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I second others that blaming scientists isn't the right thing, and punishing them certainly isn't. The life of a scientist is incredibly stressful and poorly pa

I second others that blaming scientists isn't the right thing, and punishing them certainly isn't. The life of a scientist is incredibly stressful and poorly paid. The average salary for a postdoc is like $45,000. These people have graduate degrees from the top schools in the nation, are often in their early to mid thirties, are doing research that can lead to blockbuster drugs that massively improve human health, are incredibly passionate about and good at their work, yet make little more than minimum wage A better solution, counterintuitive as it sounds, is to increas public funding for more research. If scientists can make a reasonable wage that doesn't force them to pursue tenure by living and dying by the whim of a few top journals, it will be much easier for them to stomach the financial, and possibly career, hit of publishing open source I wonder how robust the open source movement would be if engineers only made $45k / year

zjaffee 9y ago
Probably still pretty robust, much of the open sourcing that happens, especially these days, is companies open sourcing aspects of their infrastructure. People then use the fact that they built a platform that became popular to start their own companies or be a valuable candidate at all kinds of companies.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  Yes, but you're missing the point. The point is that those developers were being paid 6 figures while they were building their platform / resume.
ldd 9y ago
Unbeknown to you, there are plenty of programmers, and engineers making "only" 45k / year or less. And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque. So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  In some areas it's definitely a lot of money. Not in the Bay Area / NYC / socal though. Especially if you have kids. Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs
Vinnl 9y ago
Important is also that their contracts are usually term-limited, and that they will need to have been employed at several different institutions at entirely different locations in order to have a shot later in their careers. That doesn't help, and software developers definitely do not have this problem.

zjaffee 9y ago

Probably still pretty robust, much of the open sourcing that happens, especially these days, is companies open sourcing aspects of their infrastructure. People then use the fact that they built a platform that became popular to start their own companies or be a valuable candidate at all kinds of companies.

neuromantik8086 9y ago
Yes, but you're missing the point. The point is that those developers were being paid 6 figures while they were building their platform / resume.

ldd 9y ago

Unbeknown to you, there are plenty of programmers, and engineers making "only" 45k / year or less. And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque. So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'

aaavl2821 9y ago
In some areas it's definitely a lot of money. Not in the Bay Area / NYC / socal though. Especially if you have kids. Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs

Vinnl 9y ago

Important is also that their contracts are usually term-limited, and that they will need to have been employed at several different institutions at entirely different locations in order to have a shot later in their careers. That doesn't help, and software developers definitely do not have this problem.