And thank you as well for linking to this post!

First off, no hard feelings about any misrepresenting of my post! What you quote is exactly the sentiment I was writing about and is as good a starting point for a discussion as any. I just wanted to make my point clearer in case there were any misunderstandings.

What you quote me saying *is* a common complaint from grad students and post docs and one I have heard plenty of times (and made myself just as often). I wrote my post as a comment to some other blog posts discussing this, and I felt I was in a unique position to comment on research life from both a postdoc and PI point of view, as I am just in the middle of the transition between the two positions.

I won’t go into the details of that discussion — I think I’ve done that in my original post.

As for your own post, which I loved reading and found a very positive comment on the rest of the discussion, I think there *is* a bit of a bias in your points.

You could be very lucky with your PI. There are a lot of great supervisors out there, and I have met plenty of people who loved their post doc work and never complains about it, and if you end up one of those, then you are very lucky indeed.

From my experience, though, you are less likely to be that lucky than you are likely to end up complaining about it all. If I had to make a bet, I would bet that you will end up complaining. You can make a simple test of this by asking around in your group, or just listen to your colleagues when they bitch about work at the pub.

When work is going well, no one complaints, but research is all about trying something new, and new stuff rarely works. If your experiments work out 10% of the time, you are very lucky. So you cannot judge research life by how it is when things are going well, you have to consider the days when nothing works, all experiments fail, and you are just fed up with everything.

In those situations, how much support will you get, and will you feel that it is enough?

You will be stressed. You will be depressed. You will look for excuses for your failures, and it is just so much easier to blame someone else than yourself. This is just human nature, and there is nothing wrong with it. Go to the pub and complain about your supervisor to your friends, and you will feel better.

I think this situation explains 90% of the cases where people complain about their supervisor.

A few days later, when things are working out better in your research, ask yourself: “do I really feel that way, or was I just venting my frustrations?” If you decide on the later, you are fine.

From the PI point of view, now, I’ll confess that if he is anything like myself, he will feel the disappointments, the stress, and the depression as well from time to time.

Why did the post doc make such stupid mistakes that were easy to recognize and just as easy to avoid? If only I had smarter post docs, our group would do a lot better, we would publish more, and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time helping them out while I am busy with this grant application…

A few days later, he will think about it a bit and conclude that it is a pretty good group, doing great work, and he couldn’t really wish for a better bunch.

Research life is just stressful, and we end up in situations like this all the time. It is also a great way to spend your life, ’cause the rewards more than make up for it! When you discover something new, you are high on it for days.

Anyway, to cut a comment — that is already way too long — short: We spend a lot of time in our work under pressure and we do not necessarily appreciate that so do all of our colleagues. The stress is caused by different aspects of the academic life (figuring out the details of a complicated problem for a post doc vs. having to run a group and make sure that the group is funded next year as well), but we are all stressed and we complain about it.

If you feel bad about your work all the time and if you start hating (I mean really *hating*) your PI, then something is wrong and your need to fix it. This happens — I can tell you stories, but I won’t in public — but it is rare. Very rare compared to the usual bitching, at least.

Expect the honeymoon to end some day and expect to be disappointed with your PI, but don’t worry about it. When you leave the lab and move on, you will look back on it all a few years later and mostly remember the good times.

That’s how it’s been for me, and I have done my share of bitching…

I think there is some truth to what you have quoted me saying here, I really do, but it is exaggerated. What you write about mentor styles, I completely agree with, and is not far from what I tried to say in my own post.

Thing is, I’ve heard (and done) a lot of bitching about the PI during my PhD studies and my postdocs, and that is what I was quoting in the first paragraph, but now that I am moving unto the PI life instead, I am getting a different perspective and I was trying to represent both views in my post (while I still remember the postdoc POV).