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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Terence Tao makes about only half a million or so every year (his salary at UCLA is public). Not sure about other income, but it is pretty much just the same ballpark as good doctors, lawyers, accountants at big 4 etc. At that range of income, it’s job-dependent on whether they would have an assistant or not, so no surprise here either way.

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Dawg. If $500k isn’t in the ballpark to have an assistant, then nobody outside of actual CEOs or Fortune 500 executives has an assistant. I know people who make less than $200k and have an assistant. I feel certain there are people who make less than $100k who have an assistant.

How does someone making less than 200k afford an assistant?

Their company could realize that giving them one would be a wise use of resources.

Just like that someone can afford to make $200k in the first place: someone else is paying those people and their assistants to get things done.

The assistant's salary comes from the same corporation that pays the figures salary, not the figure themselves.

To the GP's point, a friend of mine makes 80k but is still provided an assistant. That's in the entertainment industry, where PA's are dirt cheap and union laws prohibit multitasking.

It's a surprise even if you restrict your point of view to the narrow economic interests of his employer, UCLA, who benefits from Tao's discoveries. Shelling out another 50k or so for an assistant, even if it boosts his productivity by only 10%, is a no-brainer.

If you expand your point of view to the interests of all mathematicians, or society at large, the waste here is even more extravagant.

An assistant who could do what Tao did is not going to be $50k.

The assistant's job would be to take low-hanging fruit non-research administrative tasks off his hands - pretty much like the tasks here.

The assistant would have gone through the documents manually and that’s very much a $50k/yr task

He made ~650K gross in 2021: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

That is a bit more than 1/9th of what the head football coach at UCLA makes, who has two assistants (offensive and defensive coordinators) who each earned a bit more than Tao. Additionally, UCLA still paid more than $3M in 2021 to another head football coach whom they had fired in 2017. The university seems to have fairly clearly defined priorities.

UCLA football is a profit center. It costs 32MM to operate but brings in 37MM in revenue. I suppose Tao might bring in some government grants (maybe?) but I doubt its anywhere near the same ballpark.

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo....

It's not entirely clear what year those numbers refer to. Overall, the 2019-2022 period seems to have been extremely unprofitable: https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2023-01-26/ucla-at...

But even IF this were a profitable activity, should a university really be in the business of running an enterprise that literally causes irreversible brain damage (Story about USC, but undoubtedly applies to all football programs: https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/07/usc-and-its-dying-line...)?

You’re confusing the football program for the athletic program as a whole. If you scroll down in the link I posted you’ll see every other athletic program at UCLA is indeed running at a significant loss. Football is the only profitable one.

With respect to the brain damage, he spent much longer in the professional setting than college, it’s more likely the damage came from there. I don’t think colleges should be in the business of restricting what students should be allowed to explore based on the possibility they might choose a career where brain damage may occur. And if they did, Engineering should be the first to go. Just think of all the brain damage resulting from professionals engineers of the military industrial complex!

Note that the article is not just about Junior Seau. Of the 12 linebackers who played in the USC team he was in, 5 died before age 50, and he was the only one of them with a significant NFL career (another one played a single season, the other 3 never played professional football).

> Not sure about other income, but it is pretty much just the same ballpark as good doctors, lawyers, accountants at big 4 etc

Either salaries in the US are extremely higher than what I thought, you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "good" or you are significantly overestimating how much people make.

That’s a different topic, I think. So you can consider my definition of “good” idiosyncratic, or to substitute it with “highly paid” or something.

The point is that amongst people that I know who are making 500k, the majority of them aren’t having assistants. And I do think it extrapolate to the population of people with 500k income too (no proof here, just a hunch).

Don't doctors have a lot of the administrative duties, preparation of equipment, etc., done by other staff in the practice? For practical purposes, wouldn't that count as having an assistant?

In the case of this post, one could argue that collating statistics should be done by ICM staff rather than the committee chair.

Having a personal assistant has become a rarity but I know a lot of people who are paid far less than 500k and can indeed delegate this kind of work. I work in consulting and I would most likely ask a junior member of the team to do data crunching. Similarly we share an assistant in my department whose job is to take care of scheduling complicated meetings, organising business travels, making sure than the documents required for billing have been collected.

Maybe a bit of everything, though in my experience people outside the US significantly underestimate how much successful professionals in the US earn.

For example, this article [1] says that to be in the top 1% of earners in the US a family needs to make $600k or more. There are 330 million people in the US, meaning that 3.3 million people are in a household earning $600k or more. I think that's a lot!

[1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-t...

It may be a lot in absolute terms but does not represent the experience of the other 99% of the population.

So you think 'good accountant' and 'world class mathematician' are equivalent, based on their salary?

No I don’t, but they have to pay for assistant all the same. I was describing how things are, not how they should be.

University could have paid for Terence Tao’s assistant, but then they could have paid him more too.

I think their company or institution should be paying for the assistant, just as they pay for the office, security, executive, HR, etc.

Only?

I thought about that word, and whether to put air quote around it. But Terence Tao is one of the few that could claim to be one in hundred of millions, if not billion.

So yeah, “only”.

So, you’re saying that collating conference statistics in a spreadsheet is worth a $500K yearly salary? I would have thought that you can get that cheaper.

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