[tptacek]

This is the understandable part of researcher and grad student abuse and the sense I get talking to people is that they do indeed enter the field expecting to duck in on weekends to tend to experiments, and expecting not to be well compensated.

The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they can't be productive.

The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues, and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his line cooks and stages.

[jamesash]

Two most extreme stories I am most familiar with (did not experience first-hand) were of a PI throwing a chair in the direction of a postdoc, and of a PI having a screaming fit directly in the face of a graduate student. Both assistant profs.

One got tenure and became more mellow in a relative sense. The other was subsequently unable to attract any more graduate students to their lab, and left for another, slightly less prestigious institution.

I am also familiar with one case of graduate students resigning en masse, leaving a PI with a hollowed-out research group of 2-3 that they had to rebuild. Prof had a subsequent attitude adjustment.

In all these cases the stories spread pretty quickly and profs realized that there were costs to abusive behavior. These stories pre-date social media BTW.