[jkimmel]

I'm currently considering graduate school, and have unfortunately read too many stories quite like this.

Do you have an idea of how prevalent this kind of micromanagement is for peers in your cohort? Do you just have a particularly unreasonable PI?

[bigd]

Our PI is renewed for being one of the worst in the planet, but he's also a really famous one. (average is 1 science + 1 nature / year)

Is hard to find someone this bad, but the worst part was not the micromanagement. That is pretty common. It was the constant lack of appreciation, being blackmailed over the visas, his holding papers hostage for years until your loyalty was proven. A colleague has been there for 4 years of post-doc, and has 0 papers published, 6 ready to go on his desk. And the first one is from 3 years ago.

I can go on all day over this.

I resigned yesterday at the second post-doc.

[jerf]

"Our PI is renewed for being one of the worst in the planet, but he's also a really famous one. (average is 1 science + 1 nature / year)"

The system may have helped create him, because I'd bet those two things are very connected. If the path to being published is via working other people nearly unto death, well, our history shows that there are enough people who don't have a problem that you need to rely on something other than their conscience to stop that from happening.

[coldtea]

His name? It would be fair enough to warn people about the guy.

[bigd]

I hope you will understand if I don't tell his name.

My wife is still in the lab. And she's already facing enough shit, + the retaliations because I've betrayed the PI by leaving. We don't need any legal crap added to the mix.

However, I can tell you that there are many investigations ongoing, ranging from sexual to misconduct to stealing research money, and that he's in hiring freeze since few months.

There's a chance he will be fired. The university seems, for once, on our side. Then, it will be my pleasure to tell the world all the details.

[angersock]

Sunlight is the best antiseptic.

Good luck to you and your wife!

[rprospero]

Well, everyone will probably experience this kind of micromanagement once in their grad school career, but you won't see it the whole time unless you have a truly bad advisor. Some of it just comes from forcing the grad students to work hard for a while so that you learn to work smart. A first year grad student will spend forty hours a week in the lab, pressing a button every ten minutes and recording count rates into a notebook. She'll get chewed out by her advisor for not spending enough time on research. She'll turn into a third year student who spends eight hours a week in the lab, pressing a button and recording count rates into a notebook. By the time she's a fifth year, she'll have made a little machine to press the buttons and OCR the count rates for her. That machine will run constantly while the grad student spends just forty hours a week in the lab doing practical research.

The usual attitude I've seen is: I don't care how much or how little time you spend in the lab, as long as you get the job done on time. Granted, "the job" may be winding twenty solenoids, each of which takes eight hours to wind, and "on time", may be seven days from now. Similarly, your advisor probably won't care if you take weekends off, but the calculation he asked you about at six on Friday still needs to be done monday morning. When you do it is your business.

[bigd]

I agree 100%. Our group is a very shitty case. Probably I've just bad luck, but is hard to believe:

In my former group there was no micromanagement, nor all this crap. There was however a shitty situation too where the bully was the golden-boy. That was the place where this happened:

    A, B, C write paper, submit to his pal D.
    D appoints E,F,G as reviewers.
    C, and E were in school together.
    F was a C student.
    G sends the paper back to C to auto-review it. 
    C cannot be bothered, so delegates the review back to A.
    A reviews his first name paper.

(sorry, I'm without shame self-quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329496)

[probably_wrong]

I'd like to point out that my experience with european PhD advisers (I had two, one trained in France and my current one is German) has been completely opposite to this: I'm allowed to set my own hours, I'm actually encouraged to go to the gym, and while I am expected to work a bit harder when deadlines are near, this extra effort stops the very second the deadline has passed. I also get around 20 working days of vacation.

I don't know if it's either a different culture or if only we get to read about the bad experiences and never about the good ones - I read many stories like this one, but I've never heard it from a first-person perspective. In either case, there are places where you are treated decently as a grad student.

[Thriptic]

I can only speak for my lab (an established bioengineering lab) and from what I have seen at a few others, but this strikes me as being atypical. I think there is an assumption that you will work a minimum of 50-60 hours per week in lab (at least in bio) if you want to be successful, but when and if you choose to log those hours is up to you at least in my lab.