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Comment by timrpeterson | Hacker News Reader

Except, they treat their researchers like total crap. Taking 2/3 of all grant money for overhead? Salaries for 45 year olds with 20 years of experience that are the same or worse as 25 year old with zero experience in private sector. Publish or perish? This whole thing you say these schools focus on, research? Pathetic. And trust me I know I've been at all the top schools and am now a professor.

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It's strange to me that you're a professor but the things you're saying aren't true. The 2/3 grant money thing I think you are talking about indirect costs? That's not money off the top of received grants, it's computed like a tip, where when you receive $1 of grant funding, the university receives $0.66. And only on non-equipment, non-tuition (for funding students) items. So it usually works out to being about 35%.

And Ivy League universities pay their faculty quite well, especially in computer science. I don't know of any cases where a entry-level software engineer is paid even close to what a full computer science professor makes on even their 9-month salary.

This makes me ask, have you really "been at all the top schools and am now a professor"? I feel like any assistant professor would know these things.

Let's make sure to compare apples to apples, even when discounting the 9-month salary (no CS professor truly gets the summer off, that isn't how the academy functions):

* Entry-level software engineers have 0 months experience.

* Full professors in CS have 5 yrs of a Ph.D., and perhaps 2-4 years of postdoctoral experience, and 5-7 years of professorial work.

Totally agree the comparison isn't equal. But what I'm saying is that the 9-month salary is already way higher than an industry salary. If they worked the 3 summer months funded by a grant, it's like getting a 33% bonus on top of their 9-month salary.

Yes I grant you the point about a 9-month salary, that's what I meant by discounting: to take into account.

The main point remains, you cannot compare someone with 10-15 years post-college experience with a new hire. It's absurd.

Yes. Cmon man. You're being overly literal. I'm just starting as a professor in biomedical sciences, where you probably know the terribleness reaches its peak. I'm also nearing 40 so the duration of "training" required is also a total bullahit factor especially in my area.

The general point is true: the financial incentives in academia are blatantly terrible. The quality of what's produced isn't much better. So this whole thing about universities being all about their research missions? Sadly for all those hundreds of billions the hedge funds are generating, produces a depressingly small output.

Okay, fair enough. Sorry for being a bit antagonistic. I guess I'm just a lot less pessimistic about academia, having worked in industry before as well. The financial part isn't as good as it could be for what we think we do, but I feel that it's a nice institution in many ways. A lot of lifetime academics don't appreciate the flexibility they get in terms of what they spend their time on, how they do their work, who they work with, etc.

Thanks for saying this. I agree the flexibility is huge. Pay for freedom! (Or rather don't get paid, :)

Coming from an outsider, having heard about how much sifting there is in Academia, couldn't that be because there's more people that want to be researchers than there are research positions? Someone who works in a sub-field without private sector research positions and with post-docs pushing up against them doesn't seem to be in the strongest negotiating position.

I do agree however that it is messed up.

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