> python-based data scientists who can do little more than port new data to existing models open sourced on GitHub

The data-scientist is the new web-developer.

> If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain.

How does it work in practice? Let's say I just published a major conference paper. Where do I apply for my million dollar job? Who do I reach out to?

The first thing you need to do is convince yourself you're worth that kind of money. Then when they ask you how much money you want during a job interview start talking about your peers in the industry making that kind of money. Finally make sure you're talking to multiple potential employers so you can play them against each other. Elon Musk gave that money to Ilya Sutskever because Google was probably paying him at least $1.5 million. Even if not, his share from the $60M DNNResearch acquhire (that's what got the whole ball rolling here) was probably worth far more than that.

Sadly, you're really only worth what you can convince another person to believe you're worth. But then the USA is suffering through someone convincing an electoral majority of Americans he was the best and only choice to lead the country and that's just working out splendidly right?

You don't know? Usually at NeurIPS and CVPR the applications are next to the tea and coffee they put out in the mornings. Not sure about ICML.

I did not know about these conferences. I googled the first one and found a headline about how tickets sold out in minutes. Is this why? Because everyone attending hopes to get a 6 figures job?

I'm being facetious, this is not at all true. At my company, we typically look for multiple major publications and you certainly don't get a million dollar job out of it.

Then the people who come to your company could probably do better elsewhere if money is all they care about. You work at Cruise am I right? I know someone personally who worked at Cruise who was making 7 figures. That sort of compensation is just not that unusual anymore.

But I've learned that money isn't everything the hard way. However, if you're whining about being underpaid, there's something you can do about it. There are plenty of solid reasons not to however especially if you enjoy your current gig and they're paying you sufficiently that you have a promising future. Money truly isn't everything.

I don’t doubt that either people could do better elsewhere or that someone makes a million dollars, but it’s disingenuous to claim that “If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain” when this is not true by most measures. It might happen to some people but “pretty easy” implies most fresh PhDs could do this.

I think you are embodying the notion "You miss all the shots you don't take." You're right that most fresh PhDs cannot do this (I did say top 5%). But I think we disagree as to why. You seem to think these positions do not exist and I know otherwise because I've been on both sides of the very same hiring process for which they do exist. The reason most new PhDs won't get them is because they lack the career experience to navigate the interview process to such a position. I'd love to see a world where someone teaches them those skills while they're still in academia. I sure could have used that.

I also know because the day I left academia myself long ago was a major payday for me. Finally, I know because people like Andrei Karpathy pulled it off because of his excellent communication skills, intelligence and the right background. And people like Mu Li pulled it off by associating themselves with an academic who who helped found AWS AI and in his case he landed a principal engineering position straight out of school. That's the sort of position one usually only gets after one to two decades of job experience.

Can we just agree to disagree here?

Interesting that you mention about Andrej Karpathy. I've long wondered about his meteoric rise. No doubt he's intelligent, but there's definitely more to the story. What do you think it is? Is it majorly because of the right timing and being under the right profs? His blog? His class? I'm currently a grad student. So if I want to replicate even an iota of it, how do I do it?

I think the turning point for him was his excellent presentation in the first youtube broadcast of cs231. If I remember correctly he was getting seven-figure offers before he even graduated from Stanford. I do not know him personally and I doubt I will ever meet him but we did compete for the same position at Tesla and I lost to a very worthy opponent. my only regret is that the final interview would have been with Elon Musk himself and I would have loved to meet him.

Oh wow, very interesting. Are you a PhD who works in this area too?

No, even I attended these conferences as a high school student. Attending doesn’t have anything to do with presenting.

Only reason they sell out is because both presenters and researchers who need to keep up with the field try getting tickets.

Fat chance, there’s hundreds of papers and tens of thousands of attendees at NeurIPS every year. Less than 5% of these people will make 7 figures yearly.

Did i read that right? 120mils a year?!!!

Saying he earned $120 MM a year when really that was a payout after multiple years of hitting agreed upon milestones - that's sort of like saying everybody makes millions a year at a company that just IPOed. He obviously made a lot of money, but you're exaggerating by almost an order of magnitude.

Whatever you do don't look up what Uber offered him to leave waymo...

The $680 MM that was also contingent on milestones he never hit and thus was never paid? Not to mention that was distributed across other people as well, although he was supposed to get the vast majority.

Also he's likely going to end up in jail because of what happened with that Uber fiasco.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-27/ex-google-...

That he turns out to be a scumbag seems orthogonal to his compensation. He would have gotten that money if he had delivered, no?

That said, my exiting salary at some companies was dramatically higher than my salary when I joined because the stock had appreciated and so had my compensation. And if someone wants to hire me away that's the compensation they have to deal with, not my initial comp.

Except in this case the main contingency was stealing Waymo's IP, and it's fairly well-established at this point that both parties were aware that the transfer of knowledge would be illegal. So he couldn't have delivered it without being a scumbag, since only a scumbag would try to steal it.

Anyway this is all a digression away from the fact that you are wildly misrepresenting salaries. You're also ignoring the two companies he sold to Google as part of his compensation. If you're interested you should google a bit about 510 Systems because the history is actually interesting, especially with the added knowledge of the founder becoming a total scumbag.