11 ms·

As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to stars

88 points by aburan28 11y ago

jordanb 11y ago
Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?
- unignorant 11y ago
  Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    Most of the newly hired CS professors I know (at some legit schools - CMU, Waterloo, USC, UT Austin, etc) came from postdocs. Could be a sub-field of CS thing?
    - pgbovine 11y ago
      both can be true. super rough approximation for CS faculty job candidate consideration: Ph.D. outside of the U.S. followed by a postdoc in U.S. at School X ~ Ph.D. in the U.S. at School X
    - ru55 11y ago
      Definitely a subfield thing in part. Highly theoretical CS PhDs (complexity theory, algorithms, etc - the folks who are mathematicians in computer scientist's clothing) almost always require postdocs, both because they tend to be less heavily recruited by industry, and because the vast majority of departments are shying away from theory in favor of things that bring in more grant money and industry partnerships. Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure. All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
      - hueving 11y ago
        I think you have a bias of looking at students from select top schools. A PhD student in almost any branch is going to have a really hard time getting a tenure track position unless they have an awesome research record (publications in top tier conferences/journals).
  - davmre 11y ago
    Even if true (I know many professors who did postdocs), it's not clear what you think this proves. Faculty slots are very scarce and most newly graduated PhDs, even very smart ones, do not have "faculty job at a desirable institution" as an option immediately available to them. So they are left with the choice between postdocs and industry. Most choose industry, and it's not hard to understand why.
  - stared 11y ago
    In other disciplines (e.g. mine - theoretical physics) it is not possible (whereas doing postdocs for 10 years or so is common). And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.
- newjersey 11y ago
  I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs. Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs. I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority. I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
  - chrisbennet 11y ago
    Remove the administrators. "Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
    - gozur88 11y ago
      The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.
      - marcelluspye 11y ago
        I have a really hard time believing they had to triple the number of administrators due to government regulations.
      - melling 11y ago
        How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center. People are offering solutions without following the money.
- fullshark 11y ago
  It's great if you lack marketable skills
  - pgbovine 11y ago
    that's actually absolutely correct :) academia is best at doing things that are not directly marketable in the capitalist economy. in the early 1900s, a group of weirdos working on theoretical quantum mechanics couldn't find marketable jobs in industry of the day, so they had to do their work in academia. thanks to them, you have your iPhone now.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      That's actually the crux of the issue here. In the past AI research didn't have any commercial value, and now it does. So universities and departments are having to deal with new competition, and they'll have to adjust various forms of compensation as a result.
      - sgt101 11y ago
        Nope, what they will do is crank out Ph.D.s until the market saturates. This is actually a win win for the unis.
        gozur88 11y ago
        The article talks about "stars", which implies quality over quantity. They probably already crank out too many infinitesimal-delta-thesis guys who are smart but not brilliant.
- aub3bhat 11y ago
  Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.
- _delirium 11y ago
  This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about. For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research. Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close. Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
  - hooloovoo_zoo 11y ago
    I think your numbers are off by about a factor of 2 (underestimating). You can see the salaries for the UoC system at https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. Note that most of the professorial salaries are labeled AY which means they are probably making 30% more annually. Salaries at private schools are even higher. Silicon Valley is not going to lure a "big name" away from a tenured job for south of a half-million a year.
aub3bhat 11y ago
Can confirm almost all Computer Vision professors I know work or have worked at Google/Facebook/their own startup at some point of time. Also these Professors have tenures (currently on sabbatical etc.). This is actually a great thing for graduate students too. Internships pay very well and can even extend beyond summers as part-time contractor positions. Another common method as highlighted in the article is to convert research group into a startup which gets acqui-hired by Google etc. E.g. Geometric Intelligence would be a good example.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  ..which university is this?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - shahzeb 11y ago
    I'd put my money on Stanford.
    - akhilcacharya 11y ago
      Yeah, it's certainly not a common experience for most places.
RUBwkVjwLsDKgPw 11y ago
Maybe universities should consider paying more to compete with the tech companies. It's a free market and whatnot. If the price goes up, you gotta pay more. Complaining about the price going up isn't exactly productive.
- bertr4nd 11y ago
  I doubt universities can come close to affording it. My CV wouldn't have gotten me a tenure-track position at a top school, but my income in industry is much higher than even the best paid professors at my alma mater (ignoring profs' consulting income, of course). To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
  - pbz 11y ago
    How much is the difference between academia and industry? Can you share some numbers or ranges?
    - arjunnarayan 11y ago
      Tenure-track professors in computer science at top universities get paid about 100,000 to 250,000. You can look this up publicly because a) California state employee salaries are online [1] b) UC Berkeley is a top school for CS professors and competitive with everyone else on salaries. Looking at random AI faculty members shows about 100k at hiring, about 150k at tenure, while machine learning king of kings Michael I Jordan gets 300k. Google pays starting undergrads > 160k, and fresh PhD students > 225k[2] (all in comp including first year vesting stock + base pay + expected 15% bonus). I imagine if they're poaching faculty, they're getting significantly more than that[3]. Basically I'd say the industry salaries are at least 2x the academic salaries, if not higher. The flagship hires are paid a lot more (think Yann LeCun, or Andrew Ng), and importantly, given the freedom to hire and build mini-empires to do stuff. As a final note, I know talking about salaries publicly is awkward, but this is all public information, and grad students talk freely about this sort of stuff with each other, so I don't feel like I'm revealing anything super secret beyond showing you how to look up the relevant information in publicly available areas. [1]: (http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/article2642161.html http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...) [2]: Source: Glassdoor Google for "research scientist", which is the position that PhDs in AI/ML are hired into. [3]: Google levels are public, and while Glassdoor data is sparse, faculty who are poached are hired at at least the "senior staff engineer" level, which glassdoor says about 500k, which sounds around right to me, if not a little low. As an aside, salaries at the higher levels have much higher variance than at the lower levels, and to entice someone away from a tenured position probably requires hitting the higher ends of the salary band.
pkaye 11y ago
Maybe they should pay their talent more than the administrators and paper shufflers.
- dublinben 11y ago
  And football coaches.
  - vinay427 11y ago
    I and a few other posters mentioned this elsewhere, but at many universities athletics programs make profits that are able to be used elsewhere in the university. This often doesn't include donations on the order of a hundred million dollars at many schools for upgrades, etc.
    - pkaye 11y ago
      As I read it, a vast majority of university athletic program are unprofitable. Many of them force their students to pay a special fee to fund their athletic programs. The following is probably not the best article but a start... http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-up-the-bills/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...
siscia 11y ago
Only lightly correlated, but I would like to start this discussion. Maybe it is just me, but I have a lot of interests in a lot of different areas, but AI just isn't one of those areas. Maybe I simply didn't study it enough, but I can't see in AI the challenges that makes interesting programming. There is some resources I should explore before to say that I simply don't find AI interesting?
- llamaz 11y ago
  Modern AI is closer to math than the ad-hoc but often creative solutions of AI in the 70s/80s. This is a very good sign, but it brings AI closer to the kind of work that engineers do with MATLAB. I personally prefer it that way, but it's definitely quite different to other types of programming.
- amelius 11y ago
  AI is more like gardening than it is like engineering: 1. You have to wait long for your results to come out. 2. You have little clue about what you are doing, but if you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll probably be ok. 3. You never get the results you really wanted. 4. When something goes wrong, you can't explain it.
jasonjei 11y ago
While they used Google for the example of large companies hiring academic talent, IBM did this too back in the 90s for chess.
ehudla 11y ago
Has the distinction between basic and applied research become irrelevant?
sktrdie 11y ago
For stars and talents, academia provides something the private sector can never provide: freedom. Established professors can dictate their own rhythm. They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more. They can change sub-fields of interest as they see fit, and work on problems they want to solve. Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve. Of course private research provides very interesting deals, but most stars and talents are exactly that because they had the freedom of doing things as they see fit. Putting them in a company structure with quirky rules is not their natural habitat.
- stared 11y ago
  I would strongly argue with that. I run away from academia _exactly_ to pursue freedom: http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html In short, in academia you are bound by hierarchy, local politics, grants and bureaucracy, 1-2 year lag in anything. As a freelancer I have enough $$$ I am free to pursue my intellectual interests (any side projects, teaching students topics of my choosing, etc). And when it comes to teaching - I get _only_ students that are interested, not - diluted by the crowd who just wants to fulfill the curriculum.
  - sktrdie 11y ago
    I like your article, but certainly your PhD experience is not comparable to an established professor position which was really the hole point of this thread. PhD's are harsh different realities. You're still a student as a PhD and it shouldn't really be compared to anything else; certainly not a contractor position. You're right that there are professors that are bound to hierarchy, local politics, grants, etc.. But the important point is that it is their choice to be bound to that, not someone else's. David Graeber once said "Every society has something to do with brilliant, imaginative and extremely impractical people ...we used to put them in academia, but now academia is all about self marketing." - https://youtu.be/IHAJiuU5xhk?t=9s https://youtu.be/IHAJiuU5xhk?t=9s - I think this really hits the nail on the button. Academia was and should be a place where these impractical stars can shine to their potential.
mrcactu5 11y ago
what happens to mediocre people? are we fucked? and being successful at one time does not necessarily guarantee later success. Mozart died alone and with no money. Turing killed himself at the age of 41. It's not hard to look for more recent examples.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- RGamma 11y ago
  Seems so; become a grunt programmer/admin and hope you don't get automated away too quickly (with my current academic performance I count myself to that group of people). As for the second point: Depends on how you define success in life. If life's a paycheck maximization game to you, many science superstars weren't very successful...
mathattack 11y ago
What's wrong with this? Right now universities produce far more Phds than tenure track positions. If the free market is providing jobs for many of them, all the better. The head of the CS dept of my undergrad once said to a corporate recruiter, "You can hire our undergrads, but we exist to turn them into Phds"
swingbridge 11y ago
Top talent has been fleeing academia for a while now. Lower pay, limited job security (unless you manage to win a few rounds of the the publish or peril game), limited freedom to do what you want (in large part due to games around funding and publish or peril). The private sector now offers top talent what they used to go to universities for in terms of access to the best resources, freedom of exploration, a great talent pool of co-workers and decent working environment. Therefore is it any surprise people leave academia?
altotrees 11y ago
I started out college wanting to be a professor. That was fleeting, once I saw what my most respected professors and advisors were up against, grinding out papers, looking exhausted and subtly hinting that I should pursue anything but my initial goal. When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.

88 points by aburan28 11y ago

Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?

unignorant 11y ago
Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Most of the newly hired CS professors I know (at some legit schools - CMU, Waterloo, USC, UT Austin, etc) came from postdocs. Could be a sub-field of CS thing?
  - pgbovine 11y ago
    both can be true. super rough approximation for CS faculty job candidate consideration: Ph.D. outside of the U.S. followed by a postdoc in U.S. at School X ~ Ph.D. in the U.S. at School X
  - ru55 11y ago
    Definitely a subfield thing in part. Highly theoretical CS PhDs (complexity theory, algorithms, etc - the folks who are mathematicians in computer scientist's clothing) almost always require postdocs, both because they tend to be less heavily recruited by industry, and because the vast majority of departments are shying away from theory in favor of things that bring in more grant money and industry partnerships. Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure. All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
    - hueving 11y ago
      I think you have a bias of looking at students from select top schools. A PhD student in almost any branch is going to have a really hard time getting a tenure track position unless they have an awesome research record (publications in top tier conferences/journals).
- davmre 11y ago
  Even if true (I know many professors who did postdocs), it's not clear what you think this proves. Faculty slots are very scarce and most newly graduated PhDs, even very smart ones, do not have "faculty job at a desirable institution" as an option immediately available to them. So they are left with the choice between postdocs and industry. Most choose industry, and it's not hard to understand why.
- stared 11y ago
  In other disciplines (e.g. mine - theoretical physics) it is not possible (whereas doing postdocs for 10 years or so is common). And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.
newjersey 11y ago
I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs. Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs. I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority. I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  Remove the administrators. "Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
  - gozur88 11y ago
    The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.
    - marcelluspye 11y ago
      I have a really hard time believing they had to triple the number of administrators due to government regulations.
    - melling 11y ago
      How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center. People are offering solutions without following the money.
fullshark 11y ago
It's great if you lack marketable skills
- pgbovine 11y ago
  that's actually absolutely correct :) academia is best at doing things that are not directly marketable in the capitalist economy. in the early 1900s, a group of weirdos working on theoretical quantum mechanics couldn't find marketable jobs in industry of the day, so they had to do their work in academia. thanks to them, you have your iPhone now.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    That's actually the crux of the issue here. In the past AI research didn't have any commercial value, and now it does. So universities and departments are having to deal with new competition, and they'll have to adjust various forms of compensation as a result.
    - sgt101 11y ago
      Nope, what they will do is crank out Ph.D.s until the market saturates. This is actually a win win for the unis.
      - gozur88 11y ago
        The article talks about "stars", which implies quality over quantity. They probably already crank out too many infinitesimal-delta-thesis guys who are smart but not brilliant.
aub3bhat 11y ago
Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.
_delirium 11y ago
This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about. For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research. Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close. Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
- hooloovoo_zoo 11y ago
  I think your numbers are off by about a factor of 2 (underestimating). You can see the salaries for the UoC system at https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. Note that most of the professorial salaries are labeled AY which means they are probably making 30% more annually. Salaries at private schools are even higher. Silicon Valley is not going to lure a "big name" away from a tenured job for south of a half-million a year.

aub3bhat 11y ago

Can confirm almost all Computer Vision professors I know work or have worked at Google/Facebook/their own startup at some point of time. Also these Professors have tenures (currently on sabbatical etc.). This is actually a great thing for graduate students too. Internships pay very well and can even extend beyond summers as part-time contractor positions. Another common method as highlighted in the article is to convert research group into a startup which gets acqui-hired by Google etc. E.g. Geometric Intelligence would be a good example.

akhilcacharya 11y ago
..which university is this?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- shahzeb 11y ago
  I'd put my money on Stanford.
  - akhilcacharya 11y ago
    Yeah, it's certainly not a common experience for most places.

RUBwkVjwLsDKgPw 11y ago

Maybe universities should consider paying more to compete with the tech companies. It's a free market and whatnot. If the price goes up, you gotta pay more. Complaining about the price going up isn't exactly productive.

bertr4nd 11y ago
I doubt universities can come close to affording it. My CV wouldn't have gotten me a tenure-track position at a top school, but my income in industry is much higher than even the best paid professors at my alma mater (ignoring profs' consulting income, of course). To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
- pbz 11y ago
  How much is the difference between academia and industry? Can you share some numbers or ranges?
  - arjunnarayan 11y ago
    Tenure-track professors in computer science at top universities get paid about 100,000 to 250,000. You can look this up publicly because a) California state employee salaries are online [1] b) UC Berkeley is a top school for CS professors and competitive with everyone else on salaries. Looking at random AI faculty members shows about 100k at hiring, about 150k at tenure, while machine learning king of kings Michael I Jordan gets 300k. Google pays starting undergrads > 160k, and fresh PhD students > 225k[2] (all in comp including first year vesting stock + base pay + expected 15% bonus). I imagine if they're poaching faculty, they're getting significantly more than that[3]. Basically I'd say the industry salaries are at least 2x the academic salaries, if not higher. The flagship hires are paid a lot more (think Yann LeCun, or Andrew Ng), and importantly, given the freedom to hire and build mini-empires to do stuff. As a final note, I know talking about salaries publicly is awkward, but this is all public information, and grad students talk freely about this sort of stuff with each other, so I don't feel like I'm revealing anything super secret beyond showing you how to look up the relevant information in publicly available areas. [1]: (http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/article2642161.html http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...) [2]: Source: Glassdoor Google for "research scientist", which is the position that PhDs in AI/ML are hired into. [3]: Google levels are public, and while Glassdoor data is sparse, faculty who are poached are hired at at least the "senior staff engineer" level, which glassdoor says about 500k, which sounds around right to me, if not a little low. As an aside, salaries at the higher levels have much higher variance than at the lower levels, and to entice someone away from a tenured position probably requires hitting the higher ends of the salary band.

pkaye 11y ago

Maybe they should pay their talent more than the administrators and paper shufflers.

dublinben 11y ago
And football coaches.
- vinay427 11y ago
  I and a few other posters mentioned this elsewhere, but at many universities athletics programs make profits that are able to be used elsewhere in the university. This often doesn't include donations on the order of a hundred million dollars at many schools for upgrades, etc.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    As I read it, a vast majority of university athletic program are unprofitable. Many of them force their students to pay a special fee to fund their athletic programs. The following is probably not the best article but a start... http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-up-the-bills/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...

siscia 11y ago

Only lightly correlated, but I would like to start this discussion. Maybe it is just me, but I have a lot of interests in a lot of different areas, but AI just isn't one of those areas. Maybe I simply didn't study it enough, but I can't see in AI the challenges that makes interesting programming. There is some resources I should explore before to say that I simply don't find AI interesting?

llamaz 11y ago
Modern AI is closer to math than the ad-hoc but often creative solutions of AI in the 70s/80s. This is a very good sign, but it brings AI closer to the kind of work that engineers do with MATLAB. I personally prefer it that way, but it's definitely quite different to other types of programming.
amelius 11y ago
AI is more like gardening than it is like engineering: 1. You have to wait long for your results to come out. 2. You have little clue about what you are doing, but if you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll probably be ok. 3. You never get the results you really wanted. 4. When something goes wrong, you can't explain it.

jasonjei 11y ago

While they used Google for the example of large companies hiring academic talent, IBM did this too back in the 90s for chess.

ehudla 11y ago

Has the distinction between basic and applied research become irrelevant?

sktrdie 11y ago

For stars and talents, academia provides something the private sector can never provide: freedom. Established professors can dictate their own rhythm. They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more. They can change sub-fields of interest as they see fit, and work on problems they want to solve. Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve. Of course private research provides very interesting deals, but most stars and talents are exactly that because they had the freedom of doing things as they see fit. Putting them in a company structure with quirky rules is not their natural habitat.

stared 11y ago
I would strongly argue with that. I run away from academia _exactly_ to pursue freedom: http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html In short, in academia you are bound by hierarchy, local politics, grants and bureaucracy, 1-2 year lag in anything. As a freelancer I have enough $$$ I am free to pursue my intellectual interests (any side projects, teaching students topics of my choosing, etc). And when it comes to teaching - I get _only_ students that are interested, not - diluted by the crowd who just wants to fulfill the curriculum.
- sktrdie 11y ago
  I like your article, but certainly your PhD experience is not comparable to an established professor position which was really the hole point of this thread. PhD's are harsh different realities. You're still a student as a PhD and it shouldn't really be compared to anything else; certainly not a contractor position. You're right that there are professors that are bound to hierarchy, local politics, grants, etc.. But the important point is that it is their choice to be bound to that, not someone else's. David Graeber once said "Every society has something to do with brilliant, imaginative and extremely impractical people ...we used to put them in academia, but now academia is all about self marketing." - https://youtu.be/IHAJiuU5xhk?t=9s https://youtu.be/IHAJiuU5xhk?t=9s - I think this really hits the nail on the button. Academia was and should be a place where these impractical stars can shine to their potential.

mrcactu5 11y ago

what happens to mediocre people? are we fucked? and being successful at one time does not necessarily guarantee later success. Mozart died alone and with no money. Turing killed himself at the age of 41. It's not hard to look for more recent examples.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
RGamma 11y ago
Seems so; become a grunt programmer/admin and hope you don't get automated away too quickly (with my current academic performance I count myself to that group of people). As for the second point: Depends on how you define success in life. If life's a paycheck maximization game to you, many science superstars weren't very successful...

mathattack 11y ago

What's wrong with this? Right now universities produce far more Phds than tenure track positions. If the free market is providing jobs for many of them, all the better. The head of the CS dept of my undergrad once said to a corporate recruiter, "You can hire our undergrads, but we exist to turn them into Phds"

swingbridge 11y ago

Top talent has been fleeing academia for a while now. Lower pay, limited job security (unless you manage to win a few rounds of the the publish or peril game), limited freedom to do what you want (in large part due to games around funding and publish or peril). The private sector now offers top talent what they used to go to universities for in terms of access to the best resources, freedom of exploration, a great talent pool of co-workers and decent working environment. Therefore is it any surprise people leave academia?

altotrees 11y ago

I started out college wanting to be a professor. That was fleeting, once I saw what my most respected professors and advisors were up against, grinding out papers, looking exhausted and subtly hinting that I should pursue anything but my initial goal. When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.