[throwaway_woxx7]

To give an example of what you discuss:

My career has been seriously hampered by quitting a particular project early in my PhD. That project was intractable as far as I'm concerned. My PhD supervisor never treated me the same after quitting that project. I had to get advice from a third-party in my department to get my PhD supervisor to agree to let me graduate. My PhD supervisor refuses to provide me a reference now.

I wasn't able to get a research job immediately after my PhD, and worked as an underpaid bureaucrat (not doing research) for about 2 years before starting my current government contractor research position. My job security is comparable to that of a postdoc and I have worse benefits than most postdocs, but I am paid better.

I recently applied to a job at a national lab, and I could tell that the interviewer was alarmed when I said that my PhD supervisor refuses to provide me a reference.

The important difference between academia/research and non-research industry is that while saying no can jeopardize your current job in both cases, in academia/research saying no is far more likely to jeopardize your future jobs due to the heavy reliance on detailed reference checks.

[leeoniya]

academia sounds systemically toxic.

publish or perish, lifelong grudges from irreplaceable never-wrong superiors looking to further their own Erdős numbers.

unpaid peer reviews that then become paywalled. rent-seeking from public libraries / community colleges via bundling.

data "science" aimed at producing a predefined conclusion. e.g. corporate research grants. p-hacking, dismissal/omission of inconvenient results that dont fit a narrative.

the adage "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" is simply not a thing that can happen without risking your entire carreer.

[throwaway_woxx7]

From my PhD supervisor's perspective, he holds no grudges against me. He's simply believes that I'm unreliable. (Or something like that. He never clearly told me what his problem with me was.) I freely admit that I've made mistakes. Frankly, quitting my first PhD project was hard on me and I wasn't productive for a while after that. But I did eventually improve and he never noticed! He seemed to ignore anything good I did and focus on the (inevitable) things that didn't work.

In retrospect, it would have been better for me to switch PhD supervisors or quit academia entirely.

The problem is with the structure of academia in my view. Disagreements are inevitable, but don't make someone unemployable because of them.

[trogdor]

>He's simply believes that I'm unreliable. (Or something like that. He never clearly told me what his problem with me was.)

Have you asked him?

[throwaway_woxx7]

The last time I spoke to him, I stated something along the lines of "I know that you have some problems with me". My goal was to see what could be done to reconcile with him. He explicitly denied having any problems with me. I was applying for jobs at the time and needed references from him, and after this conversation he stopped replying to those requests. His behavior doesn't make sense if he really doesn't have any problems with me.

[bell-cot]

's/sounds/is/', all too often. Sociologically, it's very much a medieval feudal system, with all the benefits and horrors that that implies.