[cycomanic]

As a professor (well associate professor actually), I can second pretty much everything you have said.

One additional thing I want to mention is, that the job of the supervisor is not only to guide the student to the PhD (i.e. the mentor role), but also to ensure that the student actually has done sufficient work to earn the PhD (the role of a gatekeeper). Which can lead to the situation, that the student thinks they should be graduating now, but the supervisor is still asking for more work. Now there are some supervisors that are abusing the gatekeeper role. Furthermore even for supervisors that are not consciously abusing the role there is also a conflict of interest, because it is in the supervisors interest to keep successful students as long as possible. So this is difficult to manage.

[chriskanan]

Agreed.

I think of my PhD students as my primary "product" I am creating as a professor. Not to say I don't think that teaching is valuable, but I'm by far proudest of my PhD students who graduate and go on to have fantastic careers. That said, I'm proud, but also sad, and worried because once they become good they leave. I let them depart once they have met our agreed upon goals, which are pretty much the bare minimum for being competitive for research-oriented jobs in industry (not "just a coder," but designing and doing independent research).