Hacker News Reader

Comment by samth | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent breakdown. The one thing I would quibble with is the characterization of summer salary. It's better to think of the 9-month pay idea as an accounting trick that has two purposes: 1. A benefit for faculty, since they get to be paid extra if they get grants. 2. An accounting approach for the NSF to limit how much any one faculty member can get in grant funding and account to Congress that the faculty are actually participating in the research. It does, as the article says, create the possibility of significant swings in compensation, similar to a bonus scheme.

View on HN

That's true in engineering and other grant-heavy fields. In other fields, where administrators care about tuition dollars, faculty can teach in the summer (and of course, get paid more). Summer grant money is supposed to be an incentive to choose research over teaching, consulting, and taking a vacation.

An important point to understand, though, is that taking a vacation for the entire summer is not really an option, no matter how few grants you have. You're expected to do more than that over the summer even though supposedly you aren't paid for it.

This varies a lot from faculty to faculty and from position to position. Some will work nonstop regardless of how many grants they have. (If you have grants, use them; if not, write them.) For pre-tenure research faculty, behaving this way is pretty much expected.

Others who are more senior and less research active may shoo their students off to internships (particularly in CS) and spend the summer doing very little. A lot of departmental committee work is paused, and people tend to know who is and is not available over the summer and will make arrangements accordingly. (I.E., don't assign Professor Tee Time to a committee that needs to function over the summer.)

For fields like mathematics (my field), where grants can be gotten but aren't that big, and people value time more than money, most of us would forgo the summer salary if we didn't have a grant. It's useful to have the extra income, to be sure, but not having it doesn't break the bank for most people. I did go to fewer meetings when I didn't have a grant, and graduate students working with me would have to TA more. (Math Depts depend on tuition dollars and usually have TAships for anyone who wants one, unlike fields where there are big grants but also teach fewer undergrads.)

It's also extremely hard to generalize even in grant-heavy fields based on source.

The NIH and the CDC don't even really have a conception of summer salary, and often cover way more salary than NSF grants do.

Framing this as a benefit/incentive is incredibly disingenuous. Note that no businesses, not even Silicon Valley, do this. To be clear: this is 75% of an expected salary (for a leadership position).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com