etiquette - What to do when expecting a negative recommendation letter?

I'm a postdoc having a difficult relationship with my adviser. Rather unexpectedly, he started literally bombarding me with all sorts of mostly unjustified accusations, including that I'm not productive enough and all sorts of personality-related complaints. I'm in the process of applying to a new postdoc. Will have the first interview in 1.5 days. Given the present situation, I don't expect a good recommendation letter from my adviser. However, I have already listed him among my recommendations.

What should I do?

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  A. Not say anything about the relationship with my present adviser during the interview.

  
  


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  B. Be upfront and mention that I have a poor relationship with my adviser and can provide more details if needed.

  
  

I'm quite confident I'm treated unfairly and can explain the situation to my advantage.

I talked to two professors whom I trust, and both of them suggested I should not say anything about this in the first interview. One of them thinks that I might get a good LOR after all; this is his justification. I would prefer not to rely on this. Thus, I don't know what is the best option. I will get another, strong recommendation letter from a very reputable professor who helped me in the past.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is a follow-up to my previous question.

Answer

A bad review from your present advisor will probably hurt you significantly. However, I think you will do more damage if you try to discredit your advisor's reference ahead of time: you risk sounding like a poor employee, particularly if your advisor is respected in your field.

Instead, I would prepare evidence to counter a possible negative recommendation. If you expect your advisor may critique your productivity, emphasize work you have completed in your interview. Unfortunately, if you have failed to publish your work in your current position, that may be difficult to prove, and the responsibility for that is not only on your advisor but on you as well.

If you anticipate critiques of your work ethic, how well you play with others, etc, and your other reference has not yet submitted a letter, you could ask them to specifically highlight those qualities. If they already submitted a letter, hopefully they already addressed these issues.

I would be careful about how you describe your relationship with your current advisor in the interview: keep the high ground, and don't make judgments of value. If you produced one good publication where your current advisor expected two, don't say "Bob had ridiculous expectations for my productivity" - instead, try something closer to "I worked on two projects with Bob - we were able to publish project 1 after ___ months but ran into setbacks on project 2."