11–20 of 57 posts
Professors at CMU make incredibly great salaries.. they are not 'poor'
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…
I wrote to the ethics board about it when the story broke, but I doubt anything will be done, as it's more or less a separate institution.
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…
Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the university? Open to any counterarguments.
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…
Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the univer…
As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the univer…
Presumably OP's ranking cares about things besides just research quality in CS or graduating students? Those other things aren't proxies for the quality of the university, they're components of it.
People generally use rankings to gauge how strong a university is perceived. OP's comments do nothing to change my perception of the university's strength.
Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lottery and get a tenure-track position, from what I understand you'll spend most of your time writing grant proposals to chase funding, and at least 5-7 years trying to please the tenure committee.
So, why exactly would anyone spend 10-15 years making a fraction of what they could in industry for a vanishingly small chance of the eventual payoff of tenure?
If you're going to slave away for 10-15 years anyway before you get to do what you want, you may as well do it in industry where you could put away enough money to be financially independent in that time. The only remaining obstacle is that you still kind of need an institutional affiliation to be taken seriously as a researcher and publish, but that might be slowly changing as the Internet makes it easier to publish.
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…
Firstly, CS professors make a decent salary. A professor at Berkeley (all salaries are publicly available for California state schools) make ~160k/year. Someone like Michael I. Jordan makes ~300k/year. And if you work in a field directly applicable to industry, such as machine learning, this figure does not include the substantial consulting/advising revenue that is available to you.
Furthermore, tenured faculty can go do a startup and then come back at any time for their old job.
Granted, a professor in CS could probably be making millions per year in finance or something, but my point is in absolute terms you can make a lot of money.