Academics are necessarily optimizing for something other than money. Nobody spends 4-7 years obtaining a PhD and then another 5-7 years pursuing tenure if their primary motivation in life is money.

The reality is: Academia can be a real shitty gig when it comes down to it. A vast majority of a professor's life is spent dealing with politics, administrative minutiae, "service", pedantic peer review, teaching, and writing grants. By the time all of that's done, you have no time left for the "fun" parts: doing the research, communicating results and having impact, and seeing its effects on the world. Not to mention the abysmal funding climate, changing role of universities, and the fact that many fields (esp. in CS) are now being pushed further, faster, and better by industry...

There's a mass exodus going on right now. At least 25% of the professors I know (I'm friends with many) have either left or are thinking about leaving academia.

Bingo.

CS is lucky in that it's relatively cheap to study. Other than compute time, all most people need is a good coffee maker and a white board. Biology professors need to bring in an order of magnitude more grant money to keep their labs running. As a result, most of them do very little of their own research; they may look at data or plan an experiment with a grad student or postdoc, but the vast majority of their time is spent raising money or reviewing other people's work.

Having been a biology professor this is 100% accurate except most of your time is spent dealing with politics and administrative garbage.

From your profile, it looks like you got out. Any regrets (or advice)?

Yes I regret every day leaving science as I love it. In an ideal world I would still be a professional scientist, but we don't live in an ideal world so you have to make the best of what opportunities you have - I certainly can't complain about my life.

My only advice is seize the chances that come your way and make the most of them. It is all too easy to stay in the warm cocoon of academia even when you know you should leave.

I got out a little over a year ago. I was a BME PhD and did a lot of software engineering and signal analysis of brain signals for brain-computer interfaces. I was a neurology professor for a few years (after a 4 year neurosurgery postdoc), and decided academia wasn't for me. I now work at a trading firm as a quant researcher/trading system software engineer. I have never been happier, but definitely miss the science part of research (i.e., NOT grant writing, politics, etc). I have been doing part time consulting work on Upwork focusing primarily on helping with biomedical signal analysis and software/app design. I still get to be involved in that niche, but now I have money left to feed my kids after all my student loans have been paid. We are actually able to buy a house, which was going to be more than a decade away had I stayed in academia (and got NIH funding, and tenure, etc). I guess I value financial security and that of my kids too much to sacrifice my life for doing science.

As someone who recently left what was ostensibly a dream job (a tenure-track position at a top university), I largely agree .

Being able to start to avoid the "service" of donating my time to support the paywalled journal system and actually enjoying open source development again (even though I get to do less of it) is the best part.

> There's a mass exodus going on right now

This seems to be a common sentiment. I wonder if someone has done the statistics on this.

You're off the mark here. Most people who do a PhD and go on to becomes a professor don't have money as an important goal, because doing a PhD and then getting tenure takes ~12-15 years, and nobody can afford that kind of opportunity cost. If money were one of their most important considerations they would have left for industry before their PhD.

Nonetheless, top professors get paid decently (although obviously they could make 5x in industry). Michael Jordan at UC Berkeley makes ~320k. Newly tenured CS profs make ~160k at UC Berkeley. Source: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

It's true that people doing PhD's aren't monetarily driven but you can easily imagine that incentives change once they start a family and have to worry about things like a mortgage, college tuition for their kids, etc. If you can get a significant pay raise while maintaining some semblance of research autonomy AND have greater impact, why not go for it?

As I mentioned, a CS professor with enough seniority to have a family to raise is going to be pulling a 200k+/year salary, more than enough to comfortably raise a family, even in the Bay Area (probably not SF).

Something I didn't mention earlier is also the fact that if they really needed extra money they can easily consult on the side, as well, which is totally okay in academia (unlike most employees at companies).

> they can easily consult on the side, as well, which is totally okay in academia (unlike most employees at companies).

It is very rare to be outright prohibited from consulting on the side as an employee. I currently do exactly that (work for a company that sells consultants and developers to its clients on contract) and we are only prohibited from doing the same on the side if it is a conflict of interest. I've never heard of someone going to their supervisor with a lead and being told they could not pursue it.

Yes, it is rare to be outright prohibited. But it will definitely be looked down upon by managers. It is also culturally uncommon. Very few Google engineers are consulting on the side, for example.

It is extremely common for CS professors to consult. And there are absolutely no conflict of interest restrictions. CS professors will consult in their direct area of research.

  a CS professor with enough seniority to have a family
  [...] is going to be pulling [...] more than enough to
  comfortably raise a family

So you're saying people who are paid enough to have a family are going to be paid enough to have a family? :)

You think you're being clever, but you're not. Seniority actually matters in academia.

What I'm saying is I know people who've started families while they were postdocs or even phd students. Academics can start families at any level of seniority.

And if the country's policy is "well of course you're struggling to support your family, it's your own fault for not waiting until you achieve tenure at average age 39" [1] well I can understand academics leaving academia for industry. The average age of first childbirth in the US is 26, with steep rises in complications beyond age 35 [2].

Unless you're a man planning to have a child with a woman 10 years your junior, getting tenure before having a child doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age

The thing is, it can be both money AND a better opportunity to make an impact that led to him making that decision.

However, it probably feels wrong to write a blogpost and say "I did it for the money". So people conveniently leave the money part out but I think we can all agree that it's probably definitely a non-trivial factor in their decision. It just happens to make more sense to tactfully focus a blog post on the better opportunity at hand rather than the money.

Yeah it probably is more than $350k, but who's going to put that on a blog. Oh look how much I am making now. People are supposed to read between the lines and I think the "it was an offer that I could not turn down" gives a pretty good hint in the right direction.

Probably a fair bit more than 350k.

What does a professor at CMU make?

I would wager moving from being a tenured private university professor in Pittsburgh to Seattle to work for Amazon for money, even in a VP level role, would be a poor choice.

Unfortunately, moving because you believe Amazon will throw resources at a problem shows a distinct lack of familiarity with the "frugality" aspect of Amazon's culture.

He will probably be a principle or senior principle and will have a lot of freedom over what his group does, as long as he can justify that it helps the company in some way (which really shouldn't be any more difficult than justifying funding to ${government-organization}).

Freedom to control what your group works on versus resources (high quality staff, compute, etc.) to effectively pursue that work are very different things.

For an influential principle or senior principle who is in high demand, none of these are problems.

Fair enough. My experience didn't take me to AWS, but in retail it was a problem for entire tier 1 services to get resources with VP support, let alone new development/research initiatives.

Perhaps Amazon has changed, or AWS is simply different/better in this regard.

From what I've heard, they are willing to pay well for talent, but tend to be frugal on "perks" like free lunches.

Besides, it sounds like the resource he's particularly interested in is compute (and maybe storage) and AWS has this in spades...

I have worked for Amazon (although not in AWS).

The compensation was ok at the time, but starting to lag their peers by the time I left (within a year of leaving my comp had a little more than doubled). My understanding is that they've made an effort to catch up there. Regardless, Pittsburgh is a staggeringly cheap place to live (I grew up there) while Seattle is decidedly not (I live there now). Unless he's tripled his comp, he'll be making effectively less. That wasn't my point, though, I assume he's not moving for the money.

I was actually talking about resources to dedicate to research.

What makes you think Amazon will be willing to supply compute (assuming they actually have substantial excess cycles to sell, particularly on GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs) to internal development efforts? Simply having the resource doesn't mean making it available. Actually making appropriate resources available to people trying to solve problems would run completely counter to my experience there.

I don't have any inside information or anything like that, but...they are hiring him to extend his previous research on large-scale machine learning systems.

As the lab head, I imagine he won't have a hard time getting resources--they must have given him something like a startup package to lure him there.

As a big name, they have a strong incentive to keep him happy: if he were to leave in a justifiable huff (e.g., "they promised me tons of compute and all I got were these Fire Phones"), it would make recruiting much harder.