One more thing this guy might want to consider adding to his list if he's intent on exploring that landscape: working in a research-y position at a large (> few thousand employees) company.
I was in academia for a bit, and eventually dropped out of my PhD because it didn't feel right.
I was in startups (both as founder and early employee) for a while, and while I learned a lot I was mostly miserable. I also did some freelance work, and worked for a small web agency/consultancy.
I am now working in a R&D-like group at a very large company. In many ways, it combines the best of all worlds: large corporation, academic research, startups. I like reading papers and thinking about the future. I like the scrappy hard working startup attitude. I like working in a team with people that have been there for more than two decades. I like not having to worry about my job because the company is large and printing money. I like having a HR department I can go to if I encounter unethical behavior (I did not have that luxury in startups). I like having an office of my own without people talking about their life while I'm trying to work or my boss breathing down my neck every 30 minutes (open floor plans have scarred me). The list goes on and on; the gist of it is that I find it to be the best career move I've made so far.
I personally haven't found the paycut from Industry to Academia to be as minimal as he implies, at least in Computer Science. I am making easily twice as much working for Google as I could have hoped for landing a tenure-track position. That's a significant difference.
Analyze the overproduction of PHDs vs open tenure track jobs. Comparing a tenure job to working at google would be a fair apples to apples comparison.
The situation is not as bad as the liberal arts where being one of the thousands of resumes picked for a tenure track job would be like getting one of the few Nobel prizes in a hard science.
"Academic and government positions require you to work in a bureaucratic setting, maybe for the rest of your life. In industry, you can be a lone wolf if you want. In this sense, there is greater freedom in industry."
Can someone please elaborate on the industry part of this quote?
Bureaucracy is directly dependent on the size of the business. Universities are amongst the largest businesses around, hence the nonsense you have to go through to get anything done. On the other hand, you do have backup if something goes wrong which you may not be afforded in a smaller company. It's the kind of thing you'll despise until you actually need to exercise your rights.
My experience, as a PhD student with industrial sponsorship.
Big company:
- stable job
- stable pay
- lots of bureaucracy
- some freedom, but if you're a small cog in a big machine your efforts may go unseen
- potential to become a drone
- likely to be standard 9-5 hours
- usually good benefits e.g. insurance, pension.
- freedom is having a life outside the office
- routine can be rewarding and many people really require it
Academia:
- stable job after 10-20 years
- pay is meh until you get tenure. £30k nominal, up to £60k for a professorship
- lots of bureaucracy (LOTS)
- potential for institutionalisation
- limited freedom in choosing where your research goes, provided you're in a position of power in your group (otherwise forget it)
- hours are flexible within reason, potential for travel if your research is hot.
- researchers are petty as hell
- scientifically rewarding. You probably won't change the world in your lifetime, but that's OK because you love what you do
Note that while it looks like I've made academia sound arduous, that last fact makes up for it for many, many people.
Small company:
- stable job if the company is low risk
- little bureaucracy
- pay strongly linked to company performance
- high responsibility
- working hours depends on who you work for (tech industry is normally good here)
- benefits can be amazing
- freedom is the potential to really affect the company's direction
- can be very rewarding because of the responsibility
Industry can provide the ultimate freedom - working for yourself.
pay is meh until you get tenure. £30k nominal, up to £60k for a professorship
Starting salaries are a lot higher than £30k (US$50k) for CS faculty in many countries. Here in Denmark the typical starting salary is around £45k (US$70K), and you can get tenure w/ a raise after 3-4 years. And at research institutions in the US, the typical starting salary is around £50-60k (US$80-100k). You can still make more in industry, but the pay isn't £30k-level bad.
I think that's often overlooked. Simply going by the numbers, it's impossible for all PhD students to eventually get tenure. Plenty of people end up being fairly well paid research scientists until jobs become available. Tenure is definitely a job of dead man's shoes.
I have a slightly different view of what freedom is. It doesn't mean freedom from responsibilities. It means freedom to choose the direction of your research, but whatever direction you choose, you still have to work at it.
His point is that if you have freedom to work at whatever research direction you choose, then it doesn't mean freedom from the other 60% or 80% of your workload (as shown by surveys of tenure track researcher time allocation) that is not really related to research as such, much less your chosen direction of it.
Teaching, administrative duties, grad student supervision, grant proposals, committee work etc make up the majority of the workload; primary research was (IIRC) something like 20% of total working time.
one of the biggest differences between academia and industry, in the context of salary, isn't just the salary per se but the increment in salary that is possible. in academia your salary is very much fixed. no such thing as a bonus. you bring in a 3 million dollar research grant with an additional 2 million dollars in indirects (that go right into the University's pocket)? "thank you!" but your salary doesn't go up. no bonus for you.
It's actually quite common for people in academia to get a large raise if they bring in big grants in competitive areas, at least in the U.S. (in Europe it varies a lot by country).
One mechanism is that you can pay yourself summer salary: official university salaries in the U.S. are 9-month salaries, and if you have a big grant, you can give yourself effectively a 33% bonus by becoming a full-time employee on the grant during the summer. (Many grants not only allow this, but require it.)
The other mechanism is the same as in industry: get a raise by getting outside offers. A professor with a big new grant in a hot area, but a low-ish salary, is an attractive target for other universities to poach. The person can then either let themselves be poached, or present the offer to their university and ask for a retention counter-offer. Either way, a raise around ~$20-40k/yr is common in that case, although there is a bit of a soft cap on salaries, so raises are easier from lower starting points. A raise from $90k to $120k is easy-ish to negotiate, and a raise from $120k to $140-150k is fairly common for people with a high profile, but one pushing you much above $150k is difficult (and only a handful of superstars at top universities can get offers over $200k).
If you do really need more than that, though, tenured professor in a science/engineering area is also a reasonably good platform to develop additional income streams (consulting, speaking gigs, etc.), if that's your thing, since the employment contracts are typically much more liberal on allowing that than is the norm in industry. Though imo that's not really the best use of the platform.
that's a good summary, the figures you quote are accurate
the question is, then, what are the salary possibilities for a person with similar experience, stature in their chosen field of work, in the private sector?
my guess is there is a large range but I wouldn't be surprised (from what I've heard from friends and colleagues) if the answer is, integer multiples of academic salaries (if not 10x)
for example in Law, the equivalent of a tenured Full Professor at a large research-based university, might be a partner in a top law firm in the city they live in (a large city).
or in medicine, a specialist at a major hospital
or in engineering, a principle at a large engineering firm
In areas like medicine and law I can believe that's true. However I don't think it's that common in CS or engineering. I know quite a few people who've moved from academia to industry and vice versa, and the pay difference is definitely not 10x multiples. When a professor making low six figures jumps to Google, he or she gets a pay raise, but more like 20-50%, not 10x: Google isn't making $1m+ salary offers. For engineers afaict it varies by line of work. I don't know a lot about areas where being a principal is a thing (civil engineering?), but I can imagine those are lucrative. In areas like aerospace, if you compare full-professor salaries at research institutions, to senior engineering staff salaries at places like Lockheed, they're pretty comparable. If anything it's easier to make more in academia, because you can consult on the side, whereas big engineering companies typically disallow that in their employment contracts.
> It is not difficult to get some kind of honorary position with a research institute when you work in industry.
I think this statement is uh... a tad misleading. This depends a lot on your particular field of interest/research and companies you work for. Also, notoriety.
I was in academia for a bit, and eventually dropped out of my PhD because it didn't feel right. I was in startups (both as founder and early employee) for a while, and while I learned a lot I was mostly miserable. I also did some freelance work, and worked for a small web agency/consultancy.
I am now working in a R&D-like group at a very large company. In many ways, it combines the best of all worlds: large corporation, academic research, startups. I like reading papers and thinking about the future. I like the scrappy hard working startup attitude. I like working in a team with people that have been there for more than two decades. I like not having to worry about my job because the company is large and printing money. I like having a HR department I can go to if I encounter unethical behavior (I did not have that luxury in startups). I like having an office of my own without people talking about their life while I'm trying to work or my boss breathing down my neck every 30 minutes (open floor plans have scarred me). The list goes on and on; the gist of it is that I find it to be the best career move I've made so far.