Recently, I've witnessed some senior academics mock PhDs & postdocs for choosing industry. Apart from the utterly baseless points raised (hours are flexible in many data science jobs, workloads are often similar, etc.) — it's completely out of order in general. I see you.
Well, my lab has a part-time PhD student who works full-time at a data science company. So you might indeed be right and I'm in a lucky bubble, hence why the OP with so shocking to see.
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The weird insecurities of academics very rarely surprise me these days. Although with this there may also be fEC/funding related politics in play.
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What surprised me was not the views per se, but the fact they thought it was appropriate to express them in the context of a another person leaving for industry. The person who was leaving was not their employee/student.
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To me, that behaviour is an (unpleasant) side effect of the style of academic discourse where people state strong opinions looking to get a 'debate' started. I feel I am quite guilty of that sometimes although I do increasingly try to be more sensitive.
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TBF in the literature that gets you a good cite ping-pong game going. So perhaps it's perfectly adaptive. Just, like you say, it is not always interpersonally appropriate.
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Oh, it is totally a "good" strategy as it also gets you noticed - meetings, debates etc. It also closes off a lot of useful dialogue unless you are very careful.
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I don't tend to do it. But I do often have strong opinions. I think the trick is to have strong (if you do) opinions but not express them as absolutes (because they aren't usually). Being a woman also factors in to weighting others' understanding of how strong my views are too.
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I can say the same thing as another person and yet it won't be perceived as strongly as e.g., a male PI saying it. Notwithstanding, some people do tell me I'm scary, but I tend to think that's a compliment.

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I think what could be termed 'privilege blindness' is a massive issue. Some awareness of the asymmetry of situations needs to be made.
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