3 ms·
Because research pays terribly and not everyone has the luxury of martyrdom. Want to be a grad student? 80-90% pay cut. (Unless you go to Switzerland and then
by bhickey 14y ago
Because research pays terribly and not everyone has the luxury of martyrdom.
Want to be a grad student? 80-90% pay cut. (Unless you go to Switzerland and then it's closer to 70%).
Want to be a university research programmer? 70% pay cut.
Removing economic considerations, would I rather be researching auto-immune disease? Sure. But 'doing good' means compromises like buying a house at 45 instead of 35.
No one asks doctors to make these compromises.
Edit: If someone wants to deposit $2m in my bank account I'll quit my job on Tuesday and go to grad school.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- olivier1664 14y ago"buying a house at 45 instead of 35" is an economic considerations, no? ;) In the case you had $2M: Have you consider that reasearch problem are far longer and thus far less exciting than the ones we, programers, are used to solve?
- bhickey 14y agoeconomic considerations Erm -- look over there. pile of money Yes. I did research as a student and as a research programmer / computational biologist. I was just an author on a paper for work done three years ago. There will probably be another one being written up in a year or two.
- pnathan 14y agoThis is a pretty fair summary. A badly-paid software engineer (BS in CS) makes a little under a PhD in CS at a university. Which is where I'm at right now, literally. :-) Grad school pay for a CS PhD is about $20K-$30K, assuming full funding, not a good assumption. Run the numbers when you move the wage bar down from the 70-110K down to 20-30K (almost certainly without spouse/family health insurance) for about 4-8 years; then the followon work at a University won't pay well. Think about how many people would leave 30-40K on the table to go work for a university instead of doing ads. While most people aren't aces at finance, they can do the basic math that this calculation involves. :-) The key problem, of course, is that research structures in the US are not designed to be profit returning; if they were, they'd look different and the really off-the-wall stuff wouldn't be done. I, of course, am stupid enough to have gone for a MS, and am planning on pursuing a PhD. Hopefully I can get a job afterwards.