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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

50-90k...wow. For people with so much promise to advance human welfare to be worth less to society than an entry web dev salary in a decent market speaks volumes.

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Yep. I harp on this all the time: science is a bad career choice. There are an abundance of smart, fastidious, and tireless people eager to take their shot at the disciplines with the greatest potential to improve human life.

There is too much talent, too much willingness to self-sacrifice, too much competition, and far too much enthusiasm. Many scientists (myself included) wouldn't stop if they were limitlessly wealthy... and because of this fact, we are not wealthy, and many have severe doubts about continuing onward because of the poor quality of life.

I never considered this angle -- the overabundance of talent and willingness to self-sacrifice. I thought the species was rare.

This is one of the reasons why gamedev jobs suck - especially lower level - who doesn't want to write stuff like realtime 3D graphics - majority would do it for free in their own time anyway.

Yes, the same phenomenon exactly. Even the end profits generated by labor of the game devs don't get redistributed back to them, as this isn't necessary to keep them producing games. Passion begets paupers.

> who doesn't want to write stuff like realtime 3D graphics

I love programming in my day job but I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic.

It's like saying, who doesn't want to work in hard math problems while extremely time constrained all day? There are people who would love it, but I don't understand how can there be an overabundance of them.

What I'm trying to say is it's one of the more fun/rewarding fields so most of the people who get in to it do it for fun - getting a job is just a way to get paid while doing it. Unfortunately having a bunch of people willing to accept bad terms just to get to do what they like brings down the employee side of negotiation which is why I would never go in to game dev professionally - it's waay easier to go in to web or enterprise and it has way more jobs, better career path, better work environment, better pay. Game dev and stuff like scientific computing is way more fun and challenging.

That really sucks man. As a software dev I would say I've met some good people in your position and you guys are extremely smart.

You could easily pick up web dev stuff or something similar for a few years to save up and then go back to your passion.

Or even do it on the side

I can relate, I just dropped from medschool to pursue an MSc in CS without thesis. The reason? Everyone convinced me that I'll have a better life as an engineer. I gave up my dreams for personal comfort and I'm probably not the only one.

Don't give up the faith man. Do whatever you have to do to eat, but folks like you are the only long-term hope the species has.

Different people, different strokes.

I got really bored working on e-commerce checkout funnels and A/B testing and constantly learning about new Javascript frameworks that churn out every year that does the same things over and over. With Coding Bootcamp churning out more CRUD people year by year, and JS frameworks and Agile automating web dev work to be like assembly-line; I found it to be both increasingly less financially secure and spiritually filling.

Genomics (for me personally) is more interesting; you get to learn a lot of statistics, biology and backend pipeline code. Also work environment in a lab is different, you have a lot more autonomy and you get to present your work and learn more about things in an academic/journal club/talks setting vs. the typical IT/Software Agile morning standup's. Not to mention the field is constantly changing, new sequencing technologies and new search algorithms are published constantly.

The salary for post-doc's is at that range. A research scientist or a software developer at least if you land at a well-funded place or BigPharma is about the same as a software developer (100-130K). I got out of the web-dev game a year ago; and I think while I am no longer on the cutting edge of the latest React.js/Node technology, I picked up new skills in concurrency, messaging system and machine learning (HMM, SVM, clustering etc) building whole genome annotation/analysis pipelines.

It has worked out for my personality but I have plenty of friends who get excited about doing new iOS and JS languages/frameworks so I respect that too (but not for me).

Curious...how did you make the transition knowledge-wise and professionally?

> 50-90k...wow. For people with so much promise to advance human welfare to be worth less to society than an entry web dev salary in a decent market speaks volumes.

It basically depicts in stark contrasts what our true priorities are. Not what we pretend we value, but what we do value in reality.

Sorry if it sounds cynical, but I see no other conclusion.

Nobody gets paid based on how we value the work they do. It's supply vs. demand.

You can have relatively unskilled labor paid a lot if there aren't many people and very skilled labor paid little if there are a lot of them. It shouldn't be surprising.

"Demand" is just another name for what we, collectively, value and desire to acquire.

Pg talked about "measurement and leverage."Please see this http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html You don't get paid really well just because you do anything fancy.There is a reason why Larry Page and Sergey Brin dumped PhD for industry.

The implication is that their de facto salary is higher than that figure by some amount, due to their innate enjoyment of what they're doing. I think jobs with high innate enjoyment (teaching) often end up having a lower de jure salary than jobs with similar requirements but that have very low innate enjoyment (oil rig worker).

Here is another interesting data point - Taylor Swift has been making a million dollars a day this year so far, and she is on track for 365 mil by the end of this year. She will make in 2 hours what these PhDs will make in one full year

As a society, we sure have interesting priorities ...

Do you actually have a relevant point? You are comparing apples to walnuts. Sure, a handful of entertainers make a lot of money because they make a little from a lot of people. However, most entertainers make very little money. As a society we don't pay you more to be a struggling actor, singer, or comedian.

As a very experienced web guy working in India thats a big amount.

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