I would agree - what's interesting to me is that taking Parler off the mainstream platforms like Google and Apple app stores though will probably only contribute to the radicalization of its content.
Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.
That's basically the core of managing without authority. If you want people to do something but they don't report to you, then it has to seem like a great idea that will benefit them. All the better if they think it was originally their idea and get to claim the credit.
I think a point of tension for grad students is that many don't realize a PhD program is more so a job than it is another part of your education. Your advisor is generally paying for you with their hard earned grant money and relies on your results for their own success. In typical 9-5 job terms, the advisor is the manager and the PhD students are the individual contributors.
It's a harsh realization that many grad students come to, but unless your grad student is getting some level of results then the advisor will feel his/her grant money isn't going to good use. It's essentially the same thought process a manager goes through when they feel they are paying somebody a salary but that person is not contributing.
This is why independence is so critical and one of the most important traits of a grad student. Time spent telling a student exactly what to do, again, is not always a resource well spent.
Anyways, this is just my perspective on things based on conversations with a couple of my immediate family members who are professors. I went into the normal job market after getting my bachelor's, and I see a lot of parallels between the world of academia and the rest of us. There are different titles and the work is different, but much of the structure and politics are the same.
Nooo :-)
If you find yourself in a PhD program with an advisor who thinks like the above, it's really important to not internalize their viewpoint.
It's not a job. A job would pay much better!
It's not your advisors money, and they aren't paying you to advance their career.
Independence is critical, but so that you can avoid becoming someone else's cheap labor, and can instead focus on doing work that educates you and moves you forward.
(Thankfully I had a great advisor, but many try and just take advantage of the power imbalance to exploit students).
Hard disagree. I made every possible mistake that can be made related to being too idealistic about grad school; for example, I believed:
- My advisor and collaborators have my best interests at heart
- My primary role in graduate school is to develop novel, useful, reproducible ideas
- Grants, fellowships, and stipends are generous donations freely given in order to enable the above
- Quality is more important than quantity
These kinds of sentiments caused more damage to my career than any other mistakes I have made (fortunately, I survived...so far). When someone gives you money, they definitely expect something in return, even if that something is not always clearly stated, and that something is almost always related to the donor's own career advancement.
There are PIs who absolutely prey on this kind of idealism. They can find certain kinds of idealistic students, use them up, and discard them. Graduate students should be told from day one that they need to look out for their own interests, because no one else will. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are just that.
The best that can be reasonably hoped for from an advisor-advisee relationship is a clear understanding that it is a mutually beneficial transaction with bidirectional expectations. It makes me uncomfortable that the OP document obscures this fact.
I think your perspective is very pragmatic and reasonable. However, I think it still highlights only the _worst_ kinds of advisers, and if we're talking about looking out for your own self interests, then picking a good adviser is your highest priority.
There are two kinds of advisers I think are missing in your analysis. First, are the idealists, the probably newly minted professors who view there students fondly and their mentorship responsibilities very seriously. These are bad for you too, because you need to be pushed to obtain results on occasion, you can't always have someone who is feeling guilty about their own efforts and not being straight with you about your weakness.
Second, is, in my opinion, the ideal adviser. One who views the relationship as an apprenticeship more so then a manager/employee or mentor/mentee. An apprentice has to learn the craft, but they're still producing work for the artisan (adviser). If the student fucks something up they need to be told, because learning the craft is the highest priority.
The "manager" type of adviser is in my opinion the worst. A good manager is only a useful adviser if a PhD is otherwise a waste of time for you anyway (because you already can do research). Moreover, most manager-types are bad at being managers as well, compounding the horrible situation.
To avoid giving the impression that I had a horrible advisor who twisted me into cynicism, I should say:
My advisor was definitely one of the "idealists". I was his first graduate student. He always treated me well, with respect and reasonable expectations, and we are friends to this day. He did have some of the weaknesses you mention. He looked out for me as well as could reasonably be expected, but he did occasionally throw me to the wolves if the stakes were high enough -- for example, if we had a collaborator who was giving us substantial money, and they asked me to do the impossible or the unreasonable, he'd tell me to grin and bear it, and do my best, rather than informing the collaborator about reality.
In short, he was way above average, but still, his interests and mine occasionally came into conflict. But it can get so much worse -- I have seen numerous graduate students and postdocs absolutely exploited (department chairs and big shots are the most frequent offenders), and the most vulnerable targets were always those who assumed that we are all but brothers-in-arms in the great Scientific Enterprise.
What I mean to say is that even if a grad student lucks into or intelligently selects a good advisor, idealism is still a problem because as your collaborations and career expand, the probability approaches 1 that you will run into someone who will absolutely exploit you if given the chance. Someone who has enough leverage on an otherwise good advisor can also exploit a student by proxy. Students should be prepared for this inevitability.
In my view, when we read a document like the OP, what we are mainly getting is a window into how a PI likes to view himself -- i.e., the benevolent master lovingly and altruistically shepherding his apprentices into independence -- rather than any relevant form of reality. I'm sure OP came by this delusion honestly, but one of the primary qualifications to become a PI is the ability to spin, and no one is easier to spin than oneself.
I definitely think there is a grain of truth to everything you've said, but I do have to comment that the diction used is a bit dramatic.
For instance, I 100% agree that the posted document is how the PI views himself, without question. I also agree that this probably doesn't perfectly reflect reality.
But, at the same time, I think this is more just a human problem, not a PI specific problem. Moreover, I think a lot can still be gained from such a document, especially when the document is made public. It lets you point out inconsistencies and in the worst case share a negative experience with evidence to back it up.
> I do have to comment that the diction used is a bit dramatic.
Fair. I wouldn't use this kind of language when talking to colleagues in person, for sure. In fact, I wouldn't address the subject at all.
> But, at the same time, I think this is more just a human problem, not a PI specific problem. Moreover, I think a lot can still be gained from such a document...
Absolutely. I think the OP has good intentions and believes what he writes. But I wanted to warn prospective grad students not to take this kind of thing completely at face value.
I wasn't advocating being naive about conflicts of interest.
But the solution to a conflict of interest is not to internalize your advisor's point of view!
So don't think of them as your manager, in some traditional sense.
Think of them as your mentor, not your boss. Most of the time it's hard for them to fire you. Think long term, don't be tricked into optimizing their need for a stream of low quality papers to inflate their indices, or whatever pathology they may be pursuing.
I had a great advisor who didn't do any of this. But if my advisor was just trying to exploit me, and I had no way to effectively ignore it, it would substantially decrease the value of doing a phd, to the point where I'm not sure id recommend it in terms of expected value.
>What are they paying you for, then?
They aren't paying you. It's whatever body awarded the Grant's money. And they probably didn't set out to increase your advisors hindex.
I think treating it as a job where 75% of the salary is experience is probably the right attitude. FWIW I worked with a lot of grad students and anecdotally saw the best outcomes from people who within 2-3 months of showing up knew exactly what they wanted to do, were in the lab 10-8 to do it, graduated in 4-5 years and immediately got top-tier jobs.
I knew people who spent (7, 8, 9, 10, 11) years as a PhD student and they sure didn't seem happy or end up particularly good places...
One of my managers during an internship in college was blind. I actually had no idea he was blind until I met him in person; this includes being interviewed by him remotely and have discussions about code I was writing in real time. I was completely shocked.
This was at a very large corporation, and he had been blind throughout his long career there. I believe the primary tools he used were JAWS and a device that would actually generate braille for text on screen. This was pretty incredible to me, as he would do most of his reading via this braille device.
I don't think you will be limited to a certain portion of the stack. In some ways, it may open up certain opportunities like working more on the Accessbility features for front-ends, which is a critical part of a front-end but often overlooked.
Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.