That’s about right in my field (biomed research).

quite a bit higher in the government labs

I don’t think there’s a biomed equivalent to “government labs” — research institutes are typically associated with universities and pay even less than NIH scale. Here’s the NRSA postdoc scale:

Years of Experience: yearly pay

0: $36,996
1: $38,976
2: $41,796
3: $43,428
4: $45,048
5: $46,992
6: $48,852
7 or more: $51,036

And it’s my experience that most universities and institutes pay less than NRSA fellowships. Compare that with the quoted numbers:

position (years of experience): median salary

Biologist I (0-2): $40,943
Biologist II (2-4): $52,002
Biologist III (4-6): $60,910
Biologist IV (6-8): $72,984
Biologist V (8+): $83,205

So the question becomes: how many of these lucrative positions are available, and how does that compare to the number of postdoc positions?

I don’t have the data to hand to answer my own question, but I will say this: I certainly hope that noone is going to choose a research career on the basis of the Jupiter numbers as expected earnings.

It’s rare for scientists from the outside to enter Italy to do science. As an American your permit-of-stay will be your largest headache (you will have it easier than me, but your wife will still have to sign for your permit every ~year). In my most frustrating moments I have written and spoke publically about the difficulties that foreign scientists experience to enter Italy and do science with respect to legal status — Italy doesn’t distinguish skilled immigrants from unskilled immigrants, and with respect to those unliveable salaries, which makes the final decision to leave for you. If you want these references, write me and I can send them to you.

P.S. Lucky you.. in Veneto, services almost function normally!

P.S.S. Did you check out SISSA? Or, to try to work around the pitiful low salary, perhaps you can get in someplace on a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Amara — I hear you about Italy and salaries. I’m actually trying to find work in Italy right now (in the Veneto region) as an American and am appalled. 1200 euro per month for “un ricercatore?” (Why am I looking? Wife in the Italian academic world — and I’m considering leaving NASA for THIS?)

As per the NASA/Hansen/Cleave comments — most of the time I think it’s poor choices made by underlings who don’t know what they are doing or why they are censoring rather than Orwellian directives from above. BUT, the fact that they feel that they must please the administration is sad and scary in itself.

My, when you finally start to get to earn the big $$ in astrophysics, you end up being scolded by a politically appointed underling, whose sole role is to be (Orwellian isn’t this) “one of the officials appointed to review Hansen’s work.”

“They’re trying to control what’s getting out to the public,” Hansen said, adding that many of his colleagues are afraid to talk about the issue. “They’re not willing to say much, because they’ve been pressured and they’re afraid they’ll get into trouble.”

But Mary L. Cleave, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Earth Science, said the agency insists on monitoring interviews with scientists to ensure they are not misquoted.

“People could see it as a constraint,” Cleave said. “As a manager, I might see it as protection.”

That is of course Protection of the President!!! So do you want to get to the big $$???

Shhhh! Don’t tell everyone!

Well, I’m a happy wreck, as opposed to a miserable one. I do try to get to sleep earlier these days, but have not got the trick to work fully yet….

Anyway, as compensation, I play hard on the weekends. Gardening: digging holes, filling them in, painting things, sawing things, drilling things, hammering things, shopping for things, hiking to and from uh…things, movies…. and the occasional exploration of the cafe and bar scene in one neighbourhood or other. Keeps me in contact with life, or whatever.

-cvj

I am not atypical, I’m sure, and I get up at 6:00am every day, I am in my office (depending on the day) by any time from 7:30 to 8:30 am. I can often (not always) be still found there twelve hours later…. and when I head home I’m still working and might work some more when I get there (depending upon how exhausted I am).

And you sleep during seminars?
Your schedule would turn my body into a miserable wreck! If I have to get up at 6 am, then I need to sleep at 10 pm at the latest, so I have to go to bed a bit before that time. I need to do my daily excercising (running) at least 4 hours before going to bed, so that means that my working day must be finished a bit before 6 pm. But I can still work 12 hours a day by working from home.

In general it seems that in software the idea of design as a driving principle (as opposed to functionality) is only now becoming dominant. As a Microsoft employee recently said, Microsoft is now employing as many designers per project as there were in the entire company 5 years ago. It’s true for the entire field that software used to (and still does) suffer from being engineer designed rather then designer designed, that’s not specific to physicists I think…

If SAP has a lot of physicists working for them, it would explain why there software is not suited to the business world. It is cumbersome, expensive and forces business to conform to the software vs. the software conforming to the business.

Cheers,

Elliot

That’s a fair point Clifford. While working outside of science, and having been secure in the lifestyle and disposition it has granted me in security, lets not be to glossy on the expectations that each of us has to earn our stripes so to speak, and that it will all be yellow roses and such.:)

Those whose value reocgnizes, the blood, sweat, and tears, know full well that such expectations, to have a “pot of gold” in how we can now look at the things that we did not have an opportunity to pursue earlier, can have branches within the sciences, that you had trained for.

Become creative, inventive, and bring forth the aspects of idealogy that was not seen before. “Only,” what experience allows one to see into the writing, that on the previous day, without the knowledge, now sees what never had been transparent before.

Yes they can all do it, but it takes work and commitment, and it is “exciting” to venture, while your security has been taken care of. Family, home, food, responsibilites, work, and “now” what you love most:)

Cheers,

-cvj

Amara, SAP is a famous example, I think their workforce is made up of a majority of physicists. But from what I have seen the sentiment extends quite broadly.

And yes the habilitation still exists, though now there is an alternative of assistant professorships. The habilitation isn’t structured like a PhD though. As far as I know it mostly consists of putting together the postdoc research and writing an introduction to it.
Structurally the postdoc world in Germany sucks though. One of the biggest hurdles for people is that you can’t be employed by a University as a researcher indefinately, after a number of years you either become a fully tenured professor or you have to leave.

So we work hard for our money.

Cheers,

-cvj

I think that these are roughly the words of the CEO (president?) of SAP. During the first years I was living in Heidelberg, the huge nearby software company SAP was snatching up a large proportion of the physics and astrophysics PhDs from the University. (The SAP CEO being a physicist himself, probably knew what he was doing.)

Regarding poorer prospects in German academia, to teach in the German university, one used to need a second, higher level PhD after the first. In my opinion, that is one very large obstacle. Has that changed yet?

My observation is Italy has much worse prospects for academia, it is not what you know, but who you know, and that ‘who’ follows a lineage that is impossible to break (although some do try).

I think overall message is that being a physicist can offer some financial rewards, with perhaps a bit more options (outside of academia) for experimentalists working in optics, electronics, magnetism, nanoscience, chemistry, materials science and biophysics, than theorists or high energy/nuclear/astro experimentalists.

However, it’s a long difficult road to get to the point when you are rewarded for your job more or less adequately, with many years, most likely well over a decade of being severely underpaid, compared to many other non-PhD career options for smart, independently thinking and ambitious young people. Sometimes I wish this point was made more explicit to undergrads considering going to grad school – the truth about many years in grad school, multiple 3-year postdocs that become more often, competitiveness of academic job market and research grant market, etc.

-cvj

One of my tutors (working in finite temperature QCD) went to MunichRe after his PhD, to work on similar statistical models. Apparently it’s much harder in France to get an adequate job with a physics PhD though, in Germany it is assumed that somebody who went through a physics PhD is probably good enough at learning stuff quickly. The additional years spent honing “pure” thinking easily offset the loss of job experience.

The brain drain in Germany is mostly structural, that is, the postdoc funding and academic career prospects are a lot worse. So while expected earnings extra academia are high (compared to France for example) career prospects in academia aren’t as good.

Clifford, ah I misunderstood you there! So does the Jupiter Scientific data apply only to academic (or research) posts or also to physicists who went of into Software engineering and finance? It’s not obvious from that page how they got it. Because if the latter the figures seem low to me…

Amara, I can’t find the data, but it’s something I remember reading in the official DPG (German Physicisists Assosciation) paper. My memory might well be off though, so feel free to disregard it. Even if it was true for 2005 I’m sure in a matter of a few years China and India will have caught up.

“You’re entirely correct that I am not taking local rates of inflation or the local cost of living into account, but neither does the survey.”

cvj says: Well, the survey talks about the USA, and while I agree that a salary in New York or LA should not be lightly compared to a salary in Smallville or Pleasanton, I still have it in my mind that it is more of a leap to compare a set of USA numbers to numbers for London or Helsinki…..but I am not claiming that is correct…just a feeling.

Thanks for the information about Ireland. I’ve got to be in Dublin to do a job in a month or two, so I’ll check out how expensive it feels to me (its been a few years since I’ve been there) and see how far that 152K goes.

But overall, let’s be careful. Picking your favourite high salary and comparing it to the quoted median has a limit to its meaningfulness, as I’m sure you know. I can give you a long list of low salaries from the same land masses. See Amara’s remarks. What would be really interesting would be information about the median salary in Europe for a physicist, and then compare that….

Cheers,

-cvj

“Clifford, what I meant is if you want to get people to study physics, it might be more worthwhile to point out expected earnings if you leave academia (which are quite a bit higher then that and mor viable for more people),”

cvj says: -

LOL! Of course! You’re assuming that I’m talking only about academia because I’m an academic, right? That’s funny. I did not specify academia anywhere in my post, or comments, I think. If I did, please forgive me. When I say “physicist”, I mean “physicist”, not “physicist in academia”. Physicists work in jobs (as physicists or otherwise… the data only tracks the former) all over the “real world”, and help make society tick. Imagine physicists in various areas of instrumentation, imaging, etc, R+D, in industry, medicine, etc….. yeah, I know, they often get called engineers, but a lot of them are physicists… I include those all when I talk about getting more people into the field. I don’t just mean more string theorists….

Cheers,

-cvj

fh – if grad school counts, then the numbers seem too high, as grad school salaries spread over many years will inevitably drag the average/median down. I strongly suspect for numbers to make some sense that even postdoctoral experience doesn’t count, and they are looking at people with 8+ years of permanent job experience – tenure track, staff at government labs etc.

This blog could give people some idea based purely on anecdotal evidence.

My experience is that current postdoc salaries in universities are averaged between 35K and ~40K, quite a bit higher in the government labs with larger spread as well – generally from mid 40ies to mid-60ies, with a tail going all the way to the 80ies and 90ies in ridiculously overpaid places like LANL. Assistant professor salaries depend strongly on the place, ranging from 60 to 80K for the most part, with once again a decaying tail towards 100K for best candidates in hot fields. I find these numbers a little embarrassing since it would appear some industry or government lab postdocs (like the ones at LANL) would actually have to take a paycut if they want to start tenure track academic career. Also, 5-6 years of working towards tenure is the most stressful and often most productive period of time, yet there’s no job security OR financial reward – but with so many applicants eager to get on the tenure train, universities can afford to pay very little and at the same time remain highly selective.

Past tenure it really depends on university, your statue etc. – in some places people hit the ceiling just over 100K, in others it goes way up. People lured from industries (or who might get lured into industry) will probably expect to get higher salaries than those with less options. Consulting and book writing is another additional source of income.

Tenure-track parallel in government labs goes up faster than in universities, as many staff scientists make more than assistant professor counterparts, but the only option to move up in salary bracket above ~100K is to go into managerial-type position – division director, etc. Funding situation is easier at the gov. labs and there is no teaching, but also no cheap student slave labor and more management to deal with. But overall it could be the best match to be efficient at doing research without much stress, and if you do that, your position can approach security of tenured professor. Jumping back to academia, perhaps even as associate or full prof., is often still an option, even though it gets harder as years go by, especially as lack of teaching is a potential problem.

Industry giants like IBM, Lucent-Bell, Exxon, GE used to do a lot of fundamental, cutting-edge science, but lately there has been a huge shift towards applications and short-term projects. You can find a lot of former Lucent folks as faculty at top places, but the times have changed. ME, MS, ChemE and EE might be interested in hiring top scientists from industry, but probably not physics departments. Salaries are ~90-100K for qualified folks fresh out of postdoc, and can grow at a much faster rate. But fundamental research and publishing in top journals is more difficult, with management demanding for devices, not papers. Hours are very good, as are stock options, but job security sucks, and you have very little say in your choice of projects.

Finally, financial industry and consulting are probably among highest paid – expect 100K plus bonuses fresh out of PhD, with a ridiculously fast indexing. Hours are terrible, expect to put in up to ~70-80 hours a week, and if you don’t like crunching numbers all day long (or BSing high-paying customers with buzzwords in powerpoint presentations = aka consulting), then you can start feeling miserable rather quickly. Going back to academic research is almost never an option (plus it would mean a huge paycut). I know only one person who came back after a year in finances.
Unlike 10-15 years ago, there are a lot of smart PhDs you will be competing with, as well as smart non-PhDs who are younger and just as hungry. Your graduate coursework or research is almost useless – writing programming code, general analytical skills and presentation skills (consulting) are key attributes. Job security is worse than anywhere else, you either make it after 3-5 years, or forced to go do something else. If you do make it, you can expect to become boss and hours become more reasonable, while pay skyrockets. Smaller companies might be interested in you after a few years of being a highly paid quant-slave as well. Another drawback is that financial companies/consulting are highly elitists and like to hire folks from top or better yet Ivy-League schools like Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Caltech. So if your PhD is from other highly reputable but not fancy-sounding school, you need to have someone on the inside, and even then it’s tough to get in.

Ok, this is my long take on salaries and various career options.