessed on the basis of gender.

So the presumption that it is permissible to wield power in this way — that one is entitled to do so without consequence — is pervasive in the society, a function less of the particular setting.

What can be done? People try to find bosses/departments/companies/universities with better protections. People (students, amazon workers, meat packers) sometimes organize and unionize.

You can always find instances of Students/workers/scientists/sharecroppers who resisted. Some more effectively than others.

Does it have to be this way? Are there alternatives to ways that schools and corporations and nonprofits are structured? I hope you can bring some innovative perspectives as you move to the next stage in your career.

Depends on how important you are and if you are aware of your own importance.

A lot of important people also lend themselves to bullying either because they are not aware of their importance or because they have some psychological affinity to exploitation.

But it's definitely less in a competitive job market where you leave one company and find another one same week at a different company.

I think the reason academia can be a famously toxic place to work is tenure.

When people are unfireable and can't change jobs, people who hate each other are forced to work together for decades.

Not entirely different from marriages when divorce is illegal/unthinkable.

Which is one reason I think "employment at will" is a very important concept.

Im American and work in an office (remote during Covid) where Im only one of a few Americans. The rest of my co-workers all came from Indian .. they worked hard, appreciate their job, their job is attached to staying in the US and thus they have to do very good work. Indeed, all of us do so and the best part all without working with entitled cry baby drama (some narcissistic) Americans. There's either a few or more of such who make work more stressful then it ever needs to be cause of their insecurities, entitlement and narcissism. I am so thankful to be working where I do and away from entitled Americans who some take for granted what they have and cause a done of unneeded drama and stress to those around them.

Also, as you get older all people chill out ... dont live in their head/live out their insecurities.

I've always had pretty good supervisors in both academia and the workplace. The worst manager I had was a guy whose only real fault was phoning it in, but he just had a baby and I didn't blame him. No one was abusive.

But I had friends who were in tougher spots. In grad school a friend of mine in the physics department was basically a slave of his advisor, needing to do IT admin work for his advisor that was unrelated to his field of study and constantly doing errands for him. There is a big difference between fields like physics where you are living off of your advisor's grants and math where you are not tied to your advisor financially at all.

In the workplace, I had a friend who had kind of a frumpy annoying manager who didn't appreciate him. But the level of professionalism was much higher than academia.

No .. The situation in academia is terrible and can be far worse than industry. In industry, h1bs and long term interns (a thing in Canada) also face some very real abuse .. but no where is it as prolonged as academia. It is a real shame. This is not just in the advisor advisee relationship .. but also when you submit papers to conferences and journals. As an insider to the reviewing process, I am often nauseated at the arbitrary and unfair nature of it all. I have seen attempts at fixing the reviewing system actually make it worse. Contract teaching and being a TA can also be horrible.

I want to say .. this is not a guarantee that you will be abused. There are many many excellent people (junior, senior, all around). You just need to protect yourself. If you spot abuse, speak up and be prepared to quit. Life is too short.

Ironically, while colleges often promote themselves as institutions of 'higher education' ... IME the fraction of professors who saw themselves as educators was ... markedly less than half.

In my major's department of perhaps 30, there were at best 5 who were willing and enthusiastic teachers. The rest (it was evident) saw their teaching duties as an unfair chore heaped upon their higher aspirations. (Their scorn for the actual educators was palpable.) Besides the chosen few, the best teachers - as always and everywhere I suspect - were my fellow students.

Whatever colleges are, or ever were (the 'Halls of Ivy' were but a dream), they are composed of the same sorts of human beings that are found everywhere in life. Try not to become like the man behind the curtain.

It still exists, but as other replies have said, it’s worse in academia in general.

The reason isn’t specifically to do with academia - it’s because you’ve entered what’s effectively a state of modern indentured servitude.

Your career (and future) is directly dependent on the person you report to, which naturally leads to them abusing that because they’re human and therefore fundamentally horrid.

The same happens all the time with conditional visas like the H1B. Sure, you could push back, but it’ll mean your life as you know it is over, so you won’t.

I wish I had something nicer to say about this, but sadly I don’t, because humans.

It’s why I work for myself now (which I realise is not an option for many). I’ve too many stories of my own about being abused by employers.

My experience, in both domains, is that Academia is the worst system for abuse. It is setup to protect professors and not students. I'm glad in the US that graduate students, in some states, have unionized. Hopefully, this will begin to tip the balance.

I worked in academia and Fortune 500 businesses.

Not usually verbal or emotional abuse because of HR and "hostile work environment." Abuse of effort and credit can happen, but there are ways to deal with it if it is coworkers or managers.

There is more abuse of effort and credit in academia definitely. Undergrads and grad students do the most menial work while PI's and tenured profs get the glory and indirect hire/fire of visiting profs, associates profs, postdocs, and other staff.

Department heads are the royalty who don't have to work day-to-day as much but have to deal with politics of the institution, make sure everyone is publishing prestigiously enough, and raising money.

Being a good manager is a skill like any other, something you have to learn.

In the industry, being someone's line manager and looking after their wellbeing and professional development is often considered a job in itself, and people in that career track get selected, rewarded and promoted on the basis of being a good manager.

In academia, lab leaders are leaders because of their academic qualities, and whether they are good managers is completely secondary. They probably receive very little to no training and aren't evaluated on their management skills. Understandably, they focus on growing as researches, not as managers.

That is why so many supervisors in academia are very bad managers.

Sure it can be that way. Knowledge work tends to be a bit better but you do get death marches. A lot of that is coordinated from higher ups though so your manger might be an insulating force rather than the driving force. In academia you are directly under the advisor for basically everything. You should have a PHd committee and perhaps a dean of students. They can sometimes help but it’ll depend on how transparent the departments are. Clear communications go a long way. Ask for help.

I also think that people forget to ask for help. I certainly never did.

Some faculty are terrible managers too don’t forget that. A good manager is hard to find in general.

Yep. It happens.

Unfortunately not everyone is as lucky to be able to up and quit when these things happen.

* Visa holders are often susceptible to this kind of abuse. Low wages, can't job hop, etc.

* Those who are bound by health care. Being healthy isn't a privilege everyone enjoys.

* Those without safety nets. Not just people who grew up poor that have no place to turn if things get bad. This could be you if you live paycheck to paycheck. If you have to choose between being homeless and an abusive work place, most are going to take the abuse.

For every person that you hear mention that their workplace is great and wonderful, there is somebody else in the workforce who is suffering.

I've seen no abuse at all in industry. Only attentive, genuinely kind management that worked extremely hard and was more than fair.

That's one data point... and work is frustrating for reasons other than abusive managers/supervisors.

One theory for the difference here is that, if you're good at your job, management loves you. You make your manager look good. Conversely, in academia, if you're very smart, you may end up embarrassing your supervisor by scooping them. I imagine incumbent academics are terrified of smart kids coming along and solving "their problem" that they've been working on for years.

I walked away from academia early on and went into working in IT because I felt (after a couple years) the earlier coursework didn't benefit me and wouldn't for some time.

I wonder if part of this process forces out anyone not willing to put up with the environment earlier on. At least in a program where this is the eventual circumstance?

In business it'd largely depend on the environment fostered at the outfit. But if you're allergic to that kind of behaviour you'll have a much easier time (as you assume) seeking different employ. As long as you do something multiple companies will employ you for.

Haven't seen this yet. I was a student, but I never got abused there. However... I was beaten by other kids, and bullied by a teacher before I was 12 or so... I've also bullied and beaten other kids, a long long time ago.

Today with what I experienced, I believe that we're still some kind of animal, and the predator in us reacts to weakness. Situations usually start small, the perpetrator tests the territory, and the victim usually doesn't say anything or is too surprised to set a boundary. At one point it will go to the next step and further escalation goes from there.

In my experience it really depends on the individual people. When doing my master’s I had two supervisors. One I only spoke on other academic matters and the first actually wanted me to do something else. When the time came to grade my thesis the first supervisor named a grade and the second said “I haven’t read your work but I trust him.” That was it.

In the industry so far I have seen managers claiming all credits for the successes of their underlings (Old style manager) as well as very supportive, enabling, and supportive managers.

So I suppose it depends on which supervisor you end up with.

I would say that out of 12 bosses or grandbosses I've had who significantly influenced my job, 8 were actively good, 1 was pretty neutral, and 3 were really bad (and caused me to leave those companies.)

The sample for this question is clearly skewed toward the upper end of the spectrum here on HN.

If you’re going into industry from academia, I’d suggest doing some deep homework on how to work with different corporate cultures. Be aware of the toxic behaviors people display and have documented. Learn email etiquette. Be prepared to make every conversation an email either to just yourself or (for it to really stick) to everyone in the conversation.

Yes, it's just as common. Unless you happen to be able to sell yourself well and are in high demand (for example a personable and somewhat capable programmer), your boss knows he has power over you. It naturally follows they will abuse it, because for some reason that's how a lot of people operate. It's not always conscious, but for the subject that distinction doesn't really matter :)

If you are in social science/humanities, usually students are not paid by professors' grants. Thus professors do not push students. That being said, it'd be very difficult to get good advising if students do not show effort. In natural science/engineering, it's a different story as advisors usually pay phd stipends out of their own funding and thus expect them to be competent RA/TAs.

I have never been that deep into academia and I work at a non-tech Fortune 500 company. I would say that the abuses are somewhat more limited on an individual basis and it’s more of a collective effort of management to abuse their power. Not sure if that’s better or worse. There is no room for different ideas, it’s all kissing the butt of incompetents who are willing to play the game in order to get ahead.

In academia, your thesis advisor has an organizational obligation to training you as a researcher. The advisor's actual obligation is of course to their own career. In industry, your manager doesn't even have an organizational obligation on your behalf. They're working on behalf of the company. In other words, what you saw in academia is a great preparation for things to come.

As somebody with 3+ decades of experience at multiple kinds of orgs as a contractor and an employee I can say with confidence YES!

Especially when they know you are in a jam, such as recessions or family issues.

Dilbert is a comic strip and a documentary. I suggest students read more Dilbert so they are less shocked when they get a real job. Humans are very human. Vulcans would go nuts on Earth.

Not that common, prevalence varies by industry - but most of the time you are reporting to a middle manager. Middle managers have the basic job of keeping their team happy and achieving some goals/quotas on a defined schedule. As long as you are contributing to the latter your supervisors job is to keep you happy.

Micro managers etc tend to get pushed out of tech jobs fast.

That sucks, but none of it of sounds abusive.

Seems to me that professorships are so rare and prized that the academic underpinnings of earning them are being hollowed out of the original idealism. Marketing, perception, reputation, and funding are more important.

Huh, which is the exact same problems the foundations of the entire higher educational system in the US has rotted out from.

No in industry if your boss stays around longer for 2 years he or she is on the shit list. Management moves around constantly to avoid being pinned down by consequences from previous decisions so you are almost alway granted to get a new boss in a few years if you hold out

I have an advanced degree and have been (managed/manager) in industry. Academia is much, much worse:

First, in an industry job, you can almost always quit or transfer, when in academia, your success is tied very tightly to your advisor. There are stories from the old days of people whose advisors died in the late years of their thesis work, causing them to have to abandon their degree or start over.

Second, professors are never trained to be managers, nor are they hired for their management skill. In most departments, the role of chair is mocked and despised, to the point that its often a rotating position - nobody wants to be the boss. Most companies invest significant time in training and coaching their managers.

Third, there is almost no consequence in academia for your students failing. If it’s widespread, you might not get enough work done to continue getting grants, but usually even abused grad students turn out a few papers. It’s not like there’s a customer satisfaction survey or annual performance evaluation for faculty, at least not one that incorporates grad student happiness. Where I work, if your employees are significantly unhappy, you’re not going to be a manager for long.

Finally, I’ve heard an argument that academics is based on a libertarian concept of freedom of thought and action, which is why professors have tenure. For a long time, this translated to there being no rules, even around things like profs dating students - if it’s consensual, who are we to get in the way? Outside of academics, we have agreed that it’s not a good idea to date your employees ...

> I want to understand how common these abuses are in industry.

Man, neglect is far too common. In one company, I only got promotion after I told I was resigning. My manager didn’t care about professional development, he even made false promises multiple times.

My guess is that this kind of behavior is less common in industry. If you receive shitty treatment you can always search for a new job if needed. I would guess that kind of behavior is probably more common in other industries such as movies.

None of what you listed (talking to colleagues about work challenges, not doing your subordinates work for them) constitute abuse. If this is the attitude you bring to the table, then no, you will not have a better experience in industry.

That's the type of discussion/drama that I expect to see in Reddit, not in HN.

If you have a PhD, in industry you'll have the chance to be abused by someone much less educated than you, who might see you as a threat to her/his career and will do anything to clip your wings.

Yep, the unspoken rule of working until the day's task is done & the fact that one has to be grateful that you have a job & are ding overtime without additional pay.

Academia is the dirtiest industry I ever eorked in. Fuck them!

My own PhD advisor was fine, but in my experience it does seem industry is better about this on average. There’s basically no HR in academia.

Some advisors abuse emotionally. But everything is swept under the rug and administrators only care about results and no major complaints.

There is a lot of politics in academia, but it’s mostly between professors, not professors and students.

Frankly I have seen it’s mostly students who abuse the system. There are a lot of goof-offs who are paid by taxpayers and just want to party, have fun and get a degree. This is just my own observation.

Why should a supervisor neglect a student if student is doing an OK job? What’s the motivation here?

I am not saying either side is always at fault. Rather, the person in power should not automatically be blamed.

Most common in the arts (industry as well as acedemia), 2nd most common in academia. In the industry mostly on Asia only.

"what are the people like in this city?" "what are the people like in the city you come from?"

I think selection process in industry is much stricter, so skill mismatch is much less, or even reduced by firing.

Not so much prevalent. Also, one can switch teams / companies, unlike in most academia situations..

What happens to the supervisor if the supervisor ignores the student ? Nothing.

Thats why it happens.

Some of it is encouraged, in a "Darwinian" sense. Yes, it's very common.

I've experienced an abusive boss exactly once in 20 years of industrial experience.

Shitty people do shitty things. Shitty people is everywhere. Identify them and leave.

I’m not sure about academia. I only have a bachelors. But I can tell you right now the primary reason I started my own company was to avoid working under some overpaid product manager type sociopath. If you can find a job without having this type of person control what you do it’s easily worth a 50% pay cut, if not more.

People are shit. Start your own business

There's a whole lot of bootlicking boomers on this post...

Abuse in industry is SHOCKINGLY common, and tolerated, as long as those bad actors can make contributions to a project. Thankfully, many companies are starting to become less and less tolerant of these types of people, and I make it clear when I interview that I have no time or tolerance for workplace bullies or brilliant jerks. I've left jobs because of bullying, and will continue to, because I refuse to be disrespected.

I know this isn't in academia but I had an abusive team lead that projected his own insecurities and personal life problems on me and the team. He would gaslight us and accuse of stuff based on what previous people had done. Also my supervisor was a right wing loon that would allow sexual harassment to take place and participate in it. We would force his political agendas on people. Thank god I got let go for budget reasons.

First off, came here after a fellow grad student directed me to this thread, but had to add a comment after reading all these comments.

I'm please to see that so many have had relatively positive grad school experiences. I am genuinely shocked, in fact. In my program (a life science program), the number of students who have less-than-stellar relationships, many of which verge on an abuse of the power dynamic, is astronomical. But, as pointed out by user @jpm_sd, the life sciences, in particular wet lab researchers, seem to find themselves frequently in this situation.

I could bore you with endless details of what that "abuse of power" looks like, since many have claimed OP is throwing around the term 'abuse' too freely, but from what I have learned about mental health, particularly during the last year, I would say that the following falls into the category of extreme disrespect verging on abuse (and I wish to validate that OP may have experienced this him/herself):

- advisor expecting students to be available for a meeting at any time of day (including calling at 23:00hrs to discuss report/grant/whatever) - advisor playing mind games via a divide-and-conquer strategy with other lab members, including gossiping and spreading 'hear say' stories - advisor with history of misogyny reported to HR, which you are only made aware of when you yourself end up in HR's office - advisor who doles out his responsibilities to graduate students and parades them as "learning opportunities", despite students being overworked and desperate to stay on top of their own research (see list by user @chriskanan - I have done all items save for # 5, 8 and 15 during my grad school tenure) - advisor who demands manuscripts prior to allowing students to write up and defend, but then never reads said manuscripts, sits on them for months to years, and then hands them over to incoming students as a 'easy first publication' upon joining the lab (à la "the student couldn't finish this before they left, so you get to finish it and get your first pub!")

And these are just a few of the many ways in which I have felt used or "abused" by my grad advisor - it is not an exhaustive list.

I have no idea how this happens, certainly I allowed some of these things to go on without addressing them early enough, but as anyone who knows that delicate advisor/student power dynamic, it is not always in your career's interest to take up these issues when you know it will come back to bite you in the form of retaliation.

My department is WELL aware of the toxicity of my advisor, and they have supported me (and other students) extensively... yet they too seem incapable of removing this academic bulldog from the department - and he doesn't even have tenure (not for lack of ability, it's a stipulation of the research institute we're in). Astoundingly, many of the newer professors regularly advise students against joining, but this is often shrugged off as "differences of personality" - certainly, I was warned, and yet here I am.

I hope that with what I have read and learned of industry via networking, I will find myself well-poised to handle what comes my way. It seems that for all the negative experiences I've had the misfortune of having, it has provided the professional growth needed to delicately but firmly address this type of behaviour in the future.

OP: I wish you the best. I am also #PhDone and hope you find some catharsis in this. Head down, chin up, you'll be out soon.

Hell yes.

I'm a neuroscience PhD candidate finishing up my degree and transitioning to gov/'industry' in ~ a month. I've had a great experience with great mentors, but there are MANY problems with the current system (at least in bioscience/medicine).

1. Academia is a feudal system.

To get in, you need a glowing letter from 'Someone Important We Know' from 'Big Name University'. Sure there are some admits with letters from less important people/schools, but if we are being honest, we know that is a big minority (I think this also accounts for the lack of diversity in science, but that is a different topic). To advance in your career (get a postdoc/faculty job), guess what is also the most important thing? 'Glowing Letters From Important People We Know'.

The next most important thing is 'Big Paper From Journal We Know (Cell/Nature/Science (CNS))'. The dirty secret of biomedical science is that getting 'big' papers very often depends on who you work for. Anectdata, but I've seen many garbage papers in CNS, where I can't believe it is in this journal, only to see ohhh it is because 'Big Name Lab at Stanford/Harvard/JHU' with a track record submitted it... I see. Glam journals like glam authors, if you don't believe that you are unusually optimistic or uninformed.

2. There is little or no opportunity to get validate-able credit for any of your work.

The only way you get document-able credit for work is your (maybe 1 or 2) publications and any fellowship/small token grant you managed to get (there are very few). I mentioned this in a comment below, but I have spent months of my life creating data and figures for grant applications (that were won or not), and I practically get 0 credit or recognition for that work. My name is not on the grant, despite me doing virtually ALL of the work for it (ideas and experiments) because I am phd candidate and cannot actually receive the funding from an NIH R01.

The vast majority of my work will go completely un-credited (both inside and outside of academia) unless someone inside academia that I might want to work with happened to see my mentors talk where they gave me a shout-out on a slide.

If I leave academia, I have no 'proof of work' for anything outside my paper and thesis (no one will read it). I can't claim authorship on the very important $500K+ grants that I practically wrote and won myself. Those don't go on my CV/resume, and if they did then people looking could look up the grant and see I am not in fact listed as an author or contact.

So in the end, what is a student or post doc in a bad situation going to do? You can leave after 3/4 years as a PhD student with no savings, and very few marketable skills, and start over in another lab or try to find a non-academic job that values half a phd? It is worse for postdocs, who have 'invested' 10+ years and either have to suck it up to get that letter, or leave with nothing (also no savings).

I think a lot of it boils down to the feudal system of letters+publications = value

[edit] wording

I've never worked in academia so can't offer any comparison, but I can add my industrial experience to the mix in case its helpful.

I've had probably a dozen line managers and a couple of dozen superiors I've had to deal with on a very regular basis over the course of my career (a smidge over 20 years).

Of them only one, who happened to be a line manager, was habitually abusive. Two others were periodically abusive, but in general not (say once or twice per month), and perhaps three more had very occasional snarly moments/blow-ups.

I've worked at, or contracted for, around a dozen companies. Perhaps four of them had a management culture I'd describe as toxic: two explicitly so, two in more underhanded and mendacious ways. Overall if I had to choose between those two evils I'd probably pick the former, although both basically suck. Of the four companies in question in only three of the cases was there any discernible impact on my own happiness and wellbeing. No company has been perfect and all have at times manifested some amount of dysfunction in management and process - I think that's just normal no matter where you work.

Almost everywhere I've worked where there are more than about 30 people some element of politics comes into play. Some people play politics more than others, but it's always there. It's also a natural consequence of getting a group of people working together who all have different ambitions, beliefs and values, interests, and motivations. Not everybody pulls in exactly the same direction all of the time.

Also, if you are ambitious you will always reach a point where you are "held back" for whatever reason. Often that's because there are only so many more senior jobs to go round, and the company only has so much money to pay wages, although you might hear all kinds of other reasons given. If that's a problem (and sometimes it will be, if you're ambitious) my advice to you would be to find a new job. I've made the mistake of staying at the odd place too long before, but don't do this because - depending on your temperament - you may find it hard to avoid becoming bitter and disillusioned. If that happens it will hamper your search for new employment.

Industry pay is probably better than academia but you have to understand that to some extent dysfunctionality and asshole behaviour are part of life. You can (and should) get out of bad situations and move yourself into better situations, but you can never guarantee you won't have to deal with a bad situation again.

Industry is absolutely not homogeneous and a lot of it comes down to who your manager is, and your own preferences and biases. E.g., if you're a "just get stuff done" kind of person you may find working for a giant megacorp kind of aggravating. OTOH if you like things to be orderly you may find the more cowboy/everybody muck in and turn their hand to anything ambience of a smaller growing company (not even necessarily a start-up) to be not entirely to your liking. And of course there's a whole spectrum in between.

Some people say that you'll have more control over creating a great place to work if you start your own company. That's true to some extent. However, when there's a downturn, pandemic, or your business simply doesn't get enough traction to keep going in its current form, you'll find you have to start making hard decisions. That doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but it will mean you'll make decisions that affect other peoples' lives in ways they understandably won't like.

There are no guarantees about the future: the past 12 months should have taught all of us that.

With all of that being said, and whatever you decide, I wish you the best, and urge you to always be seeking work that delivers some amount of joy/satisfaction (it'll never be perfect though!).

Yes.

It’s a diffetent kind of abuse. The concept of climbing the corporate ladder only really exists for executives, not for corporate wage slaves.

As an academic your best career choice is to work your way up in one organization. As an engineer the expected strategy is to hop jobs every 2-4 years.

In (American) business, barring some unions, there is no concept of tenure and it is understood you will be fired the moment you screw up or you will quit once the abuse surpasses your level of tolerance.

Either way, as a worker, expect to be abused by management and peers. As an entrepreneur expect to be abused by creditors, vendors and investors.

The only way to avoid the abuse is to be born wealthy and not work.

Are you are unhappy because of your school debt loans?