Of course, that doesn't take into account the fact that as R&D person you'll be viewed as a cost center and a target for cost cutting if the time comes.

I have friends in the bio/medical side (phds, not MDs) who are following that trajectory too.

The (sorry) data on that is thin.

And it would hardly be the first time that a hugely promising career field has gone bust.

Over my lifetime, I've seen the technical "hot jobs" go from:

⚫ Highway and civil engineering (1960s - early 1970s)

⚫ Nuclear engineering (1970s to March 28, 1979).

⚫ Defense and aerospace engineering (1980s through 1992).

⚫ Doctor / medicine (through the mid 1980s and the rise of HMOs / "managed healthcare")

⚫ Petroleum engineering (1960s - 1980, 1999 - present, big empty hole 1980 - 1999)

⚫ Genetic engineering (mostly false starts: late 1970s / early 1980s, again early 1990s, again post dot-com bust -- but it's never really launched)

⚫ "Data Scientist" (2009 - present)

⚫ "Webmaster" (1997 - 2001)

⚫ "Mobile Apps Developer" (2007 - ~ nowish, starting to fade)

Just because you're getting your time in the sun now doesn't mean the glow won't fade.

I'd also point out that most of the jobs on your list are specific roles in specific industries - data science as a concept will be more resilient because it's an evolving set of skills (as is programming/software engineering) that span basically the whole economy. The day people no longer have a reason to build systems using computers is the day these jobs will go away.

Sooo, not too long after some clever person figures out how to automate 80% of the grunt work of building an analytics pipeline and their colleagues dumb down the 20% left so that the people inhabiting the C-suite can work it on their iPads...?

I know at least three startups working that space, right now. And there are probably another 300 on the way.

Of course there aren't. The best way is to know exactly the causal process generating the data, thus enabling you to predict your variable-of-interest perfectly from the limited data.

This isn't currently possible, of course, but there's one best way to interpret data, not an infinity.

For your tortured analogy to bear any fruit you have to assume that we're just waiting to find a dead simple set of equations that explains all human endeavor, and after that finite memory and computation power won't be an issue because, hey, cause and effect.

As far as I'm aware doing probability and statistics correctly is all about framing the problem correctly. You can, for example, accidentally assume that two events are independent when they're really dependent. Is it even possible to detect that kind of mis-framing automatically?

That said, the business model for actuarial work typically hasn't been mining every last shred of individual and personal information (caveats, below) for retail advertising. Instead it's been measuring, tracking, and modeling risks within insurance, and many of the business lines don't concern individuals. You've got business, shipping, and industrial insurance, though yes, also life, healthcare, auto, home, and fire.

In particular, insurance is a fairly regulated market with exemptions from anti-trust collusion for the specific purpose of facilitating underwriting boards -- these are multi-company associations which pool risk data. It tends to make for a slightly less cut-throat competitive environment than IT. Also that personal data isn't bandied about quite so casually.

Though as I said, that's changing. I've been informed by industry insiders that a common practice now in automobile insurance is to purchase "smog reports" from states. These include a tremendous amount of data (most of it specific to vehicle performance), of which the salient element is the miles driven since the previous check. Turns out that your auto mileage is a significant risk predictor.

Though the fact that data gathered for one stated purpose (clean air) is being used for another (rate adjustment and fraud detection) is troubling.

An actuary is someone who does actuarial work. Most people join the profession right out of college. They have no piece of paper other than their degree. They are still actuaries.

A credentialed actuary is someone who has gone through the entire educational system, which are a series of exams that are typically taken while working as an actuary. Credentials and the practice rights that come with them permit an actuary to do exactly one new thing. Only a credentialed actuary can opine on the adequacy of an insurance company's loss reserves (to make sure that the company has set aside enough money for all of the claims it will eventually have to pay).

Not many actuaries issue formal statements of actuarial opinion. All of the other work that we do can be legally done by anyone. There is nothing stopping an insurance company from hiring a large number of statisticians or whatever to do the day-to-day work, only bringing in a credentialed actuary to do the reserve opinion once a year. Companies generally don't do this because actuaries are more than just statisticians; they're business professionals with very deep domain knowledge. Credentialed actuaries command a premium in the marketplace not because of any "regulatory moats", but because the specialized education itself is very valuable. If that ever stops being the case then nothing is stopping the market from correcting itself.

Why does it matter that actuaries are certified? It's a professional role which requires dealing with some pretty heavy concepts. Employers presumably want to be sure that candidates meet some level of capabilities.

That's part of what I was getting at.

But the other was that "Webmaster" was a really hot ticket for a few years. It's faded markedly.

I can't see my parent comment at the moment, but I saw a recent "ask HN" post where the question concerned where all the Ruby-on-Rails jobs had gone. What had been a really hot ticked for the past few years is starting to fade. A lot of kids are starting to learn their first talent-shift lessons.

If you're using it in the big data, industry buzzword sense, then I doubt the OP would consider it "hard science research."

It's starting to read like "webmaster" salaries in the late 90s...

But there was a long dry spell from the late 1980s through the 1990s where those jobs, especially in the US, were very, very hard to come by.

That said, I'd love to check my statements against historical salary data for the field.

What about for people outside of SF/NY/Finance?

Here's an example: you can become a principal consultant at the best and most well-known infosec firms in the world without a degree. By and large, they don't care. Even the ones that say CS degree on the job post - email a decisionmaker, tweet them, whatever - it's not true (some care, most don't).

The salary band for a principal consultant would be around $200-$250k, sometimes before bonuses and incentives to develop tools or do research. Fully realizable goal.

Now, that's my experience in that industry. But someone will also come along and tell you about software engineers who work at AmaGooBookSoft with no degree too. And if you're a top performer there - $250k is a fully realizable goal.

I'm deeply interested in how someone outside of a hotspot like SF/NYC could achieve a $250k salary. I was under the impression that $120k was pretty good for someone joining an infosec firm.

How would you go from an entry-level infosec position (an entry-level security consultant) to $250k/yr without switching companies? Also, what would be a reasonable salary for an experienced dev with no prior infosec experience who is joining an infosec firm? (Essentially someone who is switching fields to infosec, but who is still a very good programmer, and who rapidly picked up on the fundamentals of infosec and applies them in a valuable way.)

(That reminds me, I should check into working in NY or SF.)

1. >> I mean, you're in NYC. Are you referring to someone outside that area?

Yes I'm in NY (Westchester, actually). I'm thinking of people in NYC and San Francisco, so no, I suppose it doesn't answer your criteria of being outside those two areas. That said, I also know someone who makes this much and works remotely for a company in San Francisco, so he gets the best of both worlds.

2. >> How would you go from an entry-level infosec position to $250/yr?

For someone who decided to make a career of infosec and make that sort of salary (or the associated industry prestige/research you generally end up with at that level), it would take 6-10 years of exceptional work, original research and tool development. If you don't want to do all three, pick two, but you better make those two amazing.

Let me break down rough salary bands for you (keep in mind these will change based on a specific firm):

a. Associate - This is a bottom rung appsec engineer. If you join Matasano or a similar firm with promising intuitions about security and a background in development, you'll end up here. Great! $70-90k salary (there are outliers above this, and you'll see salaries for 50k - 60k, but if you know what you're doing with job searches and it's a good firm, that's the range). You usually stay here for a few years, training under the wing of mentors, until you competent in at least 3 different disciplines of information security (crypto, mobile, web app, network, incident response, reversing, malware analysis etc. etc. etc. and there are overlaps). You'll also stay here until you are ready to supervise someone else running a penetration test and can handle clients on your own.

70k - 90k

b. Consultant - You should be competent in 3 to 5 different disciplines of information security (or ridiculously stellar and potentially famous-in-the-future in 1-2). At this point, you probably haven't presented at a conference yet (and many go their entire careers without doing this), or done original technical research, but you're probably developing security tools or thinking about it. Any good firm is going to give a performance bonus for this. It's most likely taken you 1 - 2 years to reach this level, depending on innate talent, motivation and practice.

90k - 130k

c. Senior - Similar growth progression, now you have 5-7 disciplines under your belt, expert in 1-2. You're either doing original technical research or considering it, and you develop new tools are part of your research. You might present your research at conferences, you might not (most people who do meaningful research tend to submit). You now lead teams and projects for large engagements with "important clients" in the consultancy. Probably took you another 1 - 2 years to reach this, maybe 3.

130k - 180k

d. Principal - You're probably known in circles that know your consultancy, because you're one of the most important consultants at your firm now. You might even be industry-famous, if you have done particularly good research or released a tool that made pen testing easier for everyone. You're expert in 3-4 areas and it's no longer worthwhile counting how many disciplines you could technically operate in because the overlap is superfluous. It's likely taken you 1 - 2 years to reach this from Senior, if you are motivated and keep working.

180k - 250k

A few notes:

1. None of the definitions here are "hard" - don't take how many disciplines and similar such criteria as hard rules, it's just a rule of thumb.

2. These salaries are before bonuses such as for extra travel in a quarter, extra work in a quarter, tool development, research or conference presentation (you bonus for all those).

3. You'll notice salary ranges increase as you go up, because the higher you go the more nuanced the skill levels become.

4. There is a level or two above principal, generally "partner", "distinguished consultant/engineer" or something similar. You're basically at the top of your career as a consultant here and can found and manage consultancy firms. The salary here is $250k+.

5. You can skip, and the years are basic averages at best.

Are you absolutely sure about those salary bands? In particular, less than $100k minimum for a developer with ~ten years of experience seems extremely low. They could go get that much in a starting position at a trading firm, so why go infosec? If you can do anything, why do that?

Those salaries seem reasonable for ~2006, but not 2015. They say to reinvent yourself every ten years or so, but starting out at those salaries would be prohibitive.

If you have 10 years of dev experience and you're a strong enough case to get a yes from an infosec firm, they're going to work with you on salary to get to your level. As 'tptacek has explained quite a bit on here, a good firm is receptive to negotiation and starts at their floor, not yours :)

But your title will still be Associate because you need to learn the ropes. They could also fast track you too so you're a consultant within a year if you're ready.

This is a one size fits all chart. For mid career switchers and new grads alike.

If you have any more questions, feel free to email me. I didn't anticipate this comment would be so popular!

We hired basically two kinds of "software developer" (ie. people who could code but didn't have experience with software security):

* Developers with minimal professional experience in software --- a year or two out of college, say, or someone who had graduated from devops to software.

* Senior developers with impactful specializations and/or a well-cultivated side interest in software security. Impactful specializations would have included kernel-level systems programming, compiler theory, maths, maybe some kinds of networking or finance. Really: it's kernel stuff that got our attention most of all.

The former kind of developer fits into the ladder the way you're writing here.

The latter kind is for all intents and purposes in the door as a senior consultant.

We weren't in the business of asking people to take pay cuts.

Yeah, everything you're saying here is obviously true.

I tried to make the salary bands encompass most of the consultancies that operate in NY and SF (Matasano, iSec, Accuvant, Cigital, Neohapsis, Include, and lots more). As such, it doesn't square exactly with what Matasano offers.

I also want to underscore what you said about pay cuts - good firms and good managers are going to be receptive to your needs. Once you get to 'Yes', they want you, and the value you will deliver as a consultant at one of these shops will eclipse your fully loaded cost.

Finally, I want to share another piece of advice for anyone looking to go into infosec - like anything else, there are good firms and not so good firms. I won't speak ill of any specific company, but firms like Accuvant, Matasano and iSec should usually be your first attempt to break in. They are receptive to developers with no security experience.

Pick up The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (showing its age a little now, but still the only book you need to start in web app security) and read through it.

Other firms sometimes have you do ridiculous amounts of travel (75%+) without informing you of this upfront, or they are firms without good hiring standards (or firing standards) and operate mostly as point and click vulnerability scanners where you won't learn much and you'll be underpaid.

It really, really helps to reach out to people directly and ask them how they like where they work and try to get a referral to interview through them.

They might also send / you'd want to read:

- Gray Hat Python (debugging and fuzzing with Python)

- The Tangled Web (web browser security and insecurity)

- The Art of Software Security Assessment - the bible, which you really want to read as it's a foundational text. Very dense, but you'll come out of it knowing how to attack memory very well.

We didn't get to salary negotiations but if I had seen the starting salaries posted above I would have coughed up my spleen. My assumption was that a junior security researcher is a senior developer and therefore the salary would have been at least (senior dev salary + σ).

Matasano didn't have an "associate" rung on its ladder. We talked for 10 years about having a "junior consultant" role, but never did. So you can discard those numbers entirely.

I could obviously be much more specific about how the numbers in the rest of the ladder don't square with that comment, but I'm not going to.

You could get a PhD in a hard science, work for McKinsey and if you make it to partner be pulling in $1M+. Even if you don't make it to partner it's not hard to make >$250K after 2-3 years.

If you want to do technical work that has the compensation dynamics of McKinsey, you need to (a) hyper-specialize in something valuable and (b) own your own practice.

Call them specialists, experts, consultants, contractors, or whatever you want, but not engineers without an actual engineering degree.

It goes further than that actually. The term 'engineer' is often legally-protected, and often a degree is a pre-requisite, but isn't the only one. This becomes important when e.g. you're building bridges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_eng...

for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Engineer_(UK)

Unless you are talking about 'engineer' in the same way some people talk about 'architect' as in software architect.

I don't know the specific pay in these fields, but it is definitely higher than you would get staying in academics.

Most of the folks I knew who were chemists have moved onto other roles/industries.

I met a very respected chemist at AACR last year who said all of his postdocs were scrambling for work, and that some were being realistic and considering moving to China for the opportunities.

And, as the article states:

> If Margaret had left science entirely…for, say, a consulting job…she’d have earned about $100,000 a year or more...but she stayed in science.

>>> Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric.

My concern is that "work ethic" is not an independent, immutable trait, but is instead situational. If so, then a high work ethic, transplanted to General Electric, could become a low work ethic. Some folks may need their motivation to come from what they are doing, more than others. Those folks aren't helped much by a simple list of what jobs pay the most.

Truth is that so long as somebody is above you, it's very possible to have to work on things imposed on you, and in research that can mean working on topics you disagree with, along with all the office politics that come with it.

I think someone who has done both industry and research can comment, but my impression has always been that they're mostly the same thing if you're between 20 and 40.

I also got lucky with my choice of advisor and thesis project. While the topic of my thesis was an esoteric matter of academic interest, the _execution_ was an honest to goodness engineering project involving optics, electronics, and programming. So I had something to talk about in an interview.

I actually don't mind having work imposed on me. Among the many reasons why I left academia, one is that I simply didn't have my own research idea. I've even told my boss that he can assign anything to me, so long as he is confident that it's urgent, meaty work.

Now, I'd have a tough time sitting in an office, manipulating pivot tables and "dashboards," and bikeshedding at stand-up meetings.

Another myth or bias among a lot of grad students is that they have to be loyal to their specialty. I was fortunate to be fairly opportunistic about my technical interests.

I should also note that I'm reading all of this with a less than arms length interest: Both of my kids are potentially interested in science careers.

- Because you get paid to investigate some of the most interesting things in the world, in the company of mostly great people.

Science is awesome. Scientific careers right now are shitty, but that's because the current system is broken, not because of anything intrinsic to science. We should try to fix it.

I've tried quite HARD with Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, a crowdfunding for Science site, but its not exactly setting the world on fire. Would love if you have any specific suggestions.

I would expect people to end up funding the department which can produce the best promotional video. Then I expect departments to start spending ridiculous man hours producing promotional youtube videos.

[1] https://onarbor.com/search/q/machine%20learning

Funding, in particular, is a sacroscant concept in the sciences. I think your effort is a good one, because researchers as a whole are well adapted to making one's dollar go as far as possible. However, since funding is so central there is a byzantine set of rules at each institution for its acceptance and use. Perhaps you should start at the administrative level?

I love the idea btw.

The site almost looks like an internal VPN search that I shouldn't be accessing, but you should be making it irresistible. :) good luck!

The colored google-like letters are cute- but not enough. Try making it look more like kickstarter or indiegogo.

or http://publiclab.org

Also the "I'm feeling Generous" button returns an error if I don't fill in anything! Make it do something in case I really am feeling generous and want to fund something. Suggest something, etc.

If one wants to stay in science, then there are many other options than being a prof including but not limited too industrial or government labs, research scientist positions at universities, etc.

Also the majority of assistant professors actually do get tenure and I feel this article is implying that they don't. And salaries are definitely higher than 65K a year. Though again, a CS perspective.

On the other hand:

* I think if you consider "tech, finance, data scientist", some reflection reveals a discouraging fact: we're usually not talking about science or even engineering at all, but essentially support functions allowing new kinds of productivity or scale for mundane business functions. So there's careers out there for us educated in these quantitative/technological arts... but it's generally not a career in science.

* More concretely, my math/CS education is almost entirely superfluous to my six-figure job doing CSS and wrangling squirrelly JavaScript frameworks/apps (mostly as a support function to sell automobiles). Meanwhile there are tenured faculty making half what I do (and postdocs/grad students on poverty incomes) actually working to figure out how life works, cure cancer, and build space elevators.

I don't know much about research related to tenure achievement and salaries, but I found these:

http://chronicle.com/article/Average-Faculty-Salaries-by/126... http://www.opia.psu.edu/sites/default/files/AIR_Tenure_Flow_...

My takeaway from skimming is that (a) faculty salaries vary, those in areas with the industrial options we've talked about seem to be higher, but an average of $65-70k seems credible (b) data on tenure is hard to come by but everyone agrees it's very difficult to get at high status institutions.

The concept entirely predates modern ideas of science and research, so it is no real surprise that it does not serve that purpose.

As a quant, you can be doing ML to predict the stock market or hard core network coding to make placing orders faster.

In a data scientist job you'd be doing data mining to gather insights about whatever area your company works in.

At a company like Google or MS, you could be developing/implementing interesting algos for search, ad targeting, etc.

This is not even to mention Google/FB research, and even more so, MSR where you could be doing even more researchy stuff.

Now it's possible that the above jobs are much scarcer than the support function jobs but I mean most of the world does mundane jobs and earns way less than you. A PhD gives a much higher chance of getting a less mundane job.

I think he was pointing out that what is doing is not that relevant to advancing human knowledge. Proprietary trading strategies and optimizations that will most likely never be made public are not any better.

All of your examples are the same until you hit Google/FB research where you might actually be working on something that isn't directly promoting the bottom line of your employer.

64% get tenure according to http://www.sciencemag.org.libproxy.mit.edu/content/335/6070/... at least. Median time to exit the tenure track? 7 to 10 years depending on the area.

So now imagine this. You work as a PhD student for 6 years, as a postdoc for 2-3, as a faculty member for 7 years. And at the end (you're just about 40) someone flips a coin. Either you get tenure, or you beat it and get nothing. Along the way your industry peers have outearned you by hundreds of thousands of dollars by this point.

So yes. The situation is that bleak and the article is not overstating its point.

Along the way you have to keep in mind that things are only getting worse. Grant funding is much harder to get today than it was 10 years ago. Tenure rates are much lower than they were 10 years ago. So if you're planning on a career in science you have to factor in the fact that the situation you will face when you come up for tenure will likely be far worse than the already-poor statistics above indicate.

The point is that with almost any Science or Engineering degree you can get a great job in industry but that in the world of hard science research, a place people go because of their ideas, not because of the profits, you will struggle for little chance of serious reward.

Perhaps this is good for an economy. Most people will be flushed into practical things and those who are driven to be artists, teachers, scientists and performers will be carried there by their passions despite the hardship.

The biggest problem with this is that we are probably herding our most talented young people straight into the open maw of industry and away from things that lay the foundation for human advancement.

I reserve the right to later redefine this threshold but for now, call it %85.

Sadly the articles describing a lack of STEM graduates and the ones describing how shit being a scientist is both paint all science with one brush.

S is different from TEM in STEM...and CS leans more towards TEM than S.

http://kentridgecommon.com/?p=4962

Even if you had been successful for 16 years, it could still turn bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

I'm a chem phd driving for lyft while I'm running my nonprofit science outfit. Some of my passengers have told me there are others out there.

"What did one New York City cabbie say to another? So, what did you get your PhD in?"

... was a well known joke when I was a grad student in the late 80's.

http://www.tsienlab.ucsd.edu/People.htm

> * age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

You can earn more than that (and younger) if you're prepared to travel outside the US, though it's still not great. I'm hesitant to share personal details, but I'm personally in my mid-twenties and just starting a "postdoc" (in a sense; still waiting to defend my thesis), and I'm earning quite a bit more than that, albeit in an expensive city and with a large tax/student loan burden.

I'd like to do a postdoc in the US next year, but I'd have to take a large pay cut to do it, which is something I'm on the fence about–I figure you're only young once, and money isn't everything, but I can't help but feel I'd be being taken advantage of just because I happen to enjoy doing science, and the additional opportunity cost would be high too. Is it worth it? I'm not sure.

Beyond that... I wrote a much longer comment but deleted it. The fact is, academia is in an unhealthy place right now, and there's quite so much wrong with it that it's very difficult to articulate. Where do you begin? Whether to even stay in academia or leave is a question that seems to be discussed a lot lately, certainly among my colleagues, and I expect to see a lot more threads like this in the future.

Edit: Actually, I should add, that despite being in a decent place now, I had to unexpectedly work without pay for a time last year due a (ahem) 'funding hiccup.' This experience was so very terrible at the time that I'm surprised I didn't just give up on the PhD right then. To explain: in the UK, STEM funding is typically 3 years, and when that runs out you're in trouble: you can't go and get another job because you need to finish your thesis to get your PhD. Most people can't finish a PhD in 3 years (unsurprisingly). Some people manage to get extra funding from somewhere or start postdocs while still technically writing-up, but most people don't. Some people are told there will be extra funding which never materialises, or doesn't arrive on time. Several of my friends ended up going back home to live with their parents to write-up (and are still there); this is not uncommon. I know someone else who ended up living in a hostel. Once you've started the PhD you're invested, and the longer you do it the harder it is to walk away. The real kicker to me is that a lot of people accept this and think it's okay.

The best thing you can do for your career is decide, right this minute, what you want to do. Do it as soon as humanly psosible.

The reason, I suspect, that this issue is cropping up is that graduate schools are incredibly bad at career development, and it will take at least an entire generation before the culture changes completely. Administrators in general are doing their absolute best and that's a great step. But it's the lab leaders/PIs that are culturally stuck in the past.

Source: recent PhD in biological sciences, spent years improving career development at school, have Real Job now

1. NIH stipend levels are pretty low. When you talk to people on NSF or DoD funding, they're like "You pay your postdocs what!?"

2. There are fewer "eject" options. Physics, for example, has a long and established pipeline into finance. The group I'm with does lots of work on complex networks - that has applications in tech. Bio work, for the most part, leaves you qualified to do bio work. So there's both less salary pressure for "We have to pay you or you'll go work for tech instead" and the feeling of your education being a sunk cost.

Besides, one has to consider the other options available. Would the person in your example be happier had she taken a different path? who knows.

I wouldn't discourage people to try and work in that field if that's what they want to do.

Basically, you have to play it smart, find a niche, and you can beat the averages.

At my particular institution, I have known several who have transitioned (all older than me, and most who had done postdoc first). Basically what is required to transition is at least one of, preferably both of: A) 1-3 top-tier first-author papers (Nature/Science), or B) getting several small grants or one large grant adding up to at least 150K/yr. Politics can also play a role, obviously.

But I don't know for sure yet whether I will want to transition. No question, tenure-track is more prestige and pay, and research associate/staff scientist was originally created as a position for people who were too old to be postdocs and not willing or able to become faculty. I think the position is changing somewhat to be simply a "middle ground" between postdoc and faculty, less dependent on age.

But I joined this profession to do great research, not write grants all day, and I am given a great deal of freedom to do that, so I'm not seeing right now much benefit in becoming faculty other than pay. Maybe my perspective on the importance of pay will change if I have a family.

So, to answer the question directly, right now I am thinking I will become a PI iff I have to do that to push forward my research adequately. If, on the other hand, I can find a PI who is willing to do all the boring grant-writing work, pay me, and give me a lot of freedom, maybe I won't. Right now I have such a PI, which is awesome. After being this spoiled, I could never settle for the normal "you will do these experiments, serf" relationship a lot of PIs have with their underlings.

Someone else's grant funds my paycheck, but in practice, staff scientist is often a position which is intermediate in freedom between postdocs (who virtually always pursue someone else's research goals) and faculty (who, in theory, always pursue their own, once they're done writing grants and doing paperwork). So, I work "under" no one, but I do have someone who expects me to spend roughly 30% of my time on their research goals, and people would refer to me as a member of the X lab (where Dr. X is the faculty member paying my salary).

Staff scientist typically connotes a relatively senior, but non-tenure track position. So, someone who either did not want, or could not cut it in, the cutthroat world of tenure-track positions. The hours often are lighter than for professors. It is typically filled by someone in their late 30s or early 40s and who has done a postdoc.

In my case, and at my institution, it is different. I got this position because I and the person hiring me felt I deserved better salary, benefits, and prestige than a postdoc, whose salaries are fairly rigidly set by the NIH in the mid 40Ks. I can still become a professor later (the main way to do that would be to successfully write some grants). So overall, for me, this position is a step up from the likely alternative of postdoc, but for someone in their 40s whose competing alternative is faculty member, it would not be nearly so appealing.

A related position, slightly higher up the food chain but more definitively non tenure-track, is that of "core director". That means you run a "core" (a facility that all the researchers at an institution can use for a particular kind of experiment or analysis). A bioinformatics "core director" would then take datasets from researchers who come to them and perform analyses on them, and by playing their cards right, would get lots and lots of coauthorships.

Sounds like to me like this is the problem. Its a lot to ask for lifetime employment, pension, etc. The tenure system causes this. A more fluid employment system would provide more opportunity as recruitement wouldn't be this overly neurotic thing.

That said, I know people in this exact situation. They bounce from university to university. They eventually ended up somewhere, at least most of them, with a couple scragglers who always came off as hugely unlikeable trust fund kiddies, so I'm not surprise they can't convince anyone to keep them or that they feel motivated to work hard.

The people I mentioned above were mostly U of C grads. Salaries there:

>The average salary for a full-time professor at the U of C during the 2007-08 academic year was $170,800—the fifth highest in the nation

170k 5 years ago is nice scratch. Even in "poor" public schools like the University of Illinois, you're looking at 110-120k for entry level professors. Oh, and usually that's without working any of the summer months.

I'm not sure why there's so much hang-wringing over these jobs, many of which pay a decent wage. Yet there's no hang-wringing over the millions who are just as smart and talented in the private sector who have no tenure protections, no publishing rights, no patent co-ownership rights, no royalty rights, and fear layoffs all the time.

Hah! This must be one of the strangest and most pervasive myths about academia. Typically you only get the summer off ... from teaching. It's the prime time to do that research that motivated you to get into the business in the first place...

And conveniently, the University doesn't pay you a salary for this time. You can elect to pay yourself... out of your research budget. At the opportunity cost of students, postdocs, staff, equipment, travel, etc.

Sad fact, there is no will in the general population for this programs. I'm studying right now a master degree on applied statistics and we are a generation of 6 persons.

There has to be a better way. I liked the mention of DIY scientists, if people could have done hobby medicine research the same way they can 3D print, start a SaaS company, built a home automation solution using an Arduino and some stuff from ebay, if doing DIY lab research would be as easy as launching a mini delorean style quadrocopter (search on youtube), I'm sure a lot of the community here in HN would have been working on the next cure for cancer.

Perhaps there's room for a 21st century form of patronage instead.

Then if you do get a good research position somewhere, you get your base pay and all but a lot of scientists reach out for grants and they can pay themselves from them, padding their base. If you can get one of those cherry positions, it's potentially way nicer than what most engineers make. If you work on things with industrial applications you can get royalties and such, all while working at a university. Seems a number of these places have like real pension type retirement programs as well.

The haves in science are doing great, the vast majority are have-nots though and they live near poverty in a lot of positions. It's my opinion looking in (my wife is a scientist) is that there are 2 main problems: 1) Little understanding and appreciation for real science, it's thankless, there are tons of failures to usually make incremental progress, the level of meticulousness is something else.. and 2) They've got their own culture running it now and there is a history of paying dues and lot's of unwritten traditions about how you can grow and evolve a career. Post-docs don't get paid much, that's how it is, even if a lab can afford it, post-docs don't often get jobs where they post-doc, even if they're experts on the lab's area of work because that's just not how its done. It's kind of like how MDs are stereotypically just ground up by working insane shifts at the at their residency because that's what the doctors before them had to do, almost like hazing..

Most MD/PhD positions are doing research directly applicable to medical treatments and/or clinical trials. And it's definitely possible to be an MD/PhD and not be paid a tremendous amount.

Eg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Scientist_Training_Prog...

There are also a lot of unwritten traditions on such basic matters as how to write and format a scientific paper. The standards are quite meticulous, and in many fields, nobody has actually bothered to write them down or teach them explicitly as course material to students.

Some of the schools around here (Boston) have stipends which work out to be about 18,000 per year.

1500-1800 was common at the schools in the mid atlantic that I knew of recently.

[1] http://www.wendychao.com/science/stipends/

You rarely talk to anyone who says "I want to make a lot of money so I'm going to be a researcher!"

Normally people (want to) become scientists because they are passionate about science.

The problem is that science is not highly valued, especially academically. We live in a society that values trading commodities, and science isn't easily commoditized. The closest thing we can come to a commodity in science is papers, and maybe patents in the commercial world.

The shame is that science is a public benefit. In our whole history, nearly everything is ephemeral, but the things we have learned and understood and documented have persisted. Technology can be good or bad, but (well founded) science is knowledge, and it's only ever good as it lets us better understand.

We live inefficiently as long as we focus on letting people live comfortable lives only when they have something they can restrict access to and barter in exchange for that opportunity.

There are people out there that would like to do science, who would like to further our understanding of the world and universe we live in, who don't do so only because they need to help produce something that people will pay for.

In my opinion, we should pay for education and a fair income for any person who wants to practice academics. Sure, you can save luxurious salaries and budgets for the superstars, but make it such that everyone who has the capability and desire to do so can work in science, or possibly other academic pursuits, that they will have a wage that will let them have a home, healthy food on the table, support a family and live a comfortable, if modest life. The condition being that all of your results are made available to the public for free and you might get called to teach.

I think of it kind of like being in the military. Enough money gets spent on the military, TONS of money gets spent on the military, and for much of it, the public sees minor benefit. But you know that when you join, that at least while you're serving, you are going to be guaranteed to have a place to stay, food to eat, health care, education options. Nearly anyone who is fit can join.

If you could do the same for science, I think that would be great. Our governance would need to change first though, and our culture. I don't trust that government employed scientists give good results over lies to promote an agenda. At least in our current private economy you have conflicting interests that can act as oversight.

But as automation and technology supply more of our needs with less labour, we're losing more and more jobs. This leads to people without jobs. If there are people in that group that are smart enough to be scientists, there's always room for more science.

When I was doing my PhD, that is all I was really asking for. Honestly, I would have been okay with making the $40k salary per year for the rest of my life if I got to do the work I loved. But even that was not even remotely guaranteed.

Fortunately I had some good software skills from my bio phd so I could land a job.

It has nothing to do with our society per se. All capitalist societies work this way. Externalities distort pricing in very predictable ways. The fact that science is undervalued and commodities trading overvalued comes right down to how externalities are produced and/or captured by these activities.

Unlike the Soviet Union, where no personality cult of Stalin and Lenin existed. </sarcasm>

North Korea is as good an example of a totalitarian dictatorship as any Communist country (including my own).

Maybe the point that you are making is that communism is worse because if capitalism can also exist, it will take more resources and make communism miserable. Or, that if communism were widespread that life would be more miserable for everybody because we wouldn't have the capitalistic systems to make life more luxurious. Anyways, there's been plenty of debate on this topic, I just don't think there is any way to make a fair comparison in today's world. Even though these countries have similar ethnic makeup and size, I'd still say it's more of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I'm not a fan of generational hate, but for the generations that were the architects of this corporatized society, an academic job meant that you wouldn't be rich, but that money wouldn't really be a problem for you. You'd have a lifestyle comparable to about $120k in the Midwest, adjusted for cost-of-living (but coastal property also wasn't as skewed). The humiliating day-to-day struggles of the poor are hostile to the life of the mind, and the earlier generations knew it.

Hence, you have Boomer professors, even with the best intentions, championing the academic career because it has been good to them. If college advisors weren't picked from the most successful 1-2% of those who attempt PhDs, you wouldn't see the smartest of every generation shoehorned into these programs. (And yes, my experience was that almost all of the top students took an academic path at first, though some, like me, left as early as one year into a PhD program. Sure, there are a few who start Facebooks or are hand-picked to be proteges of hedge fund managers, but the other 95% of top talent veers academic-- until their illusions pop.)

So... while it's true that no one went into academia expecting to be rich, they also expected lives where money wasn't really a problem: they'd be able to buy a house, raise kids, travel abroad now and then, and because college profs respected reciprocity in admissions, beat college admissions without a fancy prep school (those being at a price which most professors would still find out of reach, even in the better times). And they got totally fucked, relative to that promise.

Yes, well, academic training remains the best way to acquire truly cutting-edge skills and training. Or, in many cases, almost the only way (other than self-study of academic materials) to know that cutting-edge research exists at all, to know where the research frontier between the not-yet-possible and the possible actually is.

Of course smart people want to spend at least some time in academia: smart people don't want to give up before they've found the frontier of the possible. The smart and devoted people want to go beyond the impossible.

On the other hand, consider categorical imperative. We need someone to study science and advance the field. We even need medieval historians (albeit, perhaps not so many of them). If everyone decides to become a bullshitting rainmaker of zero net value to society because that's where the money is, then we all lose.

My mother is nagging me to join a masters degree so I can get a job as professor in a public university.

She does not think it is a good job, she thinks it is a easy job, her words were: "I think you are smart enough to pass the tests to get the position."

That is because in a public university, after some time tenured you can't be ever fired unless you commit a serious crime, so it is a "good job" in the sense you will never be unemployed again...

At least this is the situation in Brazil.

However, eu falo um poucu de Portugues.

[1] http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/minimumpay/

It is a calling.

Which is why the insincere find it so easy to take them for a ride.

Podunk U in the midwest gets filled with MIT/Harvard degreed profs, who couldn't wait for existing profs to die off at their alma maters. It also captures the Harvard rejects with 4.0 GPA's, 2300 SAT's, 12 AP courses. Extreme selectivity at the elite institutions improves the quality of the non-elite schools. Better profs, better students. Does Podunk U have the potential to churn out some great students then? Even if its prestige isn't as good as an elite.