> I'm interested if people have any horror stories of their own to share about abusive PIs
Things I have experienced first hand, either myself or graduate students:
* A male PI that hires attractive graduate students and gives them easy tasks to land Nature, Science or Cell co-authorships and at the same time tries to land sexual favors from them.
* A female PI that only hires female graduate students and is incredibly aggressive towards male students from other groups, trying to undermine their research.
* A junior faculty member who progressively asked some students to do more and more unreasonable tasks in a particular project so that they eventually refused. Got them removed them from the project clearly in order to get a better position for himself in the publication and to include some of his friends. All this close to submission.
* A group of junior faculty members who plotted to change first authors days before submission, without communicating with the downgraded authors. Needless to say, they upgraded themselves to first authors, without having contributed anything.
* Written threats to misrepresent research results.
I successfully kicked out a professor from academia who was a bully and was harassing many other people. But this costed me several years of my career and was extremely tough to do. Ironically, I eventually ended up in a worse place. Some things I have learned in the process:
* Bullying is much more common in experimental fields. From what I've seen, bullies are enriched in the population of >50 years old professor (male or female) who attracts tons of funding and publishes several articles per month. Publishing so often is, in general, a red flag.
* When joining a group, try to talk to graduate students and postdocs. People stopped joining our group because they knew it was led by a bully. In general, most students will be extremely honest about bad working conditions.
* Before joining, try to test drive the group in some way. For example, with a small rotation project. Usually, being an insider even during a short period will reveal all nasty stuff. We had many rotation project students and none of them stayed.
* A good heuristic is to join small groups where the leader, young or old, has skin in the game. Usually, younger PIs in small groups have more skin in the game and they tend to be nicer.
* Another good heuristic is to join groups where people regularly progress to other positions in academia.
They don't try to get rid of mutability / side effects, just to isolate them.
See [1] where the author thinks that "In short, Haskell is the world’s finest imperative programming language".
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...