4 ms·

those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry I don't think this is generally true. I can think of a few cases of tenured facu

those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry I don't think this is generally true. I can think of a few cases of tenured faculty who could earn 10x their salary in private consulting but in my opinion it's generally not true. I think a good comparison would be to look at the average salary of something like Microsoft Research employees who are PhDs versus the average salary of tenured faculty of Computer Sciences at a highly ranked school like UT Austin. I suspect it won't be substantially different (based on job offers I have seen). Although I don't know what a vastly higher salary means here, I suspect that the largest entrants in private industry for quantum computing would not pay vastly higher salaries than Scott Aaronson's ~$270K for work in that field.

arghnoname 4y ago
MSR can pay well, but top flight universities (in CS at least) do actually pay pretty well. But MSR is in some ways almost a university in and of itself. It has extremely good talent and is as competitive as many faculty departments. The appeal of MSR (to me) is from the research opportunities afforded to them. The product of MSR researchers is still mostly papers. In other words, they are still researchers and research (papers) is what they want to produce. They serve on conference committees, the works. It's easy to go from MSR to academia and back again. The professors who give up a big salary are those who could take the skills they developed and apply it in a more industrial capacity, where their innovations are not public or published. This is worth a lot more to a company. Taking highly motivated and intelligent people and having them solve the hardest problems at the biggest companies in such a way (i.e., secretly) that gives the company a competitive advantage is going to pay quite well.

arghnoname 4y ago

MSR can pay well, but top flight universities (in CS at least) do actually pay pretty well. But MSR is in some ways almost a university in and of itself. It has extremely good talent and is as competitive as many faculty departments. The appeal of MSR (to me) is from the research opportunities afforded to them. The product of MSR researchers is still mostly papers. In other words, they are still researchers and research (papers) is what they want to produce. They serve on conference committees, the works. It's easy to go from MSR to academia and back again. The professors who give up a big salary are those who could take the skills they developed and apply it in a more industrial capacity, where their innovations are not public or published. This is worth a lot more to a company. Taking highly motivated and intelligent people and having them solve the hardest problems at the biggest companies in such a way (i.e., secretly) that gives the company a competitive advantage is going to pay quite well.