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

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

I think it's as much dependent on PI as on discipline. I know a young resercher whohad a terrible time at a Russell Group uni in a particular interdisciplinary research centre (but she and the PI were from computing) and she left well before the end of the contract due to his appalling approach to the workplace. This included the expectation, expressed months in advance, that they would all be working 12-14 hour days in the last week before the CHI conference deadline (I think it was CHI, perhaps WebSci). The PI was a 70+ hour week worker and expected his researchers tobe doing the same while also being abrasive and insulting ratherthan helpful and supportive.
Luckily, she's found a job in an academic-related research centre, and is doing well, though I worry that she's going to find it difficult both internally and externally if shewants to move back into the main stream of academia. Her new place, working on quite similar things, not only does not expect silly hours, but has an anti-long-hours culture. The head of the group makes sure people are taking holiday when they say they're taking holiday, and tells them off gently for answering ordinary work emails when they should be off.

[purplecat]

The more I think about this the more I think it must be PI related. With a good PI a lot of the downsides of being a postdoc are basically negligible, but with a bad PI they become a total trap and I can think of at least one strong researcher who left academia entirely because of a PI who appeared to consider themselves to be in competition with their own postdocs.

My mother and I were discussing only this weekend the importance of patronage in both academia (and in medicine where she worked) and noting, in particular, how most of the successful women in both areas were lucky to have had a good patron/mentor at a critical moment. It almost certainly applies to men too, but since the statistics show that women are less likely to get mentoring than men the effect is probably amplified in their cases.