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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

>> Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures).

Yes, but if they go to Wall St with the same credential, they make 20x that.

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The essay is from 1999, so the salaries are a little off -- it's something like $50,000 +/- $15,000 for most postdoctoral positions now. Yes, you can go to Wall St with a physics PhD and have a great career. But the thing is that many students (especially in elite institutions) enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming an actual scientist, not a Wall St analyst.

This is absolutely not a "typical postdoctoral salary", and hasn't been for more than two decades. Most major research institutions follow NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries:

https://www.training.nih.gov/postdoctoral_irta_stipend_range...

When I was finishing up a bioinformatics doctoral program in 2009 I looked far and wide for postdoc positions in the field. My recollection is that the typical salary range was $27k-$30k. What surprised me was that I dug far back in a systematics-specific newsgroup and found the same salary range being advertised for the previous 10+ years. I can't speak to what has happened over the past 12 years, since the low postdoc salaries pushed me to industry, but I can say that you're off with the "more than two decades" claim, at least as a universal claim.

I just pulled three actual postdoc offer letters out of my email archives from the 2008-2009 period. Salary offers ranged from $38K-$48K with the higher end representing a starting bioinformatics postdoc position.

NIH minimum in 2009 was >$37K. If you were getting offers in the $27K-$30K range coming out of a comp bio/bioinformatics PhD program, you were unfortunately getting seriously low-balled.

With a biology PhD?

Well, I know some really biologists who code really well, but you're right only pharma/medicine are likely to pay off your college debts, the first requires a lot of luck, and the other a lot more school. Biology is well known to be a terrible investment (by people in gradschool).

yes. with massive capital investments in bio/pharma sector some in-house expertise required to improve ROI.

ps: basic python and prob theory won't hurt.

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