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Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

Love of science and research does not pay the bills, nor does an academic level salary.

The "choice" that the author made wouldn't really crop up unless he had help paying the bills.

Yes. We are all going to live an infinite number of years. So any difference ($30-60K a year) in salary is justifiable even if you are doing mind numbing tasks making other people insanely rich. Even if you die, you will be taking all that extra money into your next life! So slave away my friends :D

What? Academics may not make the same salary as industry... but an engineering professor generally makes >$100k / yr. For example, you can look up the salary of most public university professors (eg. from Georgia Tech/UGA): http://www.open.georgia.gov/

You might not get rich... but it can definitely be livable with a high quality of life.

If you get a tenured position, it can be a $100k/year job. Tenured jobs are harder and harder to get, and adjuncts are compensated badly.

I think "associate professor" is the untenured position, regardless they seem to be all 100k +... even in Canadia:

https://uwaterloo.ca/about/what-we-stand/accountability/sala...

The untenured position is really a sessional instructor, which I'm sure also goes by different names, but involves zero job security and extremely shitty pay. It's not a salaried position, it's a "per course you teach that semester" position.

Associate Professors are usually tenured. Assistant Professors usually aren't.

This is true for some fields, at some schools. Median salary for an associate professor (the first rank with tenure) at my institution is 63k.

The average salary for professors at UCSF used to be ~$160K.

UCSF is also one of the top ranking medical research centers in the world. I'm sure that most of the faculty at UCSF could go elsewhere an make even more money.

I know a number of academics who will be surprised by this.

For that matter, having "paid the bills" through graduate school and a postdoc, the notion that you can't live on an academic salary is absurd.

My wife went the academic route, I went the industry route. For the first several years or so our salaries pretty much kept pace. Now while I admittedly earn a bit more than she does now, she earns plenty enough to to pay her own bills and have money left over.

You need to cut your bills then. I'm a 40 year old grad student who's been living on less than 20K for a decade. At this point making 40K would be living large.

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