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Comment by pbz | Hacker News Reader

How much is the difference between academia and industry? Can you share some numbers or ranges?

Tenure-track professors in computer science at top universities get paid about 100,000 to 250,000. You can look this up publicly because

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.

You're setting the bar for hiring faculty members far too high. Perhaps you mean tenured CS faculty? (Source: Stanford faculty in the process of moving to Google Research)

Brand-new CS assistant professor hires at any research-intensive CS department (there are ~80 of these schools in the U.S.) probably come in around $100k right now (as arjun said, many salaries are public) ... now that's a 9-month salary, so if you get grants to fund your summers (which you will if you're in the groove), that's a starting of $133k annual. That's not bad, considering most of these schools are located in low-ish cost of living areas. Of course, there are no stock options, huge bonuses, and other lavish benefits of industry, but it's definitely still a financially privileged position.

I meant that the parent's analysis in his footnote of what the minimum position and starting salary would be for a faculty member to ever move is setting the bar too high; it seems my wording was vague. His academic numbers seem spot on, but I question footnote [3].

What would you expect appropriate bands to be, then? For tenured/non-tenured faculty?

Given that most academics have, almost by definition, previously prioritized their work environment over their salary, one shouldn't even assume that an academic receives an (immediate) multiple factor raise by making the transition.

225k starting?! Holy cow... so grad students that go on to work as a research scientist at Google literally increase their salary by an order of magnitude. That's crazy.

Just to be clear, that was year 1 total comp, not base salary.

yep, but if you're good (e.g., a deep learning expert nowadays) and work on mission-critical, visible projects at a company with rising stock prices (Google, FB, etc.), i'm sure you can sustain $200k total comp each year as a fresh Ph.D. grad.

Jesus christ.

The amount of money BS graduates make at Google is giving me a complex.

You want to really feel bad about yourself? I have a friend that makes $75k base + $75k in bonus each year. He also has stock that nets around $450k every 3 years. So all in comp per year he makes roughly $300,000. Did I mention he's 23 with no experience (BS degree to boot)?

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.

Is he at least an excellent programmer? That kind of comp makes me want to uproot everything and go to SV.

If it makes you feel any better, the rationalization I apply to those Google/FB salaries (total comp.) is that I'm fairly confident that I will never be able to work at either of those companies. And I am at peace with that since working in this technology industry bubble, allows me to work with my mind and with talented people with diverse interests and appreciate how fortunate I am to have the ability to have what I do have - not what I don't have.

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