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You also have to do a PhD, and make sure you get a good adviser/good department, and get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen to your adviser and department,

You also have to do a PhD, and make sure you get a good adviser/good department, and get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen to your adviser and department, and be very careful with how you spend your time (if you spend a lot of time on something that doesn't end up being fruitful, that's opportunity cost that other top researchers might have turned into a breakout publication and now you are behind). And you make like $30k/year while in grad school and might experience some pretty bad mental health due to stress. Of course, the average/above-average case isn't terrible. I think non-famous AI researchers are still getting hired into $400-500k/year at FAANG at "senior" level, it's just that you would be making roughly the same amount of money if you just went directly into software engineering at a FAANG out of undergrad and did above-average at promotions. To me, that makes it not really make sense to go into AI research (especially now, when it's a hot topic and you have a 3-5 year wait to get your PhD) unless it's something you are genuinely interested in. For purely career reasons, it doesn't seem much better than just going right into software engineering.

puranjay 7y ago
The strangest thing is that knowing a lot of PhDs and PhD students (my wife is currently one), very few are motivated by financial rewards. Making money isn't always seen as a yardstick of success by their peers.
- pimmen 7y ago
  That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".

puranjay 7y ago

The strangest thing is that knowing a lot of PhDs and PhD students (my wife is currently one), very few are motivated by financial rewards. Making money isn't always seen as a yardstick of success by their peers.

pimmen 7y ago
That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".