What industry? I've never seen anything close to these averages for hard science research.
I have friends in the bio/medical side (phds, not MDs) who are following that trajectory too.
If you're using it in the big data, industry buzzword sense, then I doubt the OP would consider it "hard science research."
It's starting to read like "webmaster" salaries in the late 90s...
The (sorry) data on that is thin.
And it would hardly be the first time that a hugely promising career field has gone bust.
Over my lifetime, I've seen the technical "hot jobs" go from:
⚫ Highway and civil engineering (1960s - early 1970s)
⚫ Nuclear engineering (1970s to March 28, 1979).
⚫ Defense and aerospace engineering (1980s through 1992).
⚫ Doctor / medicine (through the mid 1980s and the rise of HMOs / "managed healthcare")
⚫ Petroleum engineering (1960s - 1980, 1999 - present, big empty hole 1980 - 1999)
⚫ Genetic engineering (mostly false starts: late 1970s / early 1980s, again early 1990s, again post dot-com bust -- but it's never really launched)
⚫ "Data Scientist" (2009 - present)
⚫ "Webmaster" (1997 - 2001)
⚫ "Mobile Apps Developer" (2007 - ~ nowish, starting to fade)
Just because you're getting your time in the sun now doesn't mean the glow won't fade.
Why does it matter that actuaries are certified? It's a professional role which requires dealing with some pretty heavy concepts. Employers presumably want to be sure that candidates meet some level of capabilities.
An actuary is someone who does actuarial work. Most people join the profession right out of college. They have no piece of paper other than their degree. They are still actuaries.
A credentialed actuary is someone who has gone through the entire educational system, which are a series of exams that are typically taken while working as an actuary. Credentials and the practice rights that come with them permit an actuary to do exactly one new thing. Only a credentialed actuary can opine on the adequacy of an insurance company's loss reserves (to make sure that the company has set aside enough money for all of the claims it will eventually have to pay).
Not many actuaries issue formal statements of actuarial opinion. All of the other work that we do can be legally done by anyone. There is nothing stopping an insurance company from hiring a large number of statisticians or whatever to do the day-to-day work, only bringing in a credentialed actuary to do the reserve opinion once a year. Companies generally don't do this because actuaries are more than just statisticians; they're business professionals with very deep domain knowledge. Credentialed actuaries command a premium in the marketplace not because of any "regulatory moats", but because the specialized education itself is very valuable. If that ever stops being the case then nothing is stopping the market from correcting itself.
That said, the business model for actuarial work typically hasn't been mining every last shred of individual and personal information (caveats, below) for retail advertising. Instead it's been measuring, tracking, and modeling risks within insurance, and many of the business lines don't concern individuals. You've got business, shipping, and industrial insurance, though yes, also life, healthcare, auto, home, and fire.
In particular, insurance is a fairly regulated market with exemptions from anti-trust collusion for the specific purpose of facilitating underwriting boards -- these are multi-company associations which pool risk data. It tends to make for a slightly less cut-throat competitive environment than IT. Also that personal data isn't bandied about quite so casually.
Though as I said, that's changing. I've been informed by industry insiders that a common practice now in automobile insurance is to purchase "smog reports" from states. These include a tremendous amount of data (most of it specific to vehicle performance), of which the salient element is the miles driven since the previous check. Turns out that your auto mileage is a significant risk predictor.
Though the fact that data gathered for one stated purpose (clean air) is being used for another (rate adjustment and fraud detection) is troubling.
I'd also point out that most of the jobs on your list are specific roles in specific industries - data science as a concept will be more resilient because it's an evolving set of skills (as is programming/software engineering) that span basically the whole economy. The day people no longer have a reason to build systems using computers is the day these jobs will go away.
Sooo, not too long after some clever person figures out how to automate 80% of the grunt work of building an analytics pipeline and their colleagues dumb down the 20% left so that the people inhabiting the C-suite can work it on their iPads...?
I know at least three startups working that space, right now. And there are probably another 300 on the way.
Of course there aren't. The best way is to know exactly the causal process generating the data, thus enabling you to predict your variable-of-interest perfectly from the limited data.
This isn't currently possible, of course, but there's one best way to interpret data, not an infinity.
For your tortured analogy to bear any fruit you have to assume that we're just waiting to find a dead simple set of equations that explains all human endeavor, and after that finite memory and computation power won't be an issue because, hey, cause and effect.
As far as I'm aware doing probability and statistics correctly is all about framing the problem correctly. You can, for example, accidentally assume that two events are independent when they're really dependent. Is it even possible to detect that kind of mis-framing automatically?
That's part of what I was getting at.
But the other was that "Webmaster" was a really hot ticket for a few years. It's faded markedly.
I can't see my parent comment at the moment, but I saw a recent "ask HN" post where the question concerned where all the Ruby-on-Rails jobs had gone. What had been a really hot ticked for the past few years is starting to fade. A lot of kids are starting to learn their first talent-shift lessons.
But there was a long dry spell from the late 1980s through the 1990s where those jobs, especially in the US, were very, very hard to come by.
That said, I'd love to check my statements against historical salary data for the field.
What about for people outside of SF/NY/Finance?
Here's an example: you can become a principal consultant at the best and most well-known infosec firms in the world without a degree. By and large, they don't care. Even the ones that say CS degree on the job post - email a decisionmaker, tweet them, whatever - it's not true (some care, most don't).
The salary band for a principal consultant would be around $200-$250k, sometimes before bonuses and incentives to develop tools or do research. Fully realizable goal.
Now, that's my experience in that industry. But someone will also come along and tell you about software engineers who work at AmaGooBookSoft with no degree too. And if you're a top performer there - $250k is a fully realizable goal.
I'm deeply interested in how someone outside of a hotspot like SF/NYC could achieve a $250k salary. I was under the impression that $120k was pretty good for someone joining an infosec firm.
How would you go from an entry-level infosec position (an entry-level security consultant) to $250k/yr without switching companies? Also, what would be a reasonable salary for an experienced dev with no prior infosec experience who is joining an infosec firm? (Essentially someone who is switching fields to infosec, but who is still a very good programmer, and who rapidly picked up on the fundamentals of infosec and applies them in a valuable way.)
(That reminds me, I should check into working in NY or SF.)
1. >> I mean, you're in NYC. Are you referring to someone outside that area?
Yes I'm in NY (Westchester, actually). I'm thinking of people in NYC and San Francisco, so no, I suppose it doesn't answer your criteria of being outside those two areas. That said, I also know someone who makes this much and works remotely for a company in San Francisco, so he gets the best of both worlds.
2. >> How would you go from an entry-level infosec position to $250/yr?
For someone who decided to make a career of infosec and make that sort of salary (or the associated industry prestige/research you generally end up with at that level), it would take 6-10 years of exceptional work, original research and tool development. If you don't want to do all three, pick two, but you better make those two amazing.
Let me break down rough salary bands for you (keep in mind these will change based on a specific firm):
a. Associate - This is a bottom rung appsec engineer. If you join Matasano or a similar firm with promising intuitions about security and a background in development, you'll end up here. Great! $70-90k salary (there are outliers above this, and you'll see salaries for 50k - 60k, but if you know what you're doing with job searches and it's a good firm, that's the range). You usually stay here for a few years, training under the wing of mentors, until you competent in at least 3 different disciplines of information security (crypto, mobile, web app, network, incident response, reversing, malware analysis etc. etc. etc. and there are overlaps). You'll also stay here until you are ready to supervise someone else running a penetration test and can handle clients on your own.
70k - 90k
b. Consultant - You should be competent in 3 to 5 different disciplines of information security (or ridiculously stellar and potentially famous-in-the-future in 1-2). At this point, you probably haven't presented at a conference yet (and many go their entire careers without doing this), or done original technical research, but you're probably developing security tools or thinking about it. Any good firm is going to give a performance bonus for this. It's most likely taken you 1 - 2 years to reach this level, depending on innate talent, motivation and practice.
90k - 130k
c. Senior - Similar growth progression, now you have 5-7 disciplines under your belt, expert in 1-2. You're either doing original technical research or considering it, and you develop new tools are part of your research. You might present your research at conferences, you might not (most people who do meaningful research tend to submit). You now lead teams and projects for large engagements with "important clients" in the consultancy. Probably took you another 1 - 2 years to reach this, maybe 3.
130k - 180k
d. Principal - You're probably known in circles that know your consultancy, because you're one of the most important consultants at your firm now. You might even be industry-famous, if you have done particularly good research or released a tool that made pen testing easier for everyone. You're expert in 3-4 areas and it's no longer worthwhile counting how many disciplines you could technically operate in because the overlap is superfluous. It's likely taken you 1 - 2 years to reach this from Senior, if you are motivated and keep working.
180k - 250k
A few notes:
1. None of the definitions here are "hard" - don't take how many disciplines and similar such criteria as hard rules, it's just a rule of thumb.
2. These salaries are before bonuses such as for extra travel in a quarter, extra work in a quarter, tool development, research or conference presentation (you bonus for all those).
3. You'll notice salary ranges increase as you go up, because the higher you go the more nuanced the skill levels become.
4. There is a level or two above principal, generally "partner", "distinguished consultant/engineer" or something similar. You're basically at the top of your career as a consultant here and can found and manage consultancy firms. The salary here is $250k+.
5. You can skip, and the years are basic averages at best.
Are you absolutely sure about those salary bands? In particular, less than $100k minimum for a developer with ~ten years of experience seems extremely low. They could go get that much in a starting position at a trading firm, so why go infosec? If you can do anything, why do that?
Those salaries seem reasonable for ~2006, but not 2015. They say to reinvent yourself every ten years or so, but starting out at those salaries would be prohibitive.
If you have 10 years of dev experience and you're a strong enough case to get a yes from an infosec firm, they're going to work with you on salary to get to your level. As 'tptacek has explained quite a bit on here, a good firm is receptive to negotiation and starts at their floor, not yours :)
But your title will still be Associate because you need to learn the ropes. They could also fast track you too so you're a consultant within a year if you're ready.
This is a one size fits all chart. For mid career switchers and new grads alike.
If you have any more questions, feel free to email me. I didn't anticipate this comment would be so popular!
We hired basically two kinds of "software developer" (ie. people who could code but didn't have experience with software security):
* Developers with minimal professional experience in software --- a year or two out of college, say, or someone who had graduated from devops to software.
* Senior developers with impactful specializations and/or a well-cultivated side interest in software security. Impactful specializations would have included kernel-level systems programming, compiler theory, maths, maybe some kinds of networking or finance. Really: it's kernel stuff that got our attention most of all.
The former kind of developer fits into the ladder the way you're writing here.
The latter kind is for all intents and purposes in the door as a senior consultant.
We weren't in the business of asking people to take pay cuts.
We didn't get to salary negotiations but if I had seen the starting salaries posted above I would have coughed up my spleen. My assumption was that a junior security researcher is a senior developer and therefore the salary would have been at least (senior dev salary + σ).
Matasano didn't have an "associate" rung on its ladder. We talked for 10 years about having a "junior consultant" role, but never did. So you can discard those numbers entirely.
I could obviously be much more specific about how the numbers in the rest of the ladder don't square with that comment, but I'm not going to.
Yeah, everything you're saying here is obviously true.
I tried to make the salary bands encompass most of the consultancies that operate in NY and SF (Matasano, iSec, Accuvant, Cigital, Neohapsis, Include, and lots more). As such, it doesn't square exactly with what Matasano offers.
I also want to underscore what you said about pay cuts - good firms and good managers are going to be receptive to your needs. Once you get to 'Yes', they want you, and the value you will deliver as a consultant at one of these shops will eclipse your fully loaded cost.
Finally, I want to share another piece of advice for anyone looking to go into infosec - like anything else, there are good firms and not so good firms. I won't speak ill of any specific company, but firms like Accuvant, Matasano and iSec should usually be your first attempt to break in. They are receptive to developers with no security experience.
Pick up The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (showing its age a little now, but still the only book you need to start in web app security) and read through it.
Other firms sometimes have you do ridiculous amounts of travel (75%+) without informing you of this upfront, or they are firms without good hiring standards (or firing standards) and operate mostly as point and click vulnerability scanners where you won't learn much and you'll be underpaid.
It really, really helps to reach out to people directly and ask them how they like where they work and try to get a referral to interview through them.
They might also send / you'd want to read:
- Gray Hat Python (debugging and fuzzing with Python)
- The Tangled Web (web browser security and insecurity)
- The Art of Software Security Assessment - the bible, which you really want to read as it's a foundational text. Very dense, but you'll come out of it knowing how to attack memory very well.
You could get a PhD in a hard science, work for McKinsey and if you make it to partner be pulling in $1M+. Even if you don't make it to partner it's not hard to make >$250K after 2-3 years.
If you want to do technical work that has the compensation dynamics of McKinsey, you need to (a) hyper-specialize in something valuable and (b) own your own practice.
Call them specialists, experts, consultants, contractors, or whatever you want, but not engineers without an actual engineering degree.
It goes further than that actually. The term 'engineer' is often legally-protected, and often a degree is a pre-requisite, but isn't the only one. This becomes important when e.g. you're building bridges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_eng...
for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Engineer_(UK)
Unless you are talking about 'engineer' in the same way some people talk about 'architect' as in software architect.
I don't know the specific pay in these fields, but it is definitely higher than you would get staying in academics.
Most of the folks I knew who were chemists have moved onto other roles/industries.
I met a very respected chemist at AACR last year who said all of his postdocs were scrambling for work, and that some were being realistic and considering moving to China for the opportunities.
And, as the article states:
> If Margaret had left science entirely…for, say, a consulting job…she’d have earned about $100,000 a year or more...but she stayed in science.