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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

I made $16,800 a year while getting my PhD. Sometimes that required me to teach, when we had funding, it was just research. Grueling hours, abusive PI, for 6 years of my life. I helped bring in over 4 million dollars in grants to my university. After about two years, I was highly skilled and founded a new core facility that I kept running for the next 4 years while finishing my PhD.

When I graduated, I had someone offer me $42,000/yr for a postdoc. At age 30. I politely declined and took an industry job for $125k instead.

We don't need H1Bs. We need better PhD student and postdoc wages.

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> We don't need H1Bs. We need better PhD student and postdoc wages.

You need both.

Your PhD classmates from abroad (most likely Russia, China, Korea, and India) would have gotten an H1B after they graduated from the PhD program, and their (edit: post-) postdoc employment would have been on an H1B.

I'm assuming this was the late 1990s or early 2000s based on the numbers provided

One of my friends who did their PhD and postdoc at Stanford has been facing the J1 to H1B hellhole because employers increasingly make the applicant pay for the entire O-1 process now. They decided to screw the whole process and return to China.

Untrue the vast majority of foreign postdocs are on J1

And until the late 2000s, if those postdocs wanted a private sector job in the US they needed an employer to sponsor their H1-B.

Also, the J-1 didn't become the primary route for postdocs until the early 2000s

Or maybe people who have dedicated half a decade to getting an education and/or working in the US in highly skilled, advanced knowledge positions should have a path to residency so they're not the mercy at their employer for the rest of their life. Just a thought.

Agreed, but that kind of reform ain't happening.

It's been stalled since the 2010s.

I stuck my own narrative in here, perhaps I should have been clearer. One thing I see over and over again are people saying that there aren't enough highly educated Americans, hence why we have to import non-Americans. I'm trying to point out why that is - we've made it economic suicide to go into advanced science as an American.

At my university, the vast majority of the incoming PhD class in Chemistry and Biochemistry were American when I joined. When I left, it was closer to 50%, the other 50% being mostly Nigerian and Ghanan (no idea why those two countries specifically). The Americans had just been priced out.

I’ve heard the path to getting a professorship in China after getting a PhD in the US was basically a sure thing, and could be used as a backup plan if the cushy US industry job path didn’t work out (or as a zero-risk plan if you wanted to move back home).

Now, it’s the opposite; people with hard-to-obtain visas get stranded in the US because the job market back home is too competitive for them.

This is great for China, but terrible for the US.

We need to bring the US education system back up to modern standards so that more Americans succeed in industry, and we also need to again make it a no-brainer for skilled workers to stay here.

This is compensated by immigrants from other countries choosing to stay in the US.

Lots of Chinese (like my friends) who studied in the US would have preferred to stay in the US, but began facing hurdles around employment, visas, and background checks.

The headaches became to much so they "decided" to move back to China because at least they could earn a US level salary, or move to Chinese adjacent countries like Singapore.

My friend did research in condensed matter physics with semiconductor applications, but no lab in the US would hire him due to National Security reasons. Now he works for an organization "supposedly" part of the Chinese MIC.

I had a similar experience. My initial stipend in grad school was $13,500/yr. My first job after defending was a VAP position for $55,000, also in my early 30s. After a year of that, I jumped to an FFRDC for twice as much.

And with a BS in CS or Math what would you have made going to work for a FAANG?

How do universities have all these endowments and not pay more?

>> $16,800

This is like 5 weeks of work at minimum wage... You would have been better off with a side hustle at macdonalds.

>> We need better PhD student and postdoc wages.

Living wages would be a start, then better.

EDIT: I fat fingered the 2... that was supposed to be 25... Do note that I live in CA so macdonalds is 20 bucks an hour now here.

5 weeks of work at minimum wage is nowhere near $16,800...

"I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"

Some people live in a bubble.

I fat fingered the 2... that was supposed to be 25...

You should still be able to edit your comment.

Flip those numbers. That's a full year of minimum wage... 16,000 / 8 / 40.

For postdocs (and often grad students), the universities aren't paying the wages, it's the research grants. In some cases, those are capped by the funding agencies. NIH in particular has rigid payscale guidelines for postdocs in the bio sciences, for example. You can find the list here [1]. A first-year postdoc makes $56k, and after seven (!) years they can make $68.5k.

Also, a general rule of thumb is that postdocs and grad students cost the same! That's because whoever is paying the grad student (either a research grant or a department teaching stipend), also has to pay their "tuition", which basically doubles the cost.

[1] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen...

In state tuition where I was rang up at about $3000/semester. It was waived by the school if you were a TA. If you were doing just research, it was paid out of the grant funds. Then I had to pay about $600 out of pocket on student fees per semester.

To make $16,800 in 5 weeks at 40 hours a week you'd need to be paid $84/hour

Not everybody can work at the same washed-up Silicon Valley panopticon providers, you know. Some people need to be, like, accountants and stuff.

That's actually just about a year at Federal minimum wage.

In my case, I on-paper only worked 19 hours/week so they didn't have to pay me health insurance.

> And with a BS in CS or Math what would you have made going to work for a FAANG?

To address this bit - the problem is (and I think you're actually trying to make this point) - we need biologists. We need physicists. We need material scientists. SaaS is sucking all the oxygen out of the room because the alternatives pay so much less. By the time this thing equilibrates, there will insufficient American institutional knowledge in core sciences.

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