How many CS PhDs are getting $1m-$4m starting salaries? If any, are they just from Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/CMU or are all the PhDs across all US universities getting these salaries? What about the tens of thousands of CS/Physics/Math PhDs who have graduated over the past two decades, are they also getting these salaries? I find it hard to imagine that a highly reputable school like Cornell would have a difficult time finding faculty. Most my PhD friends gave up looking for tenure track positions and begrudgingly accepted finance/FAANG jobs distraught from the drought in academia.

It is poor reporting to chose the most extreme possible anecdote (one person $1m-$4m salary) and then use that as an example of what is going on. The real story is...universities messed up badly structuring decent pathways for teaching positions and are trying to blame a hot market. There is also the ongoing story of poor measurement schemes (measure how good a teacher is by how good their research is) and the story of uncertainty (let highly accomplished academics rot in limbo-hell for a decade and use a tenure carrot to control them.)

BTW, the quote was from Cornell University's dean. I did my CS undergrad from Cornell. 90% of CS lectures were in a large hall where ~60% of the seats were empty, and this was in an upyear (1998-2001.) There was no shortage of space in the lecture halls. The teaching was mostly done by MS and PhD students, of which there were plenty -- the supply of recitation sections is quite elastic since there is no long-term commitment on either side.

They aren't going to get $1M at FAANG on hire, but they'll easily get $250-350k, which is already more than 4 times what university would pay them.

Fairly recent PhD graduate here (graduated last year). My observations are that the skills required to do a PhD are orthogonal to the skills required to pass FAANG interviews and, more importantly, to being a good software engineer.

I don't dispute you can make a higher salary than a faculty member, even without working at a FAANG, but having a PhD won't automatically make you eligible to get such a job.

Interesting observation. I was under the impression that getting hired into research groups at a FAANG was a different process than getting hired as a SWE, and that you could bypass some of the whiteboard "find all sub matrices with matching determinants in an NxM matrix of arbitrary size" style questions.

Those jobs, the SWE jobs, there's really no degree that will allow you to skip that gauntlet. But I think there might be a different hiring process for PhDs or faculty leaving academia to work in research labs.

I don't really know, though, just something I heard/read somewhere.

Research groups at FAANG are pretty competitive too.

Competitive, yes, certainly. But is it competitive in the same way?

I’m other words, do “cracking the coding interview” style questions play as big a role?

EDIT: I figured, why not do a quick web search. I found this link:

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/01/getting-job-at-google...

Just one POV, but it does confirm that PhD graduates do have to go through the same kind of coding exercises (at google) as anyone else. It is worth noting that this is the case if you're applying for SWE positions, where a PhD might not really confer that much of an advantage. Again, I'm not sure if this would be the case if you were, say, getting hired as an AI researcher for a lab.

So, this link sheds some light, thought I still don't know about research positions specifically.

I do know someone who ended up at IBM Research from my lab. He was collaborating with them for his research before he graduated so I'm not sure if he even had to interview after finishing.

According to Glassdoor, Facebook research candidates are given the typical interview questions as part of the process: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Facebook-Research-Scient...

Same at Google: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Research-Scientis...

For what it's worth, though I've never particularly sought out a research position in industry, I haven't really come across too many listings which leads me to believe the positions are few and far in between.

There is some difference in research scientist hiring, both in the method & the criteria. But as I said, these roles are very competitive, and most PhD holders in FAANG companies will be in SWE roles.