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Comment by xenocyon | Hacker News Reader

Also, it's not unusual for star professionals in other fields to make that much at nonprofits. E.g. neurosurgeons can often make that much at nonprofit hospitals. And if one gets into executive comp at a large nonprofit, a million a year is no big deal.

But there is a large variance in the nonprofit world, and it's more common for a PhD in CS to earn something like $60K at research nonprofits. Other nonprofit employees - social workers, for instance - have it even worse, earning not much more than minimum wage with Masters degrees. Sadly, many nonprofits capitalize on the idealism of applicants to compensate for poor comp and grueling working conditions.

So the word 'nonprofit' really doesn't convey much information; it all depends on specifics.

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Star *anything" is a path to millions. Star athletes and musicians are obvious examples, but even star jugglers or puppeteers probably make a killing.

Very misleading article

Exactly. The problem with this field is that if you want to see what you'd have to do to be a star researcher in AI. You'd have to be top-10 amongst 20.000 or so machine learning PhDs. This is not a reasonable aspiration. Plus I would argue that although Ilya Sutskever did a ridiculous amount of effort and then got lucky, 2 two others were at best interested academics on the sidelines for most of their careers, then got lucky with a grad student. There's at least 1000 who did similar effort to Ilya (let's say half as much, which is still triple what any reasonable person would find reasonable), way more than the 2 other named examples, yet have no hope at all of ever achieving his level of recognition, including several of the students who really did most of the work the 2 others got recognition for.

You also have to do a PhD, and make sure you get a good adviser/good department, and get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen to your adviser and department, and be very careful with how you spend your time (if you spend a lot of time on something that doesn't end up being fruitful, that's opportunity cost that other top researchers might have turned into a breakout publication and now you are behind). And you make like $30k/year while in grad school and might experience some pretty bad mental health due to stress.

Of course, the average/above-average case isn't terrible. I think non-famous AI researchers are still getting hired into $400-500k/year at FAANG at "senior" level, it's just that you would be making roughly the same amount of money if you just went directly into software engineering at a FAANG out of undergrad and did above-average at promotions.

To me, that makes it not really make sense to go into AI research (especially now, when it's a hot topic and you have a 3-5 year wait to get your PhD) unless it's something you are genuinely interested in. For purely career reasons, it doesn't seem much better than just going right into software engineering.

The strangest thing is that knowing a lot of PhDs and PhD students (my wife is currently one), very few are motivated by financial rewards. Making money isn't always seen as a yardstick of success by their peers.

That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".

Star jugglers do not make a killing, unfortunately. A man with a not unreasonable claim to "best juggler in the world" gave it up and became a concrete contractor. Salaries at Cirque start at $50k.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/403/

Correct me if I'm wrong: I believe that's a one-time award of $500,000, not "millions."

Actually you are incorrect. Moschen won the grant in 1990. Adjusting for inflation, that is just over a million dollars in 2019.

Even despite this, your comment strongly indicates taking a rather pedantic position. If you are suggesting that the mere amount of the grant somehow counters the spirit of the discussion, I’d say that’s extremely incorrect and a strict adherence to some threshold like “millions” would be totally missing the point.

It's a one time grant that seems to be given sort of randomly, by which I mean I don't believe people apply for it. You just kind of get surprised one day to learn that these folks think you are spiffy.

Good for him, but I really don't see that as a rebuttal to "wages are so low for this occupation that people really good at this choose to do other things as a job." It's a bit like saying "Well, just do what you love anyway! You could totes win the lottery as a way to keep a roof over your head!"

Well, kudos to the lottery winners! But most folks would like a paycheck they can kind of count on that covers their needs reasonably adequately without hoping for a windfall out of the blue as the solution to their problems.

The whole thread is specifically about lottery winners. This is an example of such a thing happening due to juggling skill. It refutes the idea there are no such examples that result from juggling skill.

Only in the sense that Paul Graham talks about successful startups "doing everything right and winning the lottery." There is a certain amount of luck in anything, but being a statistical outlier for income isn't the same as "winning the lottery," which is basically random chance.

And the reason it matters is because earned income encourages people to develop useful skills that the world desires (so as to presumably make the world a better place). Telling people they can actually make bank at X if they keep applying themselves is telling people "You don't have to be a pie-in-the-sky idealist to make the world a better place. You can do things the world actually values, be really good at them and get paid excellent money, so: win/win!"

The Nobel Prize and even MacArthur grant are intended to reward people after the fact for making the world a better place. Part of the point is to empower them to keep doing what they believe in and not give up and go do something else for pay that would be less beneficial to the world at large.

It may help encourage some folks to keep at the thing they believe in despite the low pay, but it's not a plan you can take to your accountant for how you will make your retirement work: "I'll just be amazingly good and then get a random windfall. It's Fine!"

I'm a freelance writer. Like a lot of writers, I work for peanuts.

I don't expect to be the next JK Rowling, but I can learn from her (she rewrote the first chapter of the first book like twenty times) and I've applied myself and gotten better. My pay has been gradually going up.

Because of how publishing works, JK Rowling's financial success is somewhere between salary of a million annually and random grant out of the blue. Plenty of people think writers must be nuts because most writing pays so poorly. (I have been repeatedly told to "get a real job" if I don't like being poor.)

But there's still a difference between that and your "win the lottery" framing for this discussion. It's really not the same thing.

Working hard to acquire the requisite skill in these cases is just buying the lottery ticket. It’s significantly not different than an actual lottery.

Penn Jilette is the biggest star in juggling that I know of. He seems to make pretty good money in so far as one can infer these things.

I would say that he's more like an entertainer that can juggle.

That's probably a better description for "star" x than being the best at x.

Well to be honest, your juggling has to be entertaining if you want to make money off it

In fairness, I suspect it depends on what you're juggling. I could envision someone juggling management of an electric car company and a space exploration technologies company making bank.

I think it's far more likely this person would realize juggling so much is harder than he thought, and it all comes crashing down in the end (including his net worth).

Not if they are a professional juggler.

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