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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

> A third big name in the field, the roboticist Pieter Abbeel, made $425,000, though he did not join until June 2016, after taking a leave from his job as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Those figures all include signing bonuses.

425k after signing bonus is probably closer to 300-350k base + annual bonus, which feels low for someone in such a distinguished position (close to a typical specialized physician or big tech software engineer with 5-10 years of experience). After finishing my masters degree in machine learning in the mid-2000s, I immediately got job offers higher than my much more talented professors. To me, the real story is that academia has set the compensation bar low for people adding so much value.

Edit: to be clear I know these salaries are high and people in my field are lucky to be making so much. But I also don’t think it’s accurate that people in the field are overpaid, which titles like OP may make it seem.

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Yeah its really not that high. I was reading the Ian Goodfellow, creator of GANs, was only making 800k at google. Which is honestly, really low for someone who has done ground breaking research in neural networks.

He’s not the only person making ground breaking research in neural networks.

You can walk into NIPS and find a handful of other researchers that perform at or better in this space.

Yeah that’s pretty insulting, honestly. Black or Sholes were making >10m as thought leaders in banks. It’s surprising to me that finance is so passe as a career despite the fact, as Matt Levine said, “they are run as employee run co-ops.” In otherwords, big big money. Entry level analysts at my old firm were making over 250k total comp.

Didn’t Black & Sholes win a Nobel Prize? I don’t think it’s fair to compare their pay to that of “mere” experts, even in the same field.

Scholes & Merton also joined a hedge fund that traded based on their models and cased a financial crash after the Russian bond default in 1998 which their models didn't take into account. Great example of a black swan event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

It's only a black swan event if you pay no attention to geopolitics, which unfortunately banking types don't, at least not beyond WSJ/FT headlines.

A more accurate statement would be that most fund managers care about geopolitics too much, and quants too little.

People in tech generally have no clue of how much money gets made in finance

Just put your hand in the giant rushing river of money and see what sticks...

The oyster farmer eats more oysters than everyone else. The money farmer eats more money than anyone else.

> People in tech generally have no clue of how much money gets made in finance

People in everything have no clue. Nothing to do with tech people being ignorant.

Wow, that's it? I mean that's a lot (objectively compared to most people's compensation), but I think my skip manager makes that much...

*Cries in fortune 500 wage slave

That's the difference between working for a company vs. starting a company, the lower risk of being an employee comes at a high price unfortunately.

Context is always important. At the end of the day it is about what value you bring to the table. If the work fits your experience and capabilities well, charging anything between $150 and $250+ per hour on a long term contract isn't out of the question, I've done it many time, with multi-year engagements. The best deal I did was some 25 years ago was substantially above that range.

Of course, part of it is being a good negotiator --and I am not the best by far.

Again, it is all about what one side needs vs. what the other side can deliver. You then add a context that includes such things as urgency, uniqueness of the problem to be solved, supply of practitioners with the required expertise as well as other dynamics (does the company need to meet a milestone ASAP?) and you have the makings of doing very well if you are in the right place, at the right time and with adequate negotiating skill.

Of course, if close such deals you have to be able to deliver the goods or you better start thinking about an alternative career.

Contract numbers shouldn't be directly compared to employee compensation numbers. A contractor has additional expenses and taxes and can have periods between contracts with nothing coming in, so needs to be making more money to have equivalent net income after taxes and expenses.

No difference in my experience. It's all part of the negotiation. I used "contract" as a general term rather than to mean just contract work.

Of course, I am talking about outliers here, that should be understood. In most of these cases it is, as I said, a right-place, right-time, right-skills circumstance, an alignment of the planets, if you will.

I've seen even crazier stuff. Back during the most heated phase of the internet bubble savvy guys were making outrageous deals. I remember one guy who wanted to charge $500 per hour if he worked from home and $800 if he had to come to the office...to complete a Visual Basic project. No, he was not hired. Wrong place/time/skills.

> , though he did not join until June 2016

So his effective salary is double that.

I think people are supposed to report their salary with the stock price at grant, not after appreciation (at least on levels.fyi). But yea it's a lot more because google stock is half their comp and it keeps doubling every 3-4 years.

I’m from Levels.fyi. We actually request users to report compensation with appreciation. This is because the appreciation can actually be used to negotiate compensation elsewhere and provides a more accurate picture.

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