Because who wants to be an assistant professor making $60k/yr or god forbid an adjunct making $30k/yr when you can work for a startup making $150k or FAANG making $400k or more?
I'm frugal by nature, and from Eastern Europe. How comfortable a life can one afford with $60k/yr or $30k/yr in the US? With this level of income, would you actually find any essential things or services lacking in life?
In other words, what's the actual, practical need for a person (or a smaller nuclear family) in the US to actually earn $400k a year?
Similar to the US, university-employed PhDs definitely tend to make less than many industry professionals in my country as well. Then again, it is nonetheless a very acceptable standard of living. As civil servants, life is very stable (as compared to e.g. one-person companies), and they are by no means poor. Most importantly, though, a doctorate program will very probably train you into a better, more analytical thinker (I've seen very few examples of the contrary).
For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?
The US is big in every sense of the word, cost of living varies hugely in different areas. There are places where $60k is more than enough to live nicely, and there are places where $60k would mean sharing an apartment, and being very careful about spending your money.
One thing to keep in mind is that you might $100k+ in student loan debt by the time you actually get your phd. So for that reason you go for the higher paying job.
Note that those figures vary wildly by field and institution.
The lowest salary offer I got on my faculty job search, with an apology re: salary bias against folks without clinical degrees, was half again what's quoted there.
> For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?
There's certainly an argument to take a pay cut to do a PhD if you enjoy doing it.
The thing is - go ask real PhD students 2 years into their PhD whether they're enjoying themselves. Given the 50% drop-out rate, you can probably guess what the answers will be...
> How comfortable a life can one afford with $60k/yr or $30k/yr in the US? With this level of income, would you actually find any essential things or services lacking in life?
It really depends where in US. $60k/yr in NYC or SF or Seattle will be hard -- you'll need to get housemates to share the costs of housing. But $60k/yr is some small town in Vermont or Montana is comfortable in my guesstimate.
The question is not "comfortable", but "how comfortable", which is an important distinction.
Does comfortable mean being able to find specialist doctors? Or even just enough doctors? Being able to eat a variety of fruits/vegetables year round? Constant supply of avocados? Being able to live near family? How secure is one's income, or how many possible buyers are there for what you are selling? How are the schools for one's kids? Will the school community be of acceptable quality?
Of course, these answers will vary person to person.
That definitely depends on the school. At my undergrad, tenure track CS faculty only got around 70k, going up to 90k over time. Lecturers got 55k. Adjuncts got paid more in exposure and good feelings than money. My grad school is a much bigger research school instead of a teaching school and the pay is surprisingly not much better (better, but not 180k until full professorship if ever from what I've found) from what I've heard.
For reference, at my uni (public) full tenured profs are making about $120k-$150k. Adjuncts are about $90k. Lecturers are around $70k. But that's in the CS department. Still, all of these people could be making at least double that in industry (some do double dip though).
Note: The following isn’t intended to be bragging or anything, I’m just making the case for this profession in a place where the role is routinely diminished, so I’m going to make a good case.
Well first of all the front page of HN with tons of companies laying off massive amount of their workforce is one reason. Professors have insane job security.
Another reason is that professors only have to work 8 months of the year. Quoted figures for professor salaries are for 9 month contracts. Your quoted figures are too low by 2-3x. Only the smallest no-name colleges pay $60k, and there’s no point in being an adjunct in cs with so many instructor openings at top schools.
To make up the difference in salary, I’ve established my own consulting firm and I do tech consulting. So I have the best of both worlds: stable salaried employment and I’m my own boss.
Speaking of being my own boss, I really don’t have one. The chair isn’t really a supervisor, and while I have accountability, how I teach and what I do day to day is determined by me.
Work life balance is really nice. Some days I’ll go in at 11:00 and be done by 4. Today I won’t be going in at all and I’ll work from home for 30 minutes and be done for today.
The rest of the time I spend on “research”, which is just my open source passion project. Most hackers are trying to figure out how to work on their own open source project full time, this is how I’ve done it.
Before being a professor it was impossible to get people to contribute. Now I have dozens of students who make contributions, and every year there is a fresh group who wants to get involved.
Also I’ve got access to alternative funding sources not available to people who aren’t professors. Yes, you may have a 400k salary at FAANG, but I’ve got a $4M government grant that I use as fun money to buy my own hardware for my own flights of fancy. Literally whatever I want to do, not what some FAANG CEO like Musk or Zuckerberg wants me to do.
Anyway, I like it, and I’ll never these kinds of job perks are hard to put a price on.
I didn’t realize it was possible to do this without a PhD. I want to do research, I’m working as SWE at a startup and finishing MS now, but it is online without advisor or anything. If that’s possible, that’s awesome, how does that work, like to get the position and so on, I’m guessing you would need to publish some work on your own first.
If you want to publish papers, you'll need to be a PhD or extremely good in the research division of a major company - e.g. Microsoft Research, but it'll be difficult to get there without the PhD and previous research to show (but possible).
I wouldn't hesitate to take that assistant professorship for a second. A life of the mind beats the hell out of building yet another web site or CRUD app for decades on end, which is what most in our profession do.
Sorry, are the down votes because people don’t believe CS departments are hiring? My department has been hiring continuously for 6 years and has had many failed searches. Our peer institutions haven’t fared much better. There are tons of openings, just visit any academic job board to see for yourself.
Unless you want to be a professor of computer science. There, everyone is hiring.