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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Salary offers ranged from $132,888 to $145,000. The average salary offer was $123,972. The median salary offer was $138,944. One of the candidates was offered $43,000 because the individual was pursuing a Post-doc at a university which I did not include into the calculation.

This makes me sad.

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I left the software industry to go to grad school. I just finished a three-year postdoc. The pay was a little more generous, but in the same ballpark.

IMHO, it was the best gig in the world. I got to be at a fabulous university (Stanford) and was actively mentored by the world's leading experts in my subject area. I had a total of 120 teaching hours in the classroom over three years; no committee work; my only other duties were scholarship and research. It was like going to school, with the best teachers in the world, and with plenty of personal attention.

Oh, and they paid me.

I'm more confused on how the average offer was lower than the bottom end of the range.

It was probably a typo ($132,972)?

$43,000 is actually a bit higher than what Post-docs in other science fields (esp. biology) can expect to make. Unfortunately, Post-doc salary is often fixed by the institutions making the grants (typically NSF or NIH) so there is no competition in the Post-doc market. This wouldn't be so bad if Post-docs still served their original purpose of bridging a Ph.D. from mentored researcher to independent investigator. Unfortunately, with fewer and fewer tenured positions (and the increasing life-span of currently tenured faculty, especially in the US where there is no mandatory retirement like some other countries), this is no longer the case. Originally, Post-docs were expected to spend 2 years until they could establish their own lab. Today, Post-doc periods of 6 or 8 years are not unheard of.

In astrophysics, most postdocs seem to make between 45-60k. The grant agencies do not dictate what the salary is. There usually is a salary scale set by the institution, but I know that at least at UC Santa Cruz it ranged from $32k to $75k so did not in practice restrict the department from paying whatever they wanted.

I'm really surprised that a CS/EE postdoc would be paid only $43k, since they are more commercially viable than astro one.

CS isn't a field where a postdoc is a mandatory step on the way to a professorship (unlike, say, physics). Postdocs in CS are not too common, so it's hard to generalize.

It wasn't common in areas like systems until recently. However, it has gotten common in the past 3 years. In "Theory", I thought most people did post-docs after their PhDs.

The post-doc is now effectively mandatory in computer science academia like other fields. I don't know where this figure of 75k for an astrophysics post-doc comes from. The only 70k+ post-docs I've ever heard of are at government labs like Los Alamos. At Harvard, for example, post-docs make less than 50k per year (I'm a grad student there and have post-doc friends). If Harvard's Smithsonian center for astrophysics cannot pay market demanded prices for post-docs, then I just don't buy this claim that Santa Cruz could.

I second the sentiments mentioned above that the years and low-pay of a post-doc are depressing now that it is overwhelmingly likely that it won't lead to a tenured position.

I wouldn't say it's mandatory; about half of my grad-school friends did post-docs, and half didn't. It depends strongly on your sub-area, and in part on how flexible you are on location and type of school. In some cases, people who take post-docs could've gotten professorships, but not at top-tier research universities, and preferred a year of post-doccing at Stanford to taking a professorship at a low-ranking school.

Sad that Ph.D.s get such high offers from industry? Or sad that Post-Docs get such low offers from academia?

I hope its the latter :P

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