Maybe universities should consider paying more to compete with the tech companies. It's a free market and whatnot. If the price goes up, you gotta pay more. Complaining about the price going up isn't exactly productive.
To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
a) California state employee salaries are online [1]
b) UC Berkeley is a top school for CS professors and competitive with everyone else on salaries. Looking at random AI faculty members shows about 100k at hiring, about 150k at tenure, while machine learning king of kings Michael I Jordan gets 300k.
Google pays starting undergrads > 160k, and fresh PhD students > 225k[2] (all in comp including first year vesting stock + base pay + expected 15% bonus). I imagine if they're poaching faculty, they're getting significantly more than that[3].
Basically I'd say the industry salaries are at least 2x the academic salaries, if not higher. The flagship hires are paid a lot more (think Yann LeCun, or Andrew Ng), and importantly, given the freedom to hire and build mini-empires to do stuff.
As a final note, I know talking about salaries publicly is awkward, but this is all public information, and grad students talk freely about this sort of stuff with each other, so I don't feel like I'm revealing anything super secret beyond showing you how to look up the relevant information in publicly available areas.
[1]: (http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...)
[2]: Source: Glassdoor Google for "research scientist", which is the position that PhDs in AI/ML are hired into.
[3]: Google levels are public, and while Glassdoor data is sparse, faculty who are poached are hired at at least the "senior staff engineer" level, which glassdoor says about 500k, which sounds around right to me, if not a little low. As an aside, salaries at the higher levels have much higher variance than at the lower levels, and to entice someone away from a tenured position probably requires hitting the higher ends of the salary band.
The amount of money BS graduates make at Google is giving me a complex.
I guess the shitty part is that he has to live in SV and work for Facebook. I'd be tempted to take an offer for $300k, but having to work at Facebook makes it almost not worth it. So I guess the comp matches the job.
It's just strange how much of gap there is for SEs and developers (or anyone in tech for that matter). You could be making $75k in the midwest working on something important and living pretty comfortably (if you have a spouse with income). Or you could be making $300k with less experience working at Facebook on some feature that'll never see the light of day. You're barely scraping by because the $2mm mortgage on your 1200 sqft house is killing you.
Over the past ten years I've seen my alma mater replace almost a third of its campus with brand new buildings 2 to 3 times the size of the old ones, and it has plans to replace almost half its campus by 2025 (its plan is a public document). The buildings it replaced were starting to show their age a bit, but they were still plenty usable (one building legitimately had health code violations. Ironically, it's one of the buildings that still hasn't been demolished yet).
Meanwhile tuition there has more than doubled in less than ten years. Some of that is due to the government reducing its subsidy, but a good chunk of it is going into these massive construction projects.
Some of that money can go to better salaries for professors getting lured by higher salaries elsewhere, surely (although I do worry more of it will go to administration salaries instead).
Whining about losing employees because you aren't willing to pay enough (or offer enough ancillary benefits to augment your pay), especially when your tuitions are astronomical anyway, just comes across as arrogant, and they deserve to lose their best people.