I read several misleading statements in this forum about the roles of boss/
lab PI which simply state the PI as “taking all the credit without
responsibility” and “slave driving” etc. I agree some of PI may be pretty
bad and you are a wrong person in a wrong place. But you have to remember
that you are a trainee, you may know nothing about this area of research or
you may think that you are already a superstar. Nevertheless, you have not
shown it yet, right?
I don’t think that I will need to tell what a PI’s responsibility is and
you should be able to find this out yourselves. If you cannot find this in
the end of your second or third years of postdoc. or in the end of your
graduate student training in this country, and you still think that the PI
is “taking all the credit without responsibility”, you are done! I can
almost predict that your chance to become an independent investigator is
slim.
In my training time, I never looked things this way. I always appreciate
what I learned from the bosses and they trained me to become an independent
investigator. Obviously I cannot agree with everything they did to me and I
even got into fight with them sometimes. Well, nothing is perfect, and they
are the human too, right? If you think that a PI can “take all the credit
without responsibility”, you are dead wrong and you have not learn anything
. About “cheap labor” statement, why you are so concern about a couple of
thousand dollars difference? If you are a capable person, you should move up
quickly and get a lot more than that.
Now please ask yourself, are you really interested in doing this job, which
is not going to be highly paid anyway, even you finally become a PI? If the
answer is “NO”, do not complain but spend a lot of time finding different
job!
Sorry for big rush and typos.
