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by rprospero 4461 days ago
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.
1 comments
bigd 4461 days ago
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)
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