Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me.

I will say this: I've never asked for an arXiv endorsement before, but I have cold emailed professors before to inquire about certain aspects of their work. Not often mind you, but once or twice. And I've told this story here before at some point, but the response I got the first time around was overwhelmingly positive. I'm pretty sure the guy was thrilled that anybody was interested enough to read his book and send a question about it. He sent the data I was looking for, a pre-print of another related forthcoming paper from his group, and a standing invitation to reach out with additional queries in the future.

So based on that n=1 anecdote, I feel pretty good that at least some academic types would be happy to provide an arXiv endorsement to somebody doing work related to theirs. It's no guarantee of course, but my hunch is that if one is doing non-crank work, they can probably find an endorser with some effort.

I've done this multiple times to great results.

People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.

I was a research associate about 15 years ago. The top tier CS researcher at that leading university payscale was something like $70k, that was the cap out.

> People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.

It's pretty good in the US. I just looked up a randomly chosen assistant professor at a public university and they make $200k. I only looked up one person's salary so this isn't cherry picked.

I'm not saying that they're in it for the money. I'm only disagreeing with the part where you said that the pay is garbage.

It's not an infinite amount of money and it's less than industry, but it seems not garbage considering job prestige, job benefits, etc.

That's legit. Nobody in my CS lab made money like that. Maybe they stopped paying terrible because when I left that lab I made double the salary at half the effort

I'm sorry at what university was this assistant professor getting 200k? I clearly need to find better universities :)

You can look up all the UC positions here:

https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

A lot of professors are making over 200k, but most that I knew were around 150k.

(You can also find all the 5M positions, usually head coach)

This was a professor at UCLA.

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