Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thanks for sharing.

Your experience is atypical in my field (medical biology/ML/drug discovery)/region(SF Bay Area). Think UCSF/UC Berkeley. My professor at UCSF was soooo happy he could hire starting professors at $70K a year (20 years ago; now it's about $120K).

A typical PI would have $10M/year in grants, have no grad students (or 1-2), only postdocs (who are already publishing), live fairly far away (45+minute commute). Once they reach full tenure it's about $250K/year salary (with summer free, but usually 1 day a week consulting with pharma instead), plus a heavy teaching load. And every single one of them is working nights and weekends to just barely keep up.

I looked at that, and concluded there was no way for me to be happy, and moved to industry, where I get paid more, work less, and have a far better work/life balance. I even have more time to do independent research and publish than I ever did as an academic. So I'm always interested in what attributes people who managed to pull off the "two body problem" in the physical sciences are doing.

That's a fascinating comparison.

It's true that there are major differences in academia across different fields. NIH funding is typically so much more $$ than NSF[1] -- and I wonder if this has an effect on how these fields are structured and thus who enters them. In particular, could the soft money[2] salary encourage people who are willing to take that bet?

But also UCSF/UCB's biomed stuff is kind of a different machine as far as I can tell -- it's not as focused on training (hence, fewer students and more postdocs/post-PhD researchers) and more akin to a traditional industrial research lab. But then: who are they teaching exactly at UCSF (where's the "heavy teaching load" coming from) if there are so few PhD students -- med school students?

For those reading along:

[1] Think medical/biomed/bioeng/pharma/etc. (NIH) vs physics/astronomy/computing/social science/etc. (NSF)

[2] "Soft money" means your (PI) salary is paid from the grants you get; don't get enough grants to cover your salary and you're out, typically, if you can't get a friend to sponsor you under their grants.

$10M/ year seems unusually high, even for med schools - are you sure those are annualized costs? Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with the more basic science (non clinical trial) parts of NIH, but a typical R01 is $250K-$500K/ year in direct costs so that would imply having to hold ~15 of them (with overheard) to reach $10M/year.

It seems like $10M in total value of active grants in a given year (~5 R01s) might be more typical (though the standard for tenure I've heard of in med schools is maybe ~2-3 R01s, so 5 would make you top tier and highly sought after).

For clarity, when I'm referring to $1M/year in annual funding, that's coming from ~6-7 active grants whose total value might be in the $5M range total.

R01s are too small to be worth applying for, typically. Or rather, most PIs have an R01 that pays for themselves and maybe some travel and publication feeds. Most of these people end up making center grants or finding other mechanisms (like non-NIH funding, such as CZI).

There's no way I personally would have been able to manage 5-6 active R01s a year; but then, when I did grant review, I noticed that other folks did a lot of copy/pasting and exagerating about their publications significance, which is not something I was willing to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com