What were they getting paid before, and what are they getting paid now? A "doubling of salary" sounds nice, but it's still important to know the base. "Loyalt

What were they getting paid before, and what are they getting paid now? A "doubling of salary" sounds nice, but it's still important to know the base. "Loyalty" to an institution is almost certainly an old-fashioned concept and probably a sucker's bet, but my sense of sympathy for CMU will still be somewhat dependent on the "pre-uber" numbers. For instance, if you lose a post-doc earning 55k and uber now pays them 110k, well, it's time to stop complaining. This is a person who managed to get high grades in an very tough undergrad major with high attrition rates, gain admission to a top PhD program (almost certainly requiring high standardized test scores), and made it thorough a doctoral program with a 35-50% attrition rate (elite med schools, by contrast, typically have attrition rates below 0.5%). Now, if these salaries were going from $250K with tenure to $500k, I'm a little more sympathetic to CMU (though even then, I don't begrudge these researchers their new and good salaries).