You're reading one of the top pains on Hugging Face Hub — a free sample of the catalog. Create a free account to browse all Shopify & Atlassian pains and the basic Chrome catalog.
ML PhD students struggle under hands-off advisors with no technical guidance
.61
Demand — how loud & how many (score)
Willing to payNo signal
Momentum (7d)▼ 0.5%
Cluster11 posts · 11 people
MarketplaceHugging Face Hub
Updated19d ago
The story
The pain
We chose advisors who gave us freedom, but we ended up wasting months on dead ends and bad ideas that an expert could have caught in minutes. Without someone to validate our research direction, we produce little to no publishable work and feel isolated and stressed. A hands-off advisor who never reads our work or provides technical feedback makes the PhD process excruciatingly slow and often fruitless.
Evidence
What people said · 11 complaints, 11 people
I have spent days trying to find a simple answer for something where the time spent did not make me a better researcher. I wish I had someone who was more readily available to talk about ideas, answer questions etc and catch quick mistakes that would save hours of work.
There were many pitfalls I fell into like "others did it" or dead ends, that experts of the field would've warned me about before I waste months doing.
My advisor is a legend in the field, but was entirely hands off in my phd work. However, anytime I submitted progress towards him, he would tear it up and tell me whats wrong, but never had time to help me get towards a better track, so things were excruciatingly slow
4 years later and my PhD has been a bit of a mess, no clear direction, my advisor barely knows what I've done, and the whole process has been so much more stressful than what it could have been with some guidance.
Export the pain — problem, evidence and market signals — as Markdown, PDF or JSON. The Markdown export ships with a built-in briefing you can hand straight to a developer or an AI agent.