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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

This comes up a lot: everyone has some "skills" that transfer from one domain to another. Read an interview with a titan of industry and they will invariably bring up the willingness to get up early and work hard that s/he "learned" from the paper route. The CEO of the studio "learned" to network from being in the mailroom and so on. In theory, almost any job can give you some transferable skills. A PhD may give you many more than most.

I know if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, can communicate, analyze and so forth. I have enormous respect for PhDs, and believe they can deliver enormous value. But they are not the same kind of hire as an MBA.

What is the difference between a PhD and an MBA? I think to me it captures the single most important attribute that you cannot pick up directly: what people care about.

The thing about an MBA is, they really enjoy this "business stuff." They like thinking about markets, the customer, costs, finance, how to cross-sell, how to avoid dilution and the like. Its not just that the skills are different (though they are), it is that the interests are different.

Source: comp sci PhD student who switched to an MBA.

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I don't think these articles are written for CS PhDs, who are an exceptional class of PhDs.

First, CS PhDs can ALWAYS get tenure-track academic jobs. Maybe not at a top R1, but getting a university teaching job in CS is not some sort of prize. Quite the opposite. Most non-phd-granting institutions with sub-billion endowments struggle to hire CS faculty (they pay sub-100K, sometimes as low as 65K... if you go that route in CS, your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig). So there's no "oh no plan B" fear. You don't need to be reassured your PhD wasn't a waste after failing to get any sort of academic post, because if you lower your expectations enough you will get an academic post. This is NOT true in nearly any other field.

2. CS PhDs, with a few exceptional subfields, are in high demand. It's pretty reasonable to expect 300K out of a top CS PhD program; the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that. CS PhDs who choose industry don't need to be reassured that their PhD has value. It's reflected in their compensation.

CS PhDs can ALWAYS get tenure-track academic jobs. Maybe not at a top R1, but getting a university teaching job in CS is not some sort of prize.

You got to be kidding. Competition for CS tenure track positions is insane. At my school, which is ranked around 50 in the nation, you would have to be pretty outstanding to get it (most candidates were from top-5 schools, in hottest fields, with many strong publications). I’ve heard such numbers as 100 candidates for a single spot.

> At my school, which is ranked around 50 in the nation

Top 50 on US News & World Report or CS Rankings means you're at a very good R1 institution. At #50, your institution is ranked ABOVE places like Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, RIT, Syracuse, Clemson, ...

You do realize that the USA has nearly 4,000 colleges, right?

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the CS rankings in US News, you reach Walden University at #186. Which means the colleges that US news even bothers to rank in CS constitute less than 1% of the total number of colleges in the US. And you're at a place that's in the top third of the <1%!!!

When I say academic CS jobs are easy to get, I'm referring to jobs at the >3,500 US higher ed institutions that aren't even included in US New's CS rankings.

Again, in fields like Mathematics or Biology even TT jobs at unranked/low ranked places are non-trivial to secure.

That’s funny because I’m at Tulane and they can’t seem to hire or retain worth shit.

If I had to guess, OP is at an institution in the northeast/west/Chicago. Academic CS recruiting in the south and in mid-tier cities is typically more difficult (some of that might be preference, but the big thing is two body problems. I love New Orleans but can't imagine solving an academic two body problem there is particularly easy).

For anyone wondering: the two body problem is a phenomenon that happens when two academics marry. They both want an academic job together, at the same institution preferably, but there's usually only enough room for 1. What many couples do to solve this is accept postdocs at different universities (because there's a two body problem for post docs too, so you can't usually find 2 postdoc positions at the same institution), and then wait around until they can find two assistant professorship openings at the same institution.

Sometimes if the candidate is really good, one department will ask another to make room for another faculty there. But that can be a political nightmare. Or if both researchers are in the same field e.g. CS, then the department might have to hire both even if they really only would take the one.

It's quite a problem for hiring.

> two body problem

You mean a spouse also on an academic track?

Yes. (Not just academic. Any specialized professional track outside of Medicine/Law.)

To give a different anecdote: at my school which is ranked closer to 100, we got 40 applicants, of which about 15 meet basic qualifications we're looking for (have a PhD, in the right field, have any kind of publication record, have ever taught a class). And I think we are doing pretty well compared to some places, since we're in a major coastal city and have a relatively light teaching load for a non-R1 place (2/2). A lot of places have been outright failing their CS faculty searches in the past few years, and I think more than usual will fail this year.

> 40 applicants... about 15 meet basic qualifications we're looking for... 2/2 load... major coastal city

Wow. Things are even worse than I thought. Your institution sounds like the rare type of place that shouldn't have a problem hiring. Good luck with your search.

> have a PhD, in the right field, have any kind of publication record, have ever taught a class

Most places with a teaching load higher than 3/2 dropped all three of those requirements from their job ads years ago.

They need CS lecturers all the way down to the worst college in the country. Hundreds and hundreds of departments. Everyone applies to the top, but they filter down, and if you look at who’s teaching at the lowest they clearly aren’t superstars and it wouldn’t take much to compete with them.

Even in non-CS STEM fields, there are a ton of industry jobs. Many of the students in my doctoral cohort went for industry jobs, and almost all of them are making good money (over 120k annually) and are generally happy in their careers. The problem from what I hear from them is the tendency to be slotted into super-technician roles where you are in charge of a single piece of specialized equipment. People tend to stagnate in such jobs (even though the compensation is often really generous), and such people often find themselves struggling after a decade.

However, I think it's not the Ph.D. that is not the problem - instead, it's the postdoc. While a Ph.D. is a terminal degree associated with prestige and career advancement, the outcome of postdoctoral training is far more diffuse. It ostensibly prepares you for academia yet often fails to teach essential academic skills like writing grants as the sole PI. The funnel is also really narrow, and many postdocs transition to industry after a few years - often in a very similar role and salary that they would have got straight out of their doctoral training anyway.

As a postdoc, I really feel this comment. However, a lot of people I know do postdocs since its essentially become a requirement for many industry jobs, and getting a job right after PhD is becoming harder & harder. I know people who got industry jobs (pharma) at the salary band you mentioned after 6 years of postdoctoral experience.

What’s the stigma against postdoc in the US? I don’t get it?

In the UK a postdoc is the first job after your PhD. You obviously aren’t going to get a professorship for a couple of decades, and will be too junior for a lectureship as well, so you have to do something in between. What do you do if not a postdoc?

The problem is we train way more PhDs than there are tenure track positions available. Most PhDs won’t be lucky enough to get one of those academic positions, and a postdoc is just delaying the inevitable transition to an industrial job. Postdocs are for all-star students with a good academic pedigree and publishing track record who have a good shot at tenure. People who were less then that (such as myself) are often better served starting their career outside academia.

From a pragmatic perspective that is how the calculus worked for me. It’s probably where the stigma arises from as well. Although I wish it weren’t like that, I never thought the purpose of a college/university education should be so limited to ‘job training’ (that’s what trade schools are for). That’s the American perspective, anyways.

> a postdoc is just delaying the inevitable transition to an industrial job

I don’t understand why - are postdoctoral jobs age-limited or something? Why can’t you keep doing them?

I think the point parent is trying to make is that the majority of postdocs will move to an industry job simply because that's where most of the jobs are, even if they'd prefer to remain in academia.

While postdoctoral jobs aren't age limited, they are defined in the US as a temporary training position, and it's not possible to remain a postdoc for very long. The vast majority of postdocs in the US are foreign nationals, on a visa scheme that limits their stay to a theoretical maximum of 5 years. The salary is low enough that it dissuades postdocs from remaining in these positions for very long anyway. Some institutions may support transitioning senior postdocs to a more semi-permanent "associate" position, but that's not usually the case. The visa scheme also disallows postdocs from applying for a green card (while maintaining status), which complicates matters further.

The thing is, a postdoc is a classic case of credential inflation. You don't really need a postdoc, especially if an industry job is your goal. The purpose of an academic postdoc is to strictly increase the items in your CV to make you more marketable for academic employment. Industries are hiring senior postdocs strictly because more postdocs are applying for such jobs. And this is a side effect of poor mentorship in academia in general, with freshly minted PhDs drifting into postdocs just because.

Very few graduate students think seriously about their destination during their doctoral program and are happy to be in the lab all day meeting goals their advisor sets out for them. And advisors are also happy to let this be the state of affairs since you are getting highly trained, motivated workers for pennies. This passivity starts dissipating only during a postdoc and not always. Poor mentorship can be excused in industry, but this is inexcusable when academics are paid to be mentors; it's literally in a professor's job description. NSF/DOE/NIH grants all have significant mentorship sections - and they are there for a reason.

Exactly. But this is very variable across fields. In CS or Math, it is feasible to get a tenure-track position or the equivalent in industry without a postdoc.

In Biology for instance, inflation is so insane that most tenure-track positions demand you have significant postdoctoral experience. Same applies to many industry jobs.

> In Biology for instance, inflation is so insane that most tenure-track positions demand you have significant postdoctoral experience.

“Senior job demands significant work experience” what am I misunderstanding?

The issue is the inflation of requirements in some fields due to competition. A postdoc is generally understood to be further training in running your own lab as a PI - you might manage and guide doctoral students, for example, or learn how to write and apply for grants. With that in mind, a lot of people are happy to commit to a few years of postdoctoral work. In some fields, however, the extreme shortage of tenure track positions has made very long postdoctoral stints a requirement, rather than as something to sweeten the deal. Like others have pointed out, in CS a PhD is enough to get you a tenure track academic position, while industry jobs abound. Meanwhile, in biology I commonly see 5+ years of postdoc experience being typical just to be in the consideration for an industry job that 10 years ago would have happily hired a fresh PhD. The general thinking is that a postdoc only makes sense if you want an academic position, but the glut of PhDs in the market has pushed up the requirements for all kinds of jobs.

I still don’t really get it sorry - why isn’t being a postdoctoral research assistant a valid career by itself?

I know people who don’t want to teach or lead a group or work in industry so they do postdoctoral RA work. That’s their career. Why’s that not seen as a valid thing to do in the US? People are saying ‘because you might not get tenure.’ Ok but not everyone wants that career.

Because it's time limited. National lab postdocs are valid only upto 5 years from PhD. Many grants won't fund you if you are X years since PhD.

That's why the position of Research Assistant Professors exist - the way around the postdoc time limit loophole.

However, RAPs are significantly more expensive than postdocs, which is why faculty are more eager to phase out senior postdocs and hire fresh blood rather than convert them to RAPs.

In my experience, if it's research that gets you up in the morning then a postdoc is the sweet-spot - you're experienced enough to make good progress but not too senior that you're sat in meetings all day. It's just a shame the salary is so bad you're almost forced to move on.

> It's just a shame the salary is so bad you're almost forced to move on.

UC Berkeley, for example, pays its postdocs $60k to $65k per year. It's challenging to live in the Bay Area for that money. Also, remember many postdocs have kids or are planning to have one. Child care is at least $2000 a month in the Bay Area. Asking bright, motivated individuals to delay their life decisions in pursuit of ill-defined scientific ideals is something I have a tough time defending.

Another issue (at least here) is that most positions are limited to 3-4 years and permanent positions in academia are quite rare and hard to get.

This is why I am so pissed off at academic hypocrisy currently. Labs were shut down for months. For what? To protect whom? The senior faculty who did their Ph.D. in the early eighties and refuses to transition to emeritus status?

Junior researchers were absolutely shortchanged in the pandemic shutdown, and nobody is bothered about it. For all the talk about keeping people safe, why were younger scientists denied access to experimental facilities, and yet almost no funding agencies extended grant contracts? Almost zero institutions extended their timed postdoc contracts too. And to add insult to the injury, most academic institutions had hiring freezes in 2020, effectively kiboshing careers of young scientists caught in this trap.

Honestly, I am disgusted with university faculty right now - all fancy talk, no action.

An example of the hypocrisy: a prominent university in the Boston area that announced that they will suspend on campus childcare from January. Labs are still open, and the population of lab workers most likely to have benefited from on campus childcare were postdocs. Now they have to find at home childcare at their own expense. Postdocs also tend to be overwhelmingly foreign nationals who want to avoid rocking the boat.

Some hiring freezes have actually continued even to today. I applied to one postdoctoral fellowship in the Bay Area in March 2020, and the organization still sends me a monthly update that they have suspended all hiring due to the pandemic and will resume hiring once the pandemic is over (as ill-defined as that may be). That's almost two years at this point. That is a lifetime for young scientists. I agree that decisions like these do effectively end the scientific careers of many young scientists, or at least push them out of science as a career choice. It's sad but true.

Thing is - we don't really know at this point whether this wilful destruction of the scientific careers of a cohort were avoidable or not. And zero scientific administrators will face zero consequences for this.

Whatever it is, the reverse will actually be trotted out, scientists saved lives and pat themselves on their backs.

Higher ed is an industry in crisis. Get out and be happy that you realized this before it was too late to leave that hell hole of a sector. The grass is greener. I promise.

If CS PhD's are an exceptional class then I think it's only by virtue of supply & demand. There are a larger # of opportunities in industry, and they often pay better.

As for students earning 3x your income, it seems like you're taking the lowest paid professors and comparing to the highest paid grads. The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k then you're probably not walking into a $200k+ job on graduation except as an extreme outlier. Those students aren't going to a school with the name recognition required to easily open doors for entry-level $200k positions.

Many liberal arts schools pay everyone like they are liberal arts professors. So they have impossible time hiring people in valuable professional fields like CS and statistics. They still can get solid students though. Disproportionately locals and by offering scholarships. Also prior hot areas like "data science" and security indeed led to a lot of insane starting salary stories ($300k+) for merely-above-average students from meh schools with exactly the right skills. Even the median starting salaries in hot areas have been surprisingly high for a while.

> If CS PhD's are an exceptional class then I think it's only by virtue of supply & demand. There are a larger # of opportunities in industry, and they often pay better.

Well of course. What else would it be? Doesn't it always work out in life that the jobs you can get are the ones where they need you more than you need them?

> Many liberal arts schools pay everyone like they are liberal arts professors.

Presumably, you mean something like “arts and humanities” the second time you say “liberal arts”, since the liberal arts include the natural sciences (both life and physical), social sciences, mathematics (including, among other things, computer science), arts, and humanities.

Nah, I think "liberal arts" fits the bill. Including natural sciences. In contrast to the professional colleges: Law/Business/Medicine/Engineering (which CS should be at-parity with).

Of course LACs don't have law schools or med schools or (usually) engineering colleges, so the difficulty of properly compensating CS is understandable with respect to those fields.

However, LACs do tend to have Finance/Accounting, and often pay folks in those departments better, but for whatever reason don't treat their CS faculty like their Finance faculty. My own pet theory for this market mismatch is that finance/business types tend to dominate those college's boards. LAC boards have a lot of older folks who still think of CS as code monkeying.

You can be a "liberal arts" professor yet get paid like a professor in a professional department.

Many schools have CS under engineering which pays a lot more.

> it's only by virtue of supply & demand

Absolutely. I never meant to imply otherwise. Worth mentioning that this will be true for a while though.

> The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k

I have first-hand knowledge about 3 such institutions, all of which place at least one student in a position that pays >$150K every year. Perhaps shy of 3x but higher than 2x for sure. Averages tend to be around 90K (pulled down by people who choose to go to grad school).

> Those students aren't going to a school with the name recognition required to easily open doors for entry-level $200k positions.

But they do receive fantastic educations, because they are at teaching-oriented institutions and get hand-held through their pre-career years (internship placement, interviewing skills, etc. are all coached 1:1).

The basic issue is that administrators at lower-tier institutions haven't yet flipped the switch where "CS = Finance/Accounting". They continue to hope and dream that their mathematics faculty can pick up the slack, as if it's still the 80s/early 90s and CS hasn't blossomed into its own highly specialized field.

>place at least one student in a position that pays >$150K every year.

That's pretty much what I mean by it being an outlier: it's not the norm.

>But they do receive fantastic educations, because they are at teaching-oriented...

That's hit or miss: Anyone that's highly self-motivated will do fine at most schools. One prof I had was at best disinterested. They basically summarized chapters on the chalkboard. Their apathy in answering questions went a long way towards discouraging questions in the first place. It was a shame too because their personal research was interesting: 3-dimensional computer vision. Unfortunately this was a foundation course too. I did fine, but other students that were excited about CS yet had no exposure to it before college ended up with C/D/F grades and were either setup for ever tougher times when the work got harder or simply left the program. (Computers were still expensive at that time and the dot com bubble was still building, so it was pretty common for students to arrive enthusiastic about the new tech field but completely without prior exposure to it. Maybe things are better today).

> The truth is, if you're at a school where the CS program only pays faculty $65k then you're probably not walking into a $200k+ job on graduation except as an extreme outlier.

Only because they're not located in the "$200k+ starting" job market. If they move to SF then they're immediately worth that much.

Thankfully the jobs are diffusing across America now.

Most academic professors in CS are mentoring much more than one PhD students over the course of their academic careers, yes? Therefore, as with other academic disciplines, the ratio of academic tenure-track job openings to new PhD's looking for academic jobs is >> 1, even if you look at industry demand for PhD's.

> yes?

No. The trope you're repeating here has some truth in the humanities and some natural sciences, but it's not true in CS.

Industry has a veracious appetite for CS PhDs. Only 40% of PhDS stay in academia, and of those only a fraction take jobs at universities that grant PhDs. Tenured CS professors somewhat leave for industry at much higher rates than other fields.

Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollments have surged without a corresponding increase in PhD enrollment.

Multiple sources of demand are surging, but supply is waning.

From a CRA report on the subject:

The demand for PhD’s in computer science (CS) in the US continues to outpace the supply. Both industry and academia struggle to fill positions. Since 2014, approximately 2000 CS PhDs have been awarded annually and about 60% of new PhD graduates take jobs in industry [ZwBi19]. The rapid growth in undergraduate CS enrollments during the last decade has significantly increased the number of open faculty positions at academic institutions, but has so far not led to an increase in the number of PhDs graduated.

Historically, US PhD programs have relied heavily on international students. Figure 1 shows the number of CS PhDs awarded annually to domestic and international students since 1985. The percentage of domestic PhD students graduating decreased from 69% in 1985 to 37% in 2018.

The reliance on international students to drive innovation and leadership in computing research in the US has become unstable as international students increasingly face obstacles or disincentives to study in the US, and an increasing number return home to attractive opportunities after graduation from a US university. Moreover, some areas of computing have security implications that make positions in those areas inaccessible to non-US nationals. The continuing demand for PhDs in computer science combined with this instability of international student participation requires bold action to increase the number of domestic students completing a PhD in computer science.

https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Addressing-Nation...

So... Why don't CS PhD's get together to do what medical doctors do and form a cartel to further limit the number of PhDs that are granted each year?

The current supply/demand imbalance sounds like the perfect leverage to get the ball rolling. Institutions that don't play ball could be boycotted.

A good number of specialties in medicine have a median income in the upper two thirds of the six digit range. It seems like limiting production of CS PhDs could be equally lucrative.

> A good number of specialties in medicine have a median income in the upper two thirds of the six digit range. It seems like limiting production of CS PhDs could be equally lucrative.

Probably not. Industry would route around the PhD system. Academia would just hire folks with masters degrees as ad juncts.

In order for such a scheme to work, you need a licensing regime. If anyone could practice medicine at any hospital by passing an on-site interview, the AMA would have substantially less power.

> Most academic professors in CS are mentoring much more than one PhD students over the course of their academic careers, yes?

Let's take a look at this oft-repeated claim. If we consider the Taulbee CS department survey [0], we can see the breakdown of the CS faculty population. Based on the survey, we see 32% are old-guard full professors, 16% associate professors, 20% assistant professors, 20% teaching faculty, 5% research faculty, and 5% postdocs. These are all positions with a PhD as a requirement.

This tells us that about 49% of the CS department faculty has tenure, while 51% is either working toward it or will never have it. Within that 51% there's a lot of churn. Many in that group will fail to achieve tenure. Others will work for a 3-5 year contract and move on afterward.

That's also not to say that tenured faculty never quit. Some leave academia for industry. Others go on sabbatical. Others leave for the NSF or some other institution. Others are poached by another department for a chair position. Some will leave once their spouse gets tenure at a superior institution. Others will go home to their native country.

So while it is true there are only so many positions, openings are happening all the time.

If you look at where CS PhDs are going after they graduate, we see that ~55% are going straight into industry, while only 30% are sticking around to find an academic job. This is a testament to the draw of industry in the CS field, and doesn't even capture the draw for faculty, which can be much stronger (much higher comps offered for experienced researchers as opposed to newly minted PhDs).

[0] https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2020-CRA-Taulbee-...

To your second point, most of the people I know who got a PhD (myself included, focus in operating systems) and went into industry didn’t clear $300k. Maybe it depends on your definition of top school though, this was around #14, plus or minus a bit.

By top I mean top 4 or so.

> your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig

Why are you making stuff up?

These sorts of careless lies, which are all too common, can be hard on young people in college, or considering college, or otherwise. They're either trying to value their potential education or wondering why the fuck they aren't getting the job offers they should be getting because so many are telling them their degree is the gateway to instant riches, and you're not helping.

> the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that.

Wrong in a very different way here. You should stop.

>> Why are you making stuff up?

I'm not.

Serious question: how many students and faculty currently at low-tier institutions have you talked with in the last two weeks? Two months? Two years? Do you sit on any boards or advisory panels at these types of institutions? Do you actively recruit from these types of institutions? I do. All of those things.

I know what I'm talking about. Stop being mean to me.

LACs pay junior faculty $65K and those faculty routinely place students in positions with >$150K total comp. These are facts, even at low tier colleges.

Every student? No. Some students every year? Absolutely. If you teach CS well and make $65K, almost all your students will make more than you do at their first position and many will make 2x-3x. More than enough that you'll start asking "why the hell am I here?"

> These sorts of careless lies...

This rant sounds extremely personal. Not going to touch this.

>> the total comp number for top-tier MBAs is about half of that.

> Wrong in a very different way here. You should stop.

Total comp out of a top CS PhD programs lately is around 200K-300K range with some outliers.

Total comp out of a top MBA program lately is around 100K-200K range with some outliers.

Average outcomes vary considerably. That's why my original post is properly conditioned on "top".

> LACs pay junior faculty $65K and those faculty routinely place students in positions with >$150K total comp. These are facts, even at low tier colleges.

You're leaving out a key fact, which is salary for academics is reported for 9-months, not 12.

Anyway, these stats are tracked for CS. We don't have to speculate or pull numbers out of the air. Here's the latest survey: https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2020-CRA-Taulbee-...

A 9 month salary of $65k would put you at the bottom 10% of teaching faculty in the nation. The 50th percentile is more like $82k, which is $109k annualized. If you start at $65k, I think by the time you actually graduate any students you should be making a lot more than that. And if you're not, there's got to be some other reason why you're not making a more representative salary.

But yes, in general academics can make less than the students they graduate. Many academics are okay with that because:

1. It's really hard to put a value on not having a boss in the traditional sense.

2. It's also hard to put a value on getting 3 months off in the summer and 1 month off in the winter every year.

Then again, I guess it's not hard to put a value on that: it's whatever they forego in extra salary working in industry. In that sense while the students earn more, they don't 10 paid weeks off + 11 weeks unpaid vacation in the summer.

Well, yeah, my entire point is that those $65K places fail to hire/retain, precisely because they can't/won't pay and consider the bottom of the CRA range insanely generous/competitive. Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that point. The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.

What the CRA survey doesn't tell you is that a huge percentage of CS departments just have failed searches year after year. (And, actually, there is some CRA-E report somewhere that laments the incredible difficulty of hiring in CS.)

I can see a scenario where $65k would be attractive. If it were some small college in the middle of nowhere with a 3/3 course load, that would be a very attractive position for some people. I bet when you look into it though, those schools want something like a 5/5 load with min 3 preps. No thank you.

> The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.

What else would you expect from a thread that has attracted a bunch of academics? :P

> If it were some small college in the middle of nowhere with a 3/3 course load, that would be a very attractive position for some people.

Can't imagine who. Maybe the childless? Or perhaps folks with trust funds.

> I bet when you look into it though, those schools want something like a 5/5 load with min 3 preps. No thank you.

3/3 was available pre-COVID. But the pandemic turbo-charged the MBAification of higher ed.

Today? Maybe you can find 4/4, but the high prep count is real. Oh, and you're definitely the chair at some point before tenure. These are like 50-60 hour weeks if you're doing the job well. Not worth the short summer off (during which you will... sit around in the middle of nowhere and pinch pennies if you happen to have a family)

>> The whole thread descended into pedantry about a multiple when everyone concedes the basic point.

> What else would you expect from a thread that has attracted a bunch of academics? :P

I visibly winced when a dean told me about the unique allure of life immersed in academia ;-D

> If you teach CS well and make $65K, almost all your students will make more than you do at their first position and many will make 2x-3x

"Many" is a weasel word that adds a different flavor to your original assertion that "your undergrads are making 3x your income at their first gig." What you're saying is still crazy hyperbole. I simply cannot imagine what your source of data is here. A randomly chosen google hit shows that the average starting salary for a new CS undergrad is around $68k, which seems about right.

It is still, if we're being honest, probably a bit humbling for a junior professor to be making the same as a new graduate. But you had to lean into the "2x-3x" hyperbole...

>> These sorts of careless lies...

> This rant sounds extremely personal. Not going to touch this.

Oh, touch it. Young people trying to gauge the profession, higher education, and its' costs are going to read your comments. They are entering what is often a lucrative profession but they are not going to be making three times as much as their teachers. Why make stuff up? It's not helping anybody.

> Total comp out of a top CS PhD programs lately is around 200K-300K range with some outliers.

> Total comp out of a top MBA program lately is around 100K-200K range with some outliers.

This would be a lot more compelling if you provided citations. The salary numbers someone else provided for the Stanford MBA program, numbers which you were dismissive of, included range, median, and mode, and those numbers were higher. But the numbers I (and I suspect, anyone involved in the profession) are likely to be most skeptical about are the numbers you're talking about for CS PhD new grads. Those people will often gravitate towards postdoc and teaching positions, while the Masters students will often gravitate towards FAANG jobs.

To be honest I would be delighted to learn that newly graduated CS PhDs from top programs are making, on average, as much as those entering industry with a Masters, since it would probably signal a lot more money being put towards research. I'm pretty sure the numbers you're talking about would have them making twice as much as the new Masters grads, which, again, great! I would be delighted to learn it's true.

[0] https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/compensation/computer-sci...

> "Many" is a weasel word

Yes.

> Adds color

Dude. Sometimes is also a qualifier. It's right there in my original quote. WTF is this conversation even about anymore?

This is getting unbelievably pedantic.

Look, it's a thing at the 3 institutions I advise for their CS faculty to make below-market wages and for their graduates to make above-average wages. I think this pattern of facts is uniquely common at lower tier LACs with CS PhD on faculty. Those institutions pay uniquely low rates for CS faculty, but the value of LAC-style 1:1 mentorship from a CS PhD is enormous and consistently results in better than average placements.

I didn't claim this is the base case. I used conditioning words. Sometimes. Up to. From first post on-wards.

you can call me a liar. Whatever. This is real phenomenon. These situations exist. You've even conceded my fundamental point about this subset of CS PhDs AFAICT: that the jobs are plentiful and not particularly attractive.

Next, you claimed Stanford MBAs make more than Stanford CS PhDs because some Stanford CS PhDs choose academia (and, yes, the Stanford CS PhDs who choose industry make more than their MBA counter-parts; go look at levels.fyi). That's all fine and well. Probably true. here's the thing, though. My top-most post in this thread explicitly preconditioned this branch of the conversation on "CS PhDs who choose industry". So at this point I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Clearly, we're so far down-thread that the plot is completely lost.

The pedantry is trying my patience. Go back and read my original post. Is there any aspect of that basic thesis that you actually disagree with in a substantive way?

> the salary numbers someone else provided for the Stanford MBA program, [...] and those numbers were higher.

Standford is widely-regarded as one of the very tippy-top MBA programs. The Economist ranks them #5 (but #1 in post-MBA earnings). FT ranks them #2 and US News and World Report ranks them #1.

If you listen to USNews, Stanford is the top business school and tied with three others for top CS school.

Average base salary plus expected performance bonus and signing bonus for Stanford MBA's: $270,394. Base starting salary $159,544, signing bonus $32,551. (https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/files-fpp/2...)

Average salary of a Stanford MS in CS: $153,400 (https://www.collegefactual.com/graduate-schools/stanford-uni...) Signing bonuses from 2016-2017 averaged $26,952. (https://wxkcg.com/content/234918) Plus stock.

> Average salary of a Stanford MS in CS

We're talking about PhDs.

I don't consider a PhD to be in any way equivalent to a MBA. As far as training goes, a PhD is about how to do research. The result often in fact is a step down in salary. Plus it seems to be very difficult to find any recent data on salaries.

This, from 2013 (!), says PhD salaries are about 15% more and signing bonuses are less. (https://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/10/22/salary-ranges-for-s...)

Right. But are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? Not to offend, but MBAs just seem like networking and drinking degrees to me, for people that love business. I've seen MBAs syllabuses: I've literally seen very basic things like "profit = revenue - cost" on slides. It seems like with MBAs it's almost entirely soft skills, no?

> are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer?

You are asking a genuine question that has a lot of backing research. Before I became a Quant, I was a student at the University of Chicago, getting the Masters in Financial Math. So the professor who taught the Options course at MSFM told us one day - Now I have to teach this same material to the MBA class, but at a 10,000 feet level.

One of the students asked him to elaborate. So he says - If you have a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest, then a UChicago Finance PhD is like 100. A UChicago MSFM is about 50. A UChicago MBA is like 10. A regular (non-UChicago) MBA is a 1.

More concretely, someone like me, the 50, can put up the Black Scholes on the blackboard from memory. I can derive it, solve it, code it up in C++ and price your options on a real equity & tell you whether you should buy/sell the damn thing. But that's as far as I was taught.

The Finance PhD i.e. the 100, can derive and solve not just the BS but a whole family of models - the Heston, Derman, SABR, BDT, HJM, HW etc etc - there's like a dozen of these PDEs & it gets seriously complicated very soon. So supposedly this Finance PhD can do all of that & more.

The UChicago MBA, which is the 10, knows Black Scholes, knows what the Greeks are & can eyeball the value of the Greek & tell you whether the option is overpriced or not, but can't derive/solve/code up the PDE.

The non-UChicago MBA has heard of something called the Black Scholes but that's about it.

Ofcourse that's his opinion & you should take it with a grain of salt. That said, during my time in the investment banking industry, I have worked with a boatload of MBAs, some quants(MSFMs) & a few PhDs - his opinions bore true.

This sounds like something a biased physics professor who values his own field more than others could also say about teaching quantum computing to financial math students. You don't need more than an overview and it's hard. What percentage of MBAs will need to analytically solve PDEs?

Ok. So to ask the original question again: are there any transferable hard skills in MBAs?

My experience too (in a completely different field to finance).

Good MBA programs have courses in linear programming and optimization, complex financial modeling, and supply chain that are quantitative in nature.

There are also technology components that review basic IT setups for a business.

They teach you how to think about markets, and how to review financial statements and understand a business’ profit and operations, and offer opportunity to get capital. The org behavior courses teach about how to actually get an organization to achieve its desired outcome. And that can be way more powerful than a solo person working alone in a lab.

An ideal MBA with experience post-school would be able to look at an idea, figure out if it’s a viable product with a good market fit, have the contacts to get financing, the connections to get it produced at the right quality with the lowest possible cost, hedge against forex risks, work with lawyers to negotiate the associated contracts (or know enough to not get screwed), record and accurately report the profits to governments and stakeholders, and get the right people onboarded (these are the soft skills) to get the work done.

I wrote the above, but I think the problematic ones are the “text book MBAs” (I just coined that) who go to mediocre, money-grabbing programs and think they are good to go because they read text books and have the degree. There are too many of these in the marketplace.

The other skill a good MBA imparts is solid written and oral communication.

I don’t have an MBA, but considered it and chose another MS program, cherry picking MBA courses I felt were relevant.

But to discount an MBA as two more years of undergrad partying is missing out on a lot of skills they can bring.

"I wrote the above, but I think the problematic ones are the “text book MBAs” (I just coined that) who go to mediocre, money-grabbing programs and think they are good to go because they read text books and have the degree. There are too many of these in the marketplace."

This is essentially true for all college degrees at this point.

I have friends who earned MBA's, typically through "executive" programs attached to major universities. Their training was being paid for, and they were looking for the more prestigious programs.

These programs did not accept students straight out of college, and so the people going into them already tend to have some business experience, and have already sorted themselves according to their math ability. They're already known to be diligent, organized, and satisfactorily literate.

The ones who went in with strong math skills found the quantitative courses to be a breeze. Everybody learned accounting and finance principles, which are useful for being conversant in that language. They took a course in business communications, and came out with a fairly standardized approach to writing memoranda and reports. I think they learned how to write and critique a business plan. There were one or more courses on business law, including HR.

I call these "hard" skills because they are technical in nature. I believe that these are all good skills for entry into middle management.

Just as a layperson often underestimates the true depth of a PhD's expertise in their field of study, many people often underestimate the skill of someone who has spent a similarly long time meditating on the "soft skills" that actually glue a good idea into a successful business.

I'm not arguing for hard skills over soft skills. I'm asking if MBAs actually provide transferrable hard skills.

They don’t. All MBAs I’ve met in my career have been replaced easily.

That's not an argument against MBA's having hard skills. It's an argument for a finely standardized product.

MBAs are a commodity, but they do or at least can have hard skills. I've wasted plenty of time and money on subpar market entry and expansion that could have been saved had I worked with people with some theoretical background on those.

You haven’t met good ones, and that’s likely why they were replaced.

You could write an encyclopedic book of counter intuitive organizational dynamics. While I don't know that this is the case with all of them, perhaps MBAs could be understood as internalizing the combination of such an encyclopedia with a few others besides and gaining insight into how they interplay with supply line logistics.

The insight mostly comes from experiences; the knowledge of what to reference to find where to find where to find what to find could be (boringly) boiled down to rote memorization and distributed through your standard classroom practices.

Soft skills are very valuable but you tend to learn those with experience not classes, MBAs are just as unlikely as PhDs to have them

I have heard some version of this argument frequently over the years: there is this "hard" skill in engineering or physics or computer science that has real lasting value, and there there are these other disciplines that don't really have much of value.

Now, let's unpack what people mean by "hard" skills. Do you mean they are difficult to learn? Do you mean they are useful in today and tomorrow's economy? What exactly does the hard in hard skill mean.

I think you can see how the deconstruction of the argument works here. If by hard you mean difficult to learn, then I can list a bunch of hard skills that are not directly useful. If someone can rattle of all the major proofs in quantum mechanics on a blackboard, they may be a genius, have worked hard, and can do amazing things with their brain but that effort may not directly make them more employable.

If by hard skills you mean things that are useful to the economy, then that changes. I could have spent 4 years learning WAMP and then when I come out the economy has moved on to some other framework.

Maybe by hard skills you mean some skills that make it easy to pick up the other computer skills. So I may have learned a particular computer language, but along the way I know conditionals, loops, computational expense and so on. Are these harder to learn than presentation skills? Are they more useful than financial statements?

The example here of a slide that says "profit = revenue - cost" is hardly fair. That's like saying I once saw a piece of code on github that was very poor. Picking individual examples of something you don't find challenging is easy in any field.

Explain what you mean by hard skills, and then we can talk about whether a particular discipline has them or not.

> Now, let's unpack what people mean by "hard" skills. Do you mean they are difficult to learn? Do you mean they are useful in today and tomorrow's economy? What exactly does the hard in hard skill mean.

Hard skills are what is the scientific core of your degree course or PhD program.

So knowledge about theoretical physics of you study physics or do your PhD in it. Knowledge of mathematics and ability to do hard proofs for mathematics.

For computer science, the situation is more subtle: Here the hard skill is knowledge of computer science, being able to understand papers about this topic (degree course) or doing research (PhD program). In this sense, I would consider programming knowledge as a (central!) soft skill of a CS program.

Hard skill is algorithmic, logical rigid, precise computations and physical manipulations.

Soft skill is social-emotional, communication and artistic creativity.

What I'd expect in an MBA : accounting, finance, marketing, basics in legal, management, business strategy, etc.

Sure. It's not higher maths. But they are real skills that are 1) hard 2) are not 'natural'.

Yes. It's also a good way to meet other people like you. But then the same thing goes for any 'skill'. How many businesses weren't founded by comp Sci students from the same uni?

MBA's are generalist degrees. You'll see ex-military, social workers, English majors in addition to technical people get MBAs.

As such, the content is generalist in nature. You don't do a deep dive on any particular topic (well you can in 2nd year, but it's still nowhere as deep as a specialist). A technical person could do the statistics class in their sleep (it's freshman statistics) while social worker might struggle. But the technical person would learn something new in a negotiations class, but the English major who studied debate might not.

The goal of the MBA is to give students a broad understanding of business, not specialists in any one area. So when the new graduate is given the job of determining if a business line is profitable, they can go and talk to finance and know enough that they can ask the right questions.

So the hard skills is a difficult thing to pin down - for some students no (because they had them already) for others? Yeah. And a big part of the skill set (hard? soft?) is an understanding of the different parts of a business and how they interact. That way when the CEO asks your opinion on whether or not the company should acquire another you don't say "yeah their technical team is great!", you can talk about finances, talent, product lines, competitors, etc.

Yes, it's entirely soft skills. But they work very hard at using their soft skills to solve trivial business problems.

Every worked a marketing or revops job? It's mind-numbingly trivial, the likes of you and I wouldn't last a day. But these MBAs do it all without blinking, and do it passionately. And I, for one, appreciate them for that.

an MBA involves a lot of case studies. that's breaking down what happened with a given business over a period of time in some detail. at least back in my day, MBA programs had a lot of reading and writing them

look up some examples of MBA case studies some time. they can be very interesting and informative

High level MBAs are for networking. But the degree is in Business Administration which is a bunch of broad spectrum lightly technical work in accounting, logistics, etc, which lots of businesses or entrepreneurs need and not everyone can self teach like individualist programmers do.

if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, can communicate, analyze and so forth

Correction: if you have multiple publications in top conferences as the first author. Most phds don’t have that. Part of my job is to hire ML researchers. 90% of phds who apply are quite pathetic as far as their publication record.

> I know if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years,

Focus, yes.

Hard work - not a requirement. Depends entirely on your professor's requirements to get the PhD. Most of what I saw in my time in engineering/physics: Just consistently do the work and stick to it without getting too many distractions. Hard work merely made you get the PhD quicker.

Of course, if your advisor is fussy, this strategy won't work.

The one other observation is that when you look at the output and career trajectory, there isn't much correlation with the value of the PhD and how hard the advisor makes you work. Most of the value of the hard work slave driving professors make you do goes to your professor, not you,

Do you feel like the "search space" of MBA problems is somewhat finite?

Like, if you read 5 books and 20 blogs on VCs you are unlikely to be mystified by anything that happens to you as you seed/VC/pivot/exit whatever. There are only so many possibilities.

(MBA stuff is still hard, and sensitive to luck/timing/networking/cultural factors..)

And likewise an MBA is different than an entrepreneur who trailblazes their own path, learning as they go vs. following a more indoctrinating path.

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