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"The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in computing this year, he said, but competition for top candidates is fierce. I know of

"The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in computing this year, he said, but competition for top candidates is fierce. I know of major departments that interviewed 40 candidates, and I don’t think they hired anybody." That doesn't sound like fierce competition if they were able to interview 40 candidates... Did they give them all high-paying offers and they all rejected?

slow_donkey 8y ago
Who would have thought salary was important
akshayn 8y ago
Often a research university will interview many candidates, give offers to/recruit many candidates, and yet find that for each individual it recruited, there was a competing university which worked better for that candidate. Usually (from what I have seen) candidates on the academic job market don't end up in industry (at least not immediately) - they are in the job market because they are passionate about academia.
Wohlf 8y ago
Competition must be fierce... at the level they want to pay.
- Humdeee 8y ago
  I would wager the pay would be at or near minimum wage levels. I had this exact predicament. A decade ago, it was an $8/hour offer or do an internship/co-op and make triple. Passion for your area of study is great, but going to a home with minimal to no luxuries gets old pretty quickly as years go by.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    Starting professors make less at my alma mater...a lot less. Since it's a public school you can find out how much each one makes - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/ https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/
    - goobynight 8y ago
      Dr. Falk at Chapel Hill pulling that phat $800K base salary. Meanwhile, the random dude sitting next to me is making more than every single person that works at Asheville.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    I went to a highly ranked liberal arts college and in 4 years, I didn't have a single instructor that wasn't a PhD. I don't know what the salaries were like then, but even freshly minted PhDs can be over 30, meaning that from ages 22-30, they were making graduate/doctoral student stipend money at best. $95k at age 32-35 honestly doesn't seem like a lot if your savings at that age doesn't even hit 5 figures.
bachmeier 8y ago
I'm not CS faculty, but this is similar to the situation in economics. Interview 40. Of those, 20 may end up being acceptable. The eight best of those 20 get offers at better places. Four others take nonacademic jobs. You're left fighting over a pool of eight candidates with a lot more than eight other schools. It was really tough after the recession, when the Fed was hiring a ginormous number of new PhD's.
- rguzman 8y ago
  this is one of the pathologies in academic institutions: they need teachers, but they evaluate researchers. the people who make the cut for researcher also have a lot of other options, and the institution ends up with an undersupply of teachers.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Tenure track implies research.
    - detaro 8y ago
      It does, but it's an interesting question why it always does. Knowing universities that lost their best lecturers because they insisted on a high-impact research record to consider giving them a permanent position, more flexibility in that regards looks like it'd be a good idea.
      - docbrown 8y ago
        >it's an interesting question why it always does. Not really. It’s a good question to ask but the answer is rather simple: R1 institutions stay afloat because of research grants; they need researchers to secure that grant $$.
        detaro 8y ago
        And it's surely helping the grant-getting that their researchers have to spend time teaching classes they don't really want to teach. Teaching-focused people, even if you make them full professors, are still comparatively cheap (since they don't need big teams or labs), and I don't think it's obvious that it doesn't make sense, especially if you consider decrease in teaching quality and other factors. And this also happens at institutions that aren't in dire need of cash. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting to do this for all teaching, but if you get good teachers as e.g. postdocs to try and keep them)
azhenley 8y ago
One of the problems is that a candidate might sit on an offer for a long time. The best candidates want to wait until the interview season is over to evaluate all their offers. On the other hand, some schools give one week deadlines on offers but any good candidate will turn those down. It is hard on both sides. The entire process was about 6 months when I went through it, and I had offers expiring before I even finished all the onsites. Disclaimer: I’m a CS prof at a R1 university in my first year.
mamcx 8y ago
My experience is not from the US, but sometimes companies/universities/etc self-sabotage themselves in weird ways. I teach in http://www.sena.edu.co/ http://www.sena.edu.co/ (the biggest trainer in Colombia, run by the gov) because for a advance class about databases them not have anyone and one of the faculty ask me the favor to cover for it (I was there as part of a program for startups). It work well, and I do it because the time commit was not bas and the extra money help. So I was ready to continue to teach about mobile development. I was like the only one that apply for it. I was not selected, because I don't have certain diplomas related to how operate the (very) arcane Sena "education platform" and other side stuff that demand ONE YEAR of extra courses for me. In the end, only the people that accept that get it the job, but how many with actual skills on the field?
TuringNYC 8y ago
This article is so poor I dont know where to start. The Computer Science Stampede >> "While the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science at certain American universities more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, the number of Ph.D. candidates — the potential pool of future professors — remained relatively flat." They seem to ignore the three decades of legacy PhD graduates who gave up looking for jobs in academia because of so few spots opening up. The article makes it seem almost like all legacy graduate supply poof disappears! >> “I had a faculty member who came in with an offer from a bank, and they were told that, with their expertise, the starting salary would be $1 million to $4 million,” said Greg Morrisett, dean of computing and information science at Cornell University. “There’s no way a university, no matter how well off, could compete with that.” Nice anecdote, but the number of graduates in that spot is tiny. Rarely do PhDs get that type of salary on Wall St, and often it does not last. No, they cant compete with the back on this one candidate but luckily there are a thousand other candidates, and tens of thousands of candidates once you consider the pool of grads having graduated over the last generation.
- drewg123 8y ago
  No, but most recent PhDs can get a job at a FAANG company, where their starting salary will be much higher than a faculty salary (and that's before bonus, stock grant/options/etc). Even with the cost of living in the Bay Area, they'll be able to pay off student loans faster and will finally have time to enjoy life.
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    How many CS PhDs are getting $1m-$4m starting salaries? If any, are they just from Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/CMU or are all the PhDs across all US universities getting these salaries? What about the tens of thousands of CS/Physics/Math PhDs who have graduated over the past two decades, are they also getting these salaries? I find it hard to imagine that a highly reputable school like Cornell would have a difficult time finding faculty. Most my PhD friends gave up looking for tenure track positions and begrudgingly accepted finance/FAANG jobs distraught from the drought in academia. It is poor reporting to chose the most extreme possible anecdote (one person $1m-$4m salary) and then use that as an example of what is going on. The real story is...universities messed up badly structuring decent pathways for teaching positions and are trying to blame a hot market. There is also the ongoing story of poor measurement schemes (measure how good a teacher is by how good their research is) and the story of uncertainty (let highly accomplished academics rot in limbo-hell for a decade and use a tenure carrot to control them.) BTW, the quote was from Cornell University's dean. I did my CS undergrad from Cornell. 90% of CS lectures were in a large hall where ~60% of the seats were empty, and this was in an upyear (1998-2001.) There was no shortage of space in the lecture halls. The teaching was mostly done by MS and PhD students, of which there were plenty -- the supply of recitation sections is quite elastic since there is no long-term commitment on either side.
tzs 8y ago
I don't understand how you can infer from the number of candidates they interviewed how fierce the competition is. Don't you also need to know the number of positions available at other institutions that those candidates are also considering in order to estimate competition fierceness?
- kd0amg 8y ago
  That and the number of candidates they chose not to interview
philwelch 8y ago
If you're hiring CS faculty, you're also directly competing with research organizations at large tech companies.
surge 8y ago
High-paying offer in academia? Not likely.

slow_donkey 8y ago

Who would have thought salary was important

akshayn 8y ago

Often a research university will interview many candidates, give offers to/recruit many candidates, and yet find that for each individual it recruited, there was a competing university which worked better for that candidate. Usually (from what I have seen) candidates on the academic job market don't end up in industry (at least not immediately) - they are in the job market because they are passionate about academia.

Wohlf 8y ago

Competition must be fierce... at the level they want to pay.

Humdeee 8y ago
I would wager the pay would be at or near minimum wage levels. I had this exact predicament. A decade ago, it was an $8/hour offer or do an internship/co-op and make triple. Passion for your area of study is great, but going to a home with minimal to no luxuries gets old pretty quickly as years go by.
electricslpnsld 8y ago
95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Starting professors make less at my alma mater...a lot less. Since it's a public school you can find out how much each one makes - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/ https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/
  - goobynight 8y ago
    Dr. Falk at Chapel Hill pulling that phat $800K base salary. Meanwhile, the random dude sitting next to me is making more than every single person that works at Asheville.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I went to a highly ranked liberal arts college and in 4 years, I didn't have a single instructor that wasn't a PhD. I don't know what the salaries were like then, but even freshly minted PhDs can be over 30, meaning that from ages 22-30, they were making graduate/doctoral student stipend money at best. $95k at age 32-35 honestly doesn't seem like a lot if your savings at that age doesn't even hit 5 figures.

bachmeier 8y ago

I'm not CS faculty, but this is similar to the situation in economics. Interview 40. Of those, 20 may end up being acceptable. The eight best of those 20 get offers at better places. Four others take nonacademic jobs. You're left fighting over a pool of eight candidates with a lot more than eight other schools. It was really tough after the recession, when the Fed was hiring a ginormous number of new PhD's.

rguzman 8y ago
this is one of the pathologies in academic institutions: they need teachers, but they evaluate researchers. the people who make the cut for researcher also have a lot of other options, and the institution ends up with an undersupply of teachers.
- watwut 8y ago
  Tenure track implies research.
  - detaro 8y ago
    It does, but it's an interesting question why it always does. Knowing universities that lost their best lecturers because they insisted on a high-impact research record to consider giving them a permanent position, more flexibility in that regards looks like it'd be a good idea.
    - docbrown 8y ago
      >it's an interesting question why it always does. Not really. It’s a good question to ask but the answer is rather simple: R1 institutions stay afloat because of research grants; they need researchers to secure that grant $$.
      - detaro 8y ago
        And it's surely helping the grant-getting that their researchers have to spend time teaching classes they don't really want to teach. Teaching-focused people, even if you make them full professors, are still comparatively cheap (since they don't need big teams or labs), and I don't think it's obvious that it doesn't make sense, especially if you consider decrease in teaching quality and other factors. And this also happens at institutions that aren't in dire need of cash. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting to do this for all teaching, but if you get good teachers as e.g. postdocs to try and keep them)

azhenley 8y ago

One of the problems is that a candidate might sit on an offer for a long time. The best candidates want to wait until the interview season is over to evaluate all their offers. On the other hand, some schools give one week deadlines on offers but any good candidate will turn those down. It is hard on both sides. The entire process was about 6 months when I went through it, and I had offers expiring before I even finished all the onsites. Disclaimer: I’m a CS prof at a R1 university in my first year.

mamcx 8y ago

My experience is not from the US, but sometimes companies/universities/etc self-sabotage themselves in weird ways. I teach in http://www.sena.edu.co/ http://www.sena.edu.co/ (the biggest trainer in Colombia, run by the gov) because for a advance class about databases them not have anyone and one of the faculty ask me the favor to cover for it (I was there as part of a program for startups). It work well, and I do it because the time commit was not bas and the extra money help. So I was ready to continue to teach about mobile development. I was like the only one that apply for it. I was not selected, because I don't have certain diplomas related to how operate the (very) arcane Sena "education platform" and other side stuff that demand ONE YEAR of extra courses for me. In the end, only the people that accept that get it the job, but how many with actual skills on the field?

TuringNYC 8y ago

This article is so poor I dont know where to start. The Computer Science Stampede >> "While the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science at certain American universities more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, the number of Ph.D. candidates — the potential pool of future professors — remained relatively flat." They seem to ignore the three decades of legacy PhD graduates who gave up looking for jobs in academia because of so few spots opening up. The article makes it seem almost like all legacy graduate supply poof disappears! >> “I had a faculty member who came in with an offer from a bank, and they were told that, with their expertise, the starting salary would be $1 million to $4 million,” said Greg Morrisett, dean of computing and information science at Cornell University. “There’s no way a university, no matter how well off, could compete with that.” Nice anecdote, but the number of graduates in that spot is tiny. Rarely do PhDs get that type of salary on Wall St, and often it does not last. No, they cant compete with the back on this one candidate but luckily there are a thousand other candidates, and tens of thousands of candidates once you consider the pool of grads having graduated over the last generation.

drewg123 8y ago
No, but most recent PhDs can get a job at a FAANG company, where their starting salary will be much higher than a faculty salary (and that's before bonus, stock grant/options/etc). Even with the cost of living in the Bay Area, they'll be able to pay off student loans faster and will finally have time to enjoy life.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  How many CS PhDs are getting $1m-$4m starting salaries? If any, are they just from Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/CMU or are all the PhDs across all US universities getting these salaries? What about the tens of thousands of CS/Physics/Math PhDs who have graduated over the past two decades, are they also getting these salaries? I find it hard to imagine that a highly reputable school like Cornell would have a difficult time finding faculty. Most my PhD friends gave up looking for tenure track positions and begrudgingly accepted finance/FAANG jobs distraught from the drought in academia. It is poor reporting to chose the most extreme possible anecdote (one person $1m-$4m salary) and then use that as an example of what is going on. The real story is...universities messed up badly structuring decent pathways for teaching positions and are trying to blame a hot market. There is also the ongoing story of poor measurement schemes (measure how good a teacher is by how good their research is) and the story of uncertainty (let highly accomplished academics rot in limbo-hell for a decade and use a tenure carrot to control them.) BTW, the quote was from Cornell University's dean. I did my CS undergrad from Cornell. 90% of CS lectures were in a large hall where ~60% of the seats were empty, and this was in an upyear (1998-2001.) There was no shortage of space in the lecture halls. The teaching was mostly done by MS and PhD students, of which there were plenty -- the supply of recitation sections is quite elastic since there is no long-term commitment on either side.

tzs 8y ago

I don't understand how you can infer from the number of candidates they interviewed how fierce the competition is. Don't you also need to know the number of positions available at other institutions that those candidates are also considering in order to estimate competition fierceness?

kd0amg 8y ago
That and the number of candidates they chose not to interview

philwelch 8y ago

If you're hiring CS faculty, you're also directly competing with research organizations at large tech companies.

surge 8y ago

High-paying offer in academia? Not likely.