And bad salaries. And publish or die. And and and
I know HR is a social joke and has been for a very long time…
But I really think a big problem is we made the people who decide who gets hired, fired, and prompted be some of the dumbest fucking people in a company.
Especially since once someone is HR, they tend to be HR at any company they work at. Like how CEOs are disconnected from everyone else.
One of the positive aspects about a career in science is that HR essentially has no role in hiring decisions. The hiring is done mostly by professors, who are usually highly competent in their field.
This article is about some professors (and other supervisors) being toxic. The world of science is extremely cutthroat and competitive (much more so than the world of business), and the kind of people who survive in it long-term tend to be extreme workaholics. I was personally lucky with my supervisors during my time in science, but some of them can put a lot of pressure on grad students and postdocs and expect them to be the no-lifers that they themselves usually also are.
The hiring is done mostly by professors, who are usually highly competent in their field.
But being competent in your field doesn’t make you a good manager or leader. The problem is that you have valuable technical experts with poor leadership abilities put into power. If there is an HR problem, the institution is usually incentivized to defend the expert and their atrocious behavior over junior staff.
And it doesn’t end up being a problem for academia if researchers leave the toxic workplace because spots are desirable and there isn’t an issue replacing those who leave.
But being competent in your field doesn’t make you a good manager or leader.
Except it kind of does. Surviving in academia requires being able to sell yourself well, and to be able to network and set up collaborations with other groups. Stereotypes and some exceptions notwithstanding, professors usually have good social and management skills.
Yeah…
But those professors who get to hire their own assistants are themselves hired by HR.
You might need a PHD to head a department, but it’s not like all the professors go to the library and the school president watches for smoke.
Well, the hiring process for professors varies by university, but usually other professors and the dean or similar role (typically also someone with an academic background) play important roles.
HR has no involvement in the process at my Uni besides paperwork. There’s only like 5 of them, they don’t have time to interview every candidate.