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That estimate seems … low

Yeah we're easily talking order of magnitude differences here if not even more (if you're not a tenured professor we might even be inching towards two).

Yeah, I moved from neuroscience to a hedge fund. Since then I've had individual days where I made more money than my annual salary as a neuroscientist.

try 10x.

Because I fell into an edge case, had I moved from my post-doc to a professorship, I would have faced a 20% pay cut. And that's not because my post-doc was well paid; after I factored in the side-costs of the position I was not that far above minimum wage. And this was at an elite European research group where the professor was doing his best to take care of me.

So I moved to industry.