The Plight of the Lowly Postdoc

[purplecat]

I read stuff like this and wonder if my situation is just highly discipline dependent, or I'm somehow oblivious to all the pressure. It's unlikely to be department dependent since I've worked as a postdoc in three high-ranking CS departments now.

The comments on the article suggest that it describes a situation that is particularly acute in lab-based science but I tend to be suspicious of comments below the line (not here, obviously, where you are all lovely, intelligent and rational people (fingers crossed that that is not a "summon troll" spell)).

Comments

[purplecat]

I wonder if it's even unreasonable bosses. I mean I've had emails from my boss at 5am but only because he happened to be up and was thinking of it. He almost certainly wasn't expecting a reply or expecting me to jump to doing something.

I've also had emails at unreasonable times where people were expecting actions but I'm fairly sure they've all contained phrases like "emergency" and "I'm terribly sorry" and "do you think you can find the time" and I've felt that people appreciated the fact that the time got put in. I've never felt in a situation where it was "work the weekend or never work again in this field".

I wonder if some people find it hard to distinguish between "urgent and important" and "boss can't sleep and is handling his email backlog".

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes and yes.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

... and with this.