[jknoepfler]

This reads like someone complaining about the time requirements to be a member of a top athletic club or top kitchen or top theatre or any other highly demanding discipline.

The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them.

If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and future intact. But don't pretend someone was wronging you by asking you to sacrifice.

[pjlegato]

It is indeed partially true that doing high level work simply requires extended hours and unusual dedication to achieve anything. However, that is not what is primarily at work here.

The main factor is a sort of culturally normative and ingrained rite of passage / hazing ritual / bullying / dominance effect, which primarily serves to inflate the boss professor's ego at the expense of the grad students. Getting a PhD was difficult and grueling for the professor, so they are damn sure going to make sure it's difficult and grueling for their own students.

The only way they themselves got through it was internalizing the attitude that a grueling work and study schedule is simply normal and simply the price of success.

This exercise of extreme and essentially arbitrary power over how the students live their lives, far beyond what any normal job could remotely require, is very gratifying to many professors. They've worked so hard, suffered themselves, and now THEY have this absurd power over others.. It makes them feel important and powerful at a very primal level to tell their students they have to live under these extraordinary conditions, and then see them obey.

They can literally choose whose career will live and whose will die, whose dreams will happen and whose will be broken and swept away without a thought.

To fix this, the professors need to have a lot less arbitrary power over their students. There needs to be another route to a PhD besides enduring poverty and years of ritual self-humiliation and long form ass-kissing. Only then will the culture shift, as the "grind mode" professors are replaced by new professors who didn't have to grind.

[quickben]

Isn't labour law supposed to prevent abuses like this? I mean, I see your point, but the guy that wrote that letter had some characteristics of a textbook psychopath.

We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee.

So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.

[superuser2]

>top theatre

It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.

The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.

Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.

At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.

There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.

The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.

[projektir]

Top clubs where people one up each other are fine for useless activities. They are decidedly not fine for science, which is extremely important to humanity as a whole.

[also, people in athletics are not this dumb and figured out that you do not want to train 24/7 because that's not how the body works. That's not how the brain works, either, trust me]

This has nothing to do with discipline. I guarantee that this is hilariously inefficient, scares off all the good potential scientists because they actually have a shred of self-respect, and is probably contributing to a lot of social and mental problems in the country as a whole. The "work until you die" rhetoric has always been moralistic, not scientific.

This, this right here, is the only explanation anyone should need for perceived lack of scientific progress. How can anything useful at all grow in an environment like this? It's a miracle when it does.

[Noseshine]

The letter wasn't about results, it was merely about "being there". Similar to programmers being judged for sitting in front of the computer x hours per day instead of on their work. There was not even the slightest hint that the focus of the person writing the letter was the actual result of the work.

[x0x0]

And you can see a letter further down the page from Paul Glassman and Albert Meyers that is much more in that vein. They mention 60 hours and list things that students are expected to do, learn, and keep abreast of. They also mention that if the students perform well, they will do their best to aid them both in learning and in getting a desired job. It reads very differently than the letter by Carreira. Particularly in Glassman and Meyers focus on results that require lots of hard work, whereas Carreira focuses on having his poor employees' asses in the lab all hours of the day...