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Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job

by imgabe 11y ago

Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lottery and get a tenure-track position, from what I understand you'll spend most of your time writing grant proposals to chase funding, and at least 5-7 years trying to please the tenure committee. So, why exactly would anyone spend 10-15 years making a fraction of what they could in industry for a vanishingly small chance of the eventual payoff of tenure? If you're going to slave away for 10-15 years anyway before you get to do what you want, you may as well do it in industry where you could put away enough money to be financially independent in that time. The only remaining obstacle is that you still kind of need an institutional affiliation to be taken seriously as a researcher and publish, but that might be slowly changing as the Internet makes it easier to publish.

argonaut 11y ago
In computer science, your criticisms are very very valid for graduate students: they make ~30k/year when they could be making ~200k/year at, say, Google, and they usually have less autonomy than a professor. But they don't really apply to tenure-track faculty. If grad school is already a sunk cost for you, (or it was valuable to you in other non-monetary areas), a tenure-track position can actually be quite a lucrative choice. Firstly, CS professors make a decent salary. A professor at Berkeley (all salaries are publicly available for California state schools) make ~160k/year. Someone like Michael I. Jordan makes ~300k/year. And if you work in a field directly applicable to industry, such as machine learning, this figure does not include the substantial consulting/advising revenue that is available to you. Furthermore, tenured faculty can go do a startup and then come back at any time for their old job. Granted, a professor in CS could probably be making millions per year in finance or something, but my point is in absolute terms you can make a lot of money.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I don't think it's that automatic unless your background is one that includes the "correct" college, an affluent background, and more. Many people end up pursuing an advanced degree in this field because they want to break into a new industry, make themselves more appealing to employers and make more money. If you can do a master's while working, you don't end up with 2+ years of lost salary as well. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't have a computer science degree and I currently find myself considering a master's for those reasons. It would be nice to avoid having to go that route.
  - pc86 11y ago
    Well first of all the only advantage an affluent background will give you to getting a job at Google is the same advantage it'd give you for any other employer or any other industry (better school growing up, able to focus on that school instead of working, etc). And we're already presupposing that the person in question is sufficiently hard-working and intelligent that they could be a tenure-track professor at a major research institution. I would argue that the vast of majority of folks in that position could get a very good job at Google provided they had the correct skill set. And I don't know what part of CS you're most interested in, but my degree is in Political Science and after the first shitty one I haven't had any trouble finding development work in my tiny city.
  - munin 11y ago
    > Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? Yes. from personal experience, if you can get into a good graduate program, you can also get an offer from {google,amazon,microsoft} for $150-$200. the predicate "get into a good graduate program" means you have a CS degree with a decent GPA from a well considered school and some research experience, which usually translates into some kind of job experience that you can talk up in your interview.
  - fnbr 11y ago
    > Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I think it is when you condition on the fact that someone is a professor at Berkeley/CMU. Roughly 5% of applicants are accepted to top PhD programs, and less than 20% of people with PhDs at top universities (like Berkeley/CMU) get tenure track positions. Of those with tenure track positions, a minority (<50%) get tenure, and of those who get tenure, a fraction become full professors. So the professors at Berkeley/CMU are well into the top 1% of people with computer science degrees, which makes it entirely plausible that their next best alternative is getting a high level finance/tech job.
wrecktangle 11y ago
Simply why Instrumentl is such a welcome idea.
dunkelheit 11y ago
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the help of a community and a mentor is hard.
- studentrob 11y ago
  > where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Hard to answer without knowing your background and exactly what you want to learn, but generally speaking... (1) Try to find some people who are good at something advanced you want to learn. Figure out a way to work with them. (2) Be active in online communities. Ask and answer questions, write something and open source it, or contribute to another project.
  - dunkelheit 11y ago
    I think this is good advice in general. But I doubt that the most effective way to follow it is to devote evenings after your 200k+ corporate job to studying.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bgalbraith 11y ago
  You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. A PhD is not simply learning more facts about a particular topic. It's an apprenticeship for conducting independently directed academic research. There are so many topics that you can not just learn from reading some online sources e.g. most experimental work. Most of the time spent in a typical PhD program is spent trying to solve problems that have no easy answers and no easy guidelines to follow. While you can definitely gain similar knowledge and experience in an industry setting, you almost never have the freedom to take the 3+ years often necessary to explore a narrow topic, struggle and fail repeatedly, be faced with and overcome crushing doubt and frustration, and do so in a generally supportive community.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
The most amazing part of this Q&A to me is that people will go into industry, apparently increase their worth by millions of dollars, and then come back! When you have an opportunity where people are willing to forego that sort of wealth, then it seems to me that you are doing something incredibly right.

by imgabe 11y ago

argonaut 11y ago

In computer science, your criticisms are very very valid for graduate students: they make ~30k/year when they could be making ~200k/year at, say, Google, and they usually have less autonomy than a professor. But they don't really apply to tenure-track faculty. If grad school is already a sunk cost for you, (or it was valuable to you in other non-monetary areas), a tenure-track position can actually be quite a lucrative choice. Firstly, CS professors make a decent salary. A professor at Berkeley (all salaries are publicly available for California state schools) make ~160k/year. Someone like Michael I. Jordan makes ~300k/year. And if you work in a field directly applicable to industry, such as machine learning, this figure does not include the substantial consulting/advising revenue that is available to you. Furthermore, tenured faculty can go do a startup and then come back at any time for their old job. Granted, a professor in CS could probably be making millions per year in finance or something, but my point is in absolute terms you can make a lot of money.

TheCowboy 11y ago
Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I don't think it's that automatic unless your background is one that includes the "correct" college, an affluent background, and more. Many people end up pursuing an advanced degree in this field because they want to break into a new industry, make themselves more appealing to employers and make more money. If you can do a master's while working, you don't end up with 2+ years of lost salary as well. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't have a computer science degree and I currently find myself considering a master's for those reasons. It would be nice to avoid having to go that route.
- pc86 11y ago
  Well first of all the only advantage an affluent background will give you to getting a job at Google is the same advantage it'd give you for any other employer or any other industry (better school growing up, able to focus on that school instead of working, etc). And we're already presupposing that the person in question is sufficiently hard-working and intelligent that they could be a tenure-track professor at a major research institution. I would argue that the vast of majority of folks in that position could get a very good job at Google provided they had the correct skill set. And I don't know what part of CS you're most interested in, but my degree is in Political Science and after the first shitty one I haven't had any trouble finding development work in my tiny city.
- munin 11y ago
  > Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? Yes. from personal experience, if you can get into a good graduate program, you can also get an offer from {google,amazon,microsoft} for $150-$200. the predicate "get into a good graduate program" means you have a CS degree with a decent GPA from a well considered school and some research experience, which usually translates into some kind of job experience that you can talk up in your interview.
- fnbr 11y ago
  > Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I think it is when you condition on the fact that someone is a professor at Berkeley/CMU. Roughly 5% of applicants are accepted to top PhD programs, and less than 20% of people with PhDs at top universities (like Berkeley/CMU) get tenure track positions. Of those with tenure track positions, a minority (<50%) get tenure, and of those who get tenure, a fraction become full professors. So the professors at Berkeley/CMU are well into the top 1% of people with computer science degrees, which makes it entirely plausible that their next best alternative is getting a high level finance/tech job.

wrecktangle 11y ago

Simply why Instrumentl is such a welcome idea.

dunkelheit 11y ago

Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the help of a community and a mentor is hard.

studentrob 11y ago
> where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Hard to answer without knowing your background and exactly what you want to learn, but generally speaking... (1) Try to find some people who are good at something advanced you want to learn. Figure out a way to work with them. (2) Be active in online communities. Ask and answer questions, write something and open source it, or contribute to another project.
- dunkelheit 11y ago
  I think this is good advice in general. But I doubt that the most effective way to follow it is to devote evenings after your 200k+ corporate job to studying.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bgalbraith 11y ago
You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. A PhD is not simply learning more facts about a particular topic. It's an apprenticeship for conducting independently directed academic research. There are so many topics that you can not just learn from reading some online sources e.g. most experimental work. Most of the time spent in a typical PhD program is spent trying to solve problems that have no easy answers and no easy guidelines to follow. While you can definitely gain similar knowledge and experience in an industry setting, you almost never have the freedom to take the 3+ years often necessary to explore a narrow topic, struggle and fail repeatedly, be faced with and overcome crushing doubt and frustration, and do so in a generally supportive community.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

The most amazing part of this Q&A to me is that people will go into industry, apparently increase their worth by millions of dollars, and then come back! When you have an opportunity where people are willing to forego that sort of wealth, then it seems to me that you are doing something incredibly right.