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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

I'm being facetious, this is not at all true. At my company, we typically look for multiple major publications and you certainly don't get a million dollar job out of it.

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Then the people who come to your company could probably do better elsewhere if money is all they care about. You work at Cruise am I right? I know someone personally who worked at Cruise who was making 7 figures. That sort of compensation is just not that unusual anymore.

But I've learned that money isn't everything the hard way. However, if you're whining about being underpaid, there's something you can do about it. There are plenty of solid reasons not to however especially if you enjoy your current gig and they're paying you sufficiently that you have a promising future. Money truly isn't everything.

I don’t doubt that either people could do better elsewhere or that someone makes a million dollars, but it’s disingenuous to claim that “If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain” when this is not true by most measures. It might happen to some people but “pretty easy” implies most fresh PhDs could do this.

I think you are embodying the notion "You miss all the shots you don't take." You're right that most fresh PhDs cannot do this (I did say top 5%). But I think we disagree as to why. You seem to think these positions do not exist and I know otherwise because I've been on both sides of the very same hiring process for which they do exist. The reason most new PhDs won't get them is because they lack the career experience to navigate the interview process to such a position. I'd love to see a world where someone teaches them those skills while they're still in academia. I sure could have used that.

I also know because the day I left academia myself long ago was a major payday for me. Finally, I know because people like Andrei Karpathy pulled it off because of his excellent communication skills, intelligence and the right background. And people like Mu Li pulled it off by associating themselves with an academic who who helped found AWS AI and in his case he landed a principal engineering position straight out of school. That's the sort of position one usually only gets after one to two decades of job experience.

Can we just agree to disagree here?

Interesting that you mention about Andrej Karpathy. I've long wondered about his meteoric rise. No doubt he's intelligent, but there's definitely more to the story. What do you think it is? Is it majorly because of the right timing and being under the right profs? His blog? His class? I'm currently a grad student. So if I want to replicate even an iota of it, how do I do it?

I think the turning point for him was his excellent presentation in the first youtube broadcast of cs231. If I remember correctly he was getting seven-figure offers before he even graduated from Stanford. I do not know him personally and I doubt I will ever meet him but we did compete for the same position at Tesla and I lost to a very worthy opponent. my only regret is that the final interview would have been with Elon Musk himself and I would have loved to meet him.

Oh wow, very interesting. Are you a PhD who works in this area too?

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