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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

$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.

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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.

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