It's sad to hear that Fox's is leaving Berkeley. I've heard only wonderful things about her from her course staff and students. It's awful that the university cannot pay its talented faculty enough to keep them from leaving for financial reasons and worse that they can't muster a healthy academic culture that respects all their faculty equally, whether they're tenure track, adjunct, or tenured. Best of luck in industry, it's probably the right move but I'm sure you will be dearly missed!
Same here, from both interns we've had who took a class of hers..
It's eye-opening that the salary of an adjunct faculty member at Cal with 100% appointment with classes taught to 1.5K+ students (CS61A) is less than the tuition fees of 8 students.
And the fact that Student EDUCATION FUNDING shouldnt necessarly be classified as a "LOAN"
It should be an INVESTMENT into the educational institution on the MERIT and VALUE of the degree taught and received.
Thus: If I am lured into an educational track which promises a market level pay/industry-pertinent-education which makes one employable in said field, but results in NOT... the institution should be liable for such and the investment/"tuition" should be negated and a "write-off" to the school.
That's the same as saying:
"Pay me $100 to teach you how to fight!" Gets ass kicked. "You still owe me $100 for TEACHING you how to fight."
>>If I am lured into an educational track which promises a market level pay/industry-pertinent-education which makes one employable in said field, but results in NOT... the institution should be liable for such and the investment/"tuition" should be negated and a "write-off" to the school.
Supply, meet demand. There are lots of people who want to teach part time for the title and even more who desperately cling to the hope they’ll be able to get a tenure track job after being told they won’t, for many years.
I don't think that's the whole story here. It's also that universities don't tend to value teaching, and won't pay good teachers the same that they pay good researchers. That's not market dynamics, that's a cultural decision around where to allocate resources.
It's definitely not just supply-demand. The application pool for lecturers are places like Berkeley is much smaller than you think, when you start filtering for qualified folks.
Now, at least some of this is academia having too strong of a filter, but the year I joined Berkeley - I was 1 of 4 to accept the offer.
This is the primary drawback of unions, no? The most talented workers leave to self-negotiate better salaries elsewhere and the company can’t do anything about it.
At least that’s what I got from the article. Weird for a university professor to blame a union.
I don’t think universities care whether their adjuncts are the most talented. Basically the entire point of the role these days is to undercut the cost of getting tenured faculty to teach classes. Given that backdrop I was honestly surprised to see the salary was as high as it was
That is almost certainly the union's doing. Unions help push back against the downward pressure on wages from employers (who are passing on the downard pressure from investors and the public).
The same thing happens at the vast majority of US universities whose faculty aren’t unionized. In fact, per [0], the two thirds of adjuncts make under $50,000 which is less than half what the union negotiated.
OK, but roughly 100% of the US has lower living costs than Berkeley too. $50,000 (especially with solid benefits) is a middle-class salary in most places.
The salary is as high as it is in part due to the Union -- but the UC starting salary for lecturers regardless of discipline and location is around $60K. But computer science is in a roughly better position because a few tenured faculty advocated for higher wages so they could actually make hires. Still multiple people are leaving because the workload/stress/salary are out of alignment.
> worse that they can't muster a healthy academic culture that respects all their faculty equally, whether they're tenure track, adjunct, or tenured.
Saying things like this is a real disservice to the kinds of people who waste years and decades of their lives trying to return to academia after being rejected. Deliberate gestures of inclusiveness encourage people to keep hoping long past all reason.
You have misinterpreted my point. Gestures of inclusiveness to adjunct “faculty” are bad because they aren’t faculty and will never be treated as such. Treating the unfortunates who do those jobs in the hope of becoming academics better is good for them but bad overall because it encourages applications for jobs like that which are only suitable for those of independent means or who have supportive families/spouses.
> My salary as a Unit-18 lecturer with a 100% appointment was about 100K annual compensation until our union's strike and new contract brought it to be about 107K.
I cannot muster a lot of sympathy for people choosing between 6 figure careers.
It's not reasonable to expect a university to be able to match rates of one of the highest paying careers in industry. If universities try to match industry costs for all of their employees, those costs will just be passed on to graduates in the form of more student debt, which is already enough of a crisis.
She should take the higher paying opportunities available to her, and the university should find someone who is happy with what they can afford for the position.
> It's not reasonable to expect a university to be able to match rates of one of the highest paying careers in industry. If universities try to match industry costs for all of their employees, those costs will just be passed on to graduates in the form of more student debt, which is already enough of a crisis.
This may be true for lesser colleges, but Berkeley has a 4.8 billion dollar endowment and is teaching some of our brightest minds. They can eat the cost.
It's also worth noting that 6 figure salaries don't go nearly so far in the Bay Area. Food, rent, and services are more expensive here than in most of the state, and taxes are higher than in most of the country. A rough estimate, I'd put this salary as equivalent to 65-70k somewhere like Boise, Idaho.
Endowments are not simply a pool of money sitting around spendable on anything. They are generally composed of thousands and thousands of donations, each with specific requirements for that donation. Some may be scholarships, some to fund specific research projects, some to specific departments or groups (and again with strings attached).
A better indicator of is the salary reasonable, is are there ample job applicants for the positions? If people choose this position over all their other options than this pay is market clearing, paying more is simply taking money from other productive uses.
Read the article! It's a suprisingly balanced, thoughtful take on the job of cs lecturer at Berkeley.
In particular, the author mentions important issues like cheating, "grade grubbing" (and its primary cause), managing the 100 employees, associated with the course, and revising materials (which I was very suprised to find out that an adjunct would be in charge of!).
(In contrast to the discussion here, which when I read it focused solely on the compensation aspect. Look for something else in the piece! There's more there than money.)
The amount of overhead there is, on top of teaching and preparing materials is exorbitant. Managing TAs can be difficult as they are students and are still developing their technical skills. Cheating and grade grubbing are par for the course, but it seems to increase quadratically in the number of students rather than linearly. I think part of this has to do with misconceptions about curving.
Revising materials is more of a milestone. As technology advances, we should be teaching more up-to-date stuff, so we typically revise what we teach and then share that with other instructors. Sometimes that takes considerable work. In some positions, the program strictly restricts what is allowed to be taught. I typically stick to the core content for about 65% of the course, and then add in my own topics for the other 35%.
For comparison, a similar position in Germany entry level salary would be between 50k and 60k Euro (hired lecturer, aka 13-I) and an entry level base salary for a tenure track professor is between 70k (W2) and 85k (W3) (but they usually have to buy private insurance). If that's good or bad depends on your field...in CS it's not so great, in less employable areas it's good.
I'd consider 60k solid middle class (not lower end of the spectrum).
Germany does not have the egregious housing costs of Berkeley. It’s entirely possible to feed one’s self on that amount but not really get adequate housing, and certainly not what you’d imagine as middle class stability.
True, just posted it as a data point. The salary from the article is for 9 month and mine are for 12 months so for 12 month the salary from the article would technically even be 142k. But I get her point of this actually being a 12 month job so I'll assume 107k.
That being said, I quickly googled the average rent in Berkley and it's around 4k$.
The salary difference (ignoring 9 vs 12 month) seems to be around 50k which is over 4k/month...which should be enough to cover average housing all else being equal. And that assumes no rent for the German counterpart :P
Also depends a bit where you are in Germany. I think in Munich (most expensive) the buying price is around 10k€/square meter and Berkley city from quick googling seems to be around 12,5k$. Not sure around rent prices but I'm assuming they scale to buying prices.
I found the part about health insurance interesting as well. I would probably never willingly under-insure if I had that option (I do not).
4K/month is 45% of 107k/year gross salary, that’s not affordable. Not enough left over to save for the children’s future and for retirement. But she’s not the only income so their household income is probably fine, just lower than what she could be making in another kind of job.
She should have married her partner to be on their insurance, that’s what I did.
> The salary difference (ignoring 9 vs 12 month) seems to be around 50k which is over 4k/month...which should be enough to cover average housing all else being equal. And that assumes no rent for the German counterpart :P
Except that everything else is more expensive here because of these costs. Any service you can imagine, jack the prices up 50%+.
> In San Francisco, high rents have driven the government's "low income" threshold of $117,400 (£87,970) almost as high as the median income for a family of four in the area - $118,400 (£88,630).
You know something has gone haywire when "low income" and "median" incomes are basically the same amount.
That article literally refers to it as poverty line as well a bit further down. "Poverty line" isn't a thing, thing. It'll always require some math to localize.
Lower down it discusses the nationally averaged poverty line. At no point does it make any claims to a number for a SF specific localized poverty line. As you say, local values are going to be different, but the national number is far below the "low income" threshold set earlier in the article.
Are you sure? I see values of $1.7M or so for Berkley [1]. In Munich it's around 10k Euros per square metre. There are many properties with prices around the Berkley value [2], although flats will be cheaper.
Adjunct profs are not buying houses in Berkeley, they rent. It's a college town with the housing demand that comes with that. It's also less than a 10th the size of Munich.
You’re comparing germany the country with Berkeley, a small place in california.
Maybe it’s more appropriate to compare Munich, London, Paris, Amsterdam with Berkeley and see how lecturer salaries there compare with each other. hint: Berkeley adjunct has higher salary even compared to some tenured professors in comparable cities in Europe.
If you're comparing to expensive places to live, Switzerland pays academics well. Postdoc salaries are around 85-100k (CHF, which is about the same as USD these days). Many universities don't have much in the way of a pay ladder though (ETH maxes out at 3 years experience). Full professors can hit 250k+. A studio in Zurich is 1500+/mo though which is comparable to central London, but competition is fiercer.
In the UK an experienced postdoc, or one with a competing offer, can make around 40k before having to push for lectureships. Professorial salaries start at 60k and maybe hit six figures for senior staff. Munich is fairly high, I think between 50-70k depending on who you ask (TV-L E13). Scandinavia is not great compared to the high cost of living, last time I checked.
Yes exactly, when I saw $100k I thought that sounded pretty good for an academic salary basically anywhere else except Switzerland.
A better comparison is somewhere like Oxford/Cambridge which both have extremely high rent/income ratios - some of the worst in the country - many postdocs, and almost all PhDs, can't afford to live alone. A room is close to 1k a month which is absurd in the UK.
And yes by all means compare Berkeley to Munich or Berlin or any of those cities other than London, where despite being expensive for Europe they don’t come close to Berkeley in terms of cost
Teaching is a tough gig. I come from a family of academics (my brother and I are the "redneck" engineers. The rest are kinda Ivy-league).
I have done training (usually one-off seminars) for years. The prep takes forever. I have known a lot of teachers, and have heard stories about lesson plans. I suspect college profs have that, X20.
And academia (like nonprofits) doesn't have money, so ego can be the currency. Can make for a rather unpleasant working environment.
> "Former chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ gross pay was $562,243. Dirks is set to go on paid leave for the next academic year, during which he will receive $434,000."
This is well over the pay for say, the governor of California.
It sucks that Pamela's leaving Berkeley. We worked closely together for the past year.
These thoughts are incredibly valid -- I also wrote something similar after two years, though didn't share it. Salary is a tough sticking point in the Bay, but it's far from the only thing there. At the same time, it'd be one that the University could relatively easily fix if they tried...
The point about inflexibility is really worth underscoring. My calendar is WAY more full during the semester than it ever was as a SWE. While my summers are quite a bit more flexible in terms of a calendar, they are completely filled with prep and research projects - some to fill in a pay gap, some that are fun...
I also find the 15 week (really more like 18 week) semester in the Fall quite a slog. In industry it's often possible to take a couple days vacation when you need it without issue, but it's incredibly difficult to recharge during the semester.
what's up with #2? I get #1, but as a lecturer I was kind of pissy to find out my teaching schedule after it was already carved in stone. I get that there are lots of people involved and lots of constraints, but at least find out what my plans are before putting me down for a full load?
It is unfortunate when a talented teacher, as the OP seems to be, turn to industry for (significantly) more money, but this seems to be the way the market works pretty much everywhere around the world.
There are however some advantages to an academic job: somewhat more flexible schedule (not when you're teaching), relative freedom to engage in whatever research you wish, no need to sit in front of a computer screen all day, job security.
(Author here) The aspect of flexibility is really interesting. On the one hand, the lecturer role is way more flexible in that I can get my prep work done whenever I want, and if I did find myself all done with prep, I could garden all day instead with no guilt. (That happened once in my 1.5 years!)
On the other hand, there's a lot that's more inflexible than in a SWE job: lecture times, university-dictated exam times (at night! I had to sleeptrain my toddler to make them), staff meeting times (hard to find a time that works for a staff of 50-100).
So yeah- more flexible in some ways, less flexible in others, it depends what sort of flexibility you're looking for.
As a (tenured) academic myself, I fully understand the flexibility (and the lack thereof). A staff of 50-100 sounds like a true nightmare. I've experienced classes of ~500 students myself, but 2000 seems quite excessive.
Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.
P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.
Oo, nice! I was actually thinking of adding specific support for a @memoize decorator that would visualize what gets added to the memo, like the visualization I made more manually for this article (scroll down): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algor...
Don't know when I'll ever get around to it, pull requests welcome!
Yeah, the thing is, as someone in the same position as the OP, I feel stupid for always sticking around.
Pamela already addressed the inflexibility part. And I'll just echo that I find it worse than how she described. But I've probably over-committed myself, too. Engaging in research-like stuff is very fun, but it is often unpaid for someone who is a lecturer.
As for job security: Non-Tenured folks (like the OP) get relatively short term contracts. And it's easy for the University to not renew them, especially when there are budget constraints. Sure, I never had a contract like this as SWE and I could have been fired before my 1-2 years were up, but my job there felt much more secure. I knew my manager and how the company was doing.
In contrast, while I'm friends with everyone - I don't yet have security that I'll be returning in the Fall, even though my name is on the schedule.
I’ve always considered taking a lecturer position as a sort of second career if I ever want something different from Big Tech. It’s kind of a shame the health insurance offering is mediocre, which probably rules this out, at Berkeley at least.
Bananas that cost of living in the area is so high that 100k can still leave you cutting it close. Although of course it's actually only like 65k after taxes, and there's zero hope of a unicorn payday. Accepting that you will absolutely, certainly never be financially independent ain't for everyone, especially in one of the few fields where you can reasonably feel that you don't have to accept that
Still, the pay is better than I thought and MUCH better than most adjunct situations. Even with all the caveats, I would 100% take this over an industry job that paid 2-3x. Sounds really fulfilling and fun as fuck
I am also a Unit 18 lecturer in a computer science program. What Fox writes is true. The Unit 18 arrangement is weird. I do it because I am technically temporary and only teach once or twice a year. My full time job is elsewhere.
At my UC, there is a separate ladder called Lecturer Full-Time PSOE/SOE. It's not clear why she wasn't on that ladder. Perhaps Cal doesn't have one.
(Author) I make my meals when I work from home, but I didn't often have time to make meals and get to campus at time, so I'd buy a sandwich or salad at the deli instead. That's between $10-$15 depending on which cafe my class is nearest. Also being pregnant, my appetite and nausea are unpredictable, so I might buy another snack during the day.
Certainly with better planning, I could have reduced those costs slightly.
Just to get an idea, how much would it cost to eat outside for lunch? With my European perspective, 15$ is what I would expect from a nice restaurant for lunch. Or a really fancy burger in an expensive city neighbourhood.
Yeah, a $12 entrée is pretty average for a single meal. Add anything else (tips, drink, etc.) or pick anything slightly more expensive and you'll easily hit $15. If you go for inexpensive options consistently (maybe you avoid tips and always get water at a cheaper place), you could probably average around $9-$10/meal, though you might get tired of it quickly. To average less than that while still eating out every meal, you'll have to get a bit more... creative with your selections.
In Berkeley, a cheap takeout meal like Chipotle is around ~$11. If you walked into a random nice restaurant for lunch and ordered one entree, + tax + tip, you'd surely be out $25.
In Berkeley, unless eating junk from a fast food, you're talking 20-25$/person/meal for a normal place. More like 40-50$ for a "nice" place. Even the fast food crap you'll be above 10$ unless you eat 4 chicken nuggets or something.
To be honest I don't walk nearby campus often, so I'm not sure how the cheap food joints are around it. Perhaps its cheaper due to higher volume, or lower quality? But where we go to have lunch, it's a rare day when it costs me less than 20$ per person, once the bill is signed and we're out of the door. We try to aim for the value-for-quality segment.
In France, it's difficult to have a nice meal for $15/15€, unless you are talking about ready made food/metros served in restaurants.
And company restaurants are awful.
Do you mean Paris? I was in Paris and Bordeaux last week, Paris is for sure very expensive, sometime even close to what I’m used to pay in Switzerland. But in Bordeaux “plats/formules du jour” where below 12€ in restaurants, sometime below 10€.
Note that I meant for lunch, not dinner. I meant the equivalent of “Mittagsmenu” we have in Germany. The price is generally lower.
Edit: just to be sure my tone isn’t off here, I don’t expect to know what things cost in France and not trying to say that you’re incorrect. I’m just wondering if prices I’ve seen are more or less the norm or the exception.
it depends, for the restaurants around my workplace, if you take just a main dish (which is usually well enough for a midday meal), it'd be slightly lower than 15 €. But once you add a starter/side dish or a drink or a coffee, you can easily go above that. There's also a few cheaper options where you can get combo options (like starter + main dish) for below 15 €.
For the company restaurants, from what I've seen, it depends on the company and how much they are paying, so it goes from pretty terrible to actually decent.
I find it incredibly hard to meal prep and bring meals to work too. So, I also often eat lunch out. As others have said, Berkeley is really quite expensive. Even if I go the "smoothie" route for lunch, I'm still looking at $7 with tax and tip and I'm definitely not full... Most days I was on campus I walked 5 miles in total up and down hills, so I often wanted a filling lunch.
I think I don't mind spending the money, but it is a significant change compared to working from home, or working in an office with food, or just making so much more money that you don't care. (Which is how it was when I was a SWE that worked in an office without free food.)
A university setting often has a cafeteria or other method of feeding the students, and one of the employment benefits is getting to eat there "for free" - but then for tax reasons they list it out separately on the income statement.
Not sure how common it is in the US, but at Berkeley the cafeterias are not free. They are a bit cheaper, around $9 for lunch if you prepay, but $13 if you don't!
To be honest, I don't even think faculty are told how to take advantage of this... they're off campus too and in the last couple of years, the hours have not been great. Food is totally fine for what it is, though!
To be fair the service is so poor here in Germany that it's far quicker to buy fresh produce and cook your own food than to eat out. You have to budget around 2 or 3 hours for a meal here...I guess in the US it is fast to eat out, even at a restaurant. Here in Germany the waiters just ignore you, but everyone is used to it so it won't change
>Here in Germany the waiters just ignore you, but everyone is used to it so it won't change
Funny, just by coincidence I was reading notes I kept when I visited Germany from the U.S. by myself several decades ago. I commented back then, more than once, about how annoyingly long I had to wait to simply get the tab at the end of the meal so I could pay. I thought it was just me.
No, it's a well known problem, among both Germans and foreigners. Everyone hates it, but they just sigh and say it won't change. It makes me genuinely angry how hard it is to get out of a restaurant.
My experience is quite different. When I'm in the US for conferences I'm always amazed that when going out for dinner lots of places make you wait (sometimes up to 30min) even though the restaurant is half empty. It has happened to me especially when out relatively early. Mind you this is for dinner, lunch is somewhat different usually.
As a professor, pay is very comparable across organizations for given degree programs nationwide. One hypothesis for why is that salary support on grants to faculty comes from grants with salary as a direct cost. These grants are the same amount nationwide, e.g. $600K for NSF small CISE core award. Also student tuition doesn't vary for different classes, so the university doesn't necessarily have more money for CS faculty depending on how things internally work.
There is some cost of living adjustments but it is pretty minimal. The discipline adjustments are more significant. English department adjuncts are probably paid a lot less.
My biggest surprise was that adjuncts are paid so well. It rivals my salary when I got tenure especially with only teaching two classes per semester and them being co-taught. I've done the visiting/adjunct thing in NYC, and the Berkeley salary is over 2x higher. But I was doing that for the joy of teaching and I had a day job.
Adjuncts where? I was adjuncting at PSU Harrisburg campus last year while working on a startup… $5k/class and you have to work your way up to get a consistent course load. I believe that salary applies across the entire Penn State system.
There are some professors who earn much more than average, mainly in medicine, economics and engineering from what I’ve read.
Startup idea didn’t work out (and it’s stressful), so I’m back to being a working stiff.
Hey, small world! Current grad student at PSU Harrisburg (under Dr. Lee for MSIS). I'm hoping to adjunct after graduation. Did you just apply to an open posting? What was the process like?
Nice! I actually attended there as an undergraduate many years ago. Prof Bui still remembered my name, even after my military -> industry -> academic -> industry journey. As in most institutions I've been in, if they're already familiar with your work then there's little process for getting an adjunct position because of the demand (as explained in the article). Just don't expect interesting courses right off the bat.
I do have to warn you, if you're not already aware... all those articles about lack of student engagement due to pandemic are horrifyingly correct. I started adjuncting as the pandemic hit and it seemed like each semester was worse than the previous one. I just finished up my last course and it was such a slog. People barely show up, are completely silent when they do. A root canal was more fun.
That said, it's a great feeling when you really make a connection and I hope to return to teaching sometime in the future.
I will put my psu address in my profile, if you want to connect.
I always find it weird that people in these threads where compensation come up have a real crab in the bucket mentality. “I’m not getting paid that much! It’s not fair! You shouldn’t get it because I didn’t get it!” Instead of advocating for advancing their own wages - they instead wish to pull others down. I’d understand the argument if you were arguing against people who weren’t laborers (e.g. capitalists) but for fellow laborers - this is truly crab in bucket mentality and is abhorrent.
"For comparison, if I were to take a software engineering job right now, I would earn a minimum of 160K (like at a startup with high equity) but more like 220K+. Plus sign-on bonus ($20-120K), stock options, annual performance bonus (10-40%), etc."
So this might add up to 300K. Which is a number that is unprecedented in history. Throughout most of history and to this day in pretty much every place in the world, such a salary would be reserved for the executive branch. It's an insanely high compensation largely made possible by a local tech boom, excessive venture capital, very high local living expenses, and the nature of startups, where maximum spending is considered good: 300K can be afforded because of the potential exit.
That's not how 99.99999% of the jobs work, so the comparison is odd. Not at a personal level, but definitely at a societal level.
> So this might add up to 300K. Which is a number that is unprecedented in history. Throughout most of history and to this day in pretty much every place in the world, such a salary would be reserved for the executive branch.
I'd slow down on the hyperbole. That number is specifically for the US so let's look at other white collar professions in the US that fall in similar ranges:
- Finance
- Consultants
- Lawyers
- Doctors
- Accountants
- Dentists
...
This person is probably in the top percentile of their field if they're teaching at a top CS school so let's use the high end of those fields and not the average.
This is true, but most of those jobs have significant training requirements (Lawyers, Accountants, and specifically Doctors and Dentists), and/or expect exceptionally long work hours (Doctors, Lawyers, Consultants, and especially Finance.) Silicon Valley tech is pretty unique in paying $200-300K+ for what is normally a 40 hour work week.
"Entry level" is tough to define. Perhaps entry level for Berkeley, but these are positions which still require an advanced degree and a good bit of teaching experience.
The author used to work for Google, which typically can pay 300k+ for a senior engineer position. It might be insanely high, but it doesn't make it non-factual or even a bad comparison.
Qualified candidates to people who teach CS to Berkeley students are likely to be in a similar situation too. Until the tech boom subsides a bit at least. I'd say the comparison is fair, even if a bit removed from most people's realities.
Can confirm. CS61A is a monster of a weeder course lol.
If you don't have a background in programming/computer science and come in fresh with starry eyes, you better be a prodigy in learning, because it's a lot of material in a very short amount of time.
I don't understand the rationale behind weeder courses.
Shouldn't the introductory course sequence be designed to help all students master the material?
What's the point of teaching a class poorly or not giving students enough time?
Does Cal not have enough faculty to teach the follow-on courses if too many students are successful, so they have to prevent students from being successful?
> I don't understand the rationale behind weeder courses.
When you have more people entering a major than you can handle, you end up having to weed some of them out.
If that seems nonsensical, well, maybe it is, but (I think?) it's not like the same person is deciding to do both of these at once. One entity decides to overenroll, another one needs to find a way to compensate.
It's not really a 'weeder course' because it's not a course for absolute beginners as the GP seems to suggest- the pre-reqs include some maths and programming. Back in the Scheme days, I think Brian Harvey used to say something to the effect of 'the pre-req is you know what mathematical induction is'.
61A is not a weeder course at all. It’s theoretically the CS 102 equivalent at Berkeley, with CS 10 being the CS 101 of Berkeley.
The problem is that because CS 10 is not a required course, most freshmen that come into Berkeley, many who were top of their class in high school, think “hm I can just take 61A since it’s mandatory.” It’s not entirely their fault, since Berkeley doesn’t do a very good job of advertising the CS 10 course. It’s fairly new, and there’s still a stigma around it — that you’re “not as smart” if you need to take it. The result is you have almost 2000 students every semester, and many of them are inevitably going to struggle.
I’ve sat in some CS 10 lectures (albeit while I was graduating with a CS degree and TAing CS 61B) and watched my friends do the homework. I didn’t have the luxury of taking CS 10. It’s a great way to learn how to think like a programmer. My personal recommendation is that every incoming Berkeley freshman going into CS should take CS 10, and it should be made mandatory. The CS degree only takes 3 years to complete all the required courses at a fairly leisurely pace, so there’s definitely room to add an extra requirement. Especially since now, the incredibly stupid EE16B has been dropped from the curriculum.
It’s a great course if you’re into that. We even have a major for it — EECS, which is electrical engineering and computer science.
For pure CS majors, it should be an elective. But it was made mandatory until recently. The main complaint is that it’s intense and difficult - regular reports of spending an extraordinary time on the course per week. You can see how a lot of resentment builds up quickly.
It was gone for a while but came back as CS 10 and it’s fantastic. See my earlier comment but I believe CS 10 should be made mandatory as a CS 101 course for all incoming CS/EECS majors.
Yes. An introductory course should be designed that way to facilitate learning. They do have an introductory course before this one to get your feet wet but it isn’t a part of the degree requirements.
Berkeley doesn’t have enough faculty for all the students who join. So part of it is just pragmatism.
It also wants to maintain a certain level of prestige. The degree is fairly difficult to get.
Honestly, if you don't know that many US universities suffer from the dual problems of overpopulation and under-investment in undergraduate pedagogy, the concept of weeder courses would seem wholly counterintuitive. It's pragmatic, but at the same time because it mostly benefits those who go into the class already knowing the content, so at some point you wonder if degrees are slowly just becoming glorified certification programs.
<first baby while working in the tech industry, I got 4 months fully paid leave>
This is ridiculous, how do you raise a child in US? Under the table, in your office or what.
(in my country, mat. leave is by law and till your child is 3yrs old, employer is prohibited to fire you during this period, again by law. But of course, you'll not get full salary during leave, only some percents)
Childcare. Yes, at 4 months is super soon, but that is how it is done.
But also, being at home for 3 years (or 5 if there are two kids) hurts your work super lot even if you formally stay employed. And while they cant fire you while you are away, they can fire you shortly after returning back or you get position designed to make you leave voluntary. Women after that long stay away are penalized a lot. (And also, both leaving work and going back to it are pretty large adaptations.)
When you need to work for a prolonged period, pop child in a large freezer. When finished, take them out and wait for sprog to warm up, bingo!. Time effectively stops for them, removing the massive friction between work and childcare.
It works for food, why not?
A little more seriously, raising kids properly is the most important thing there is for society, that should be explicitly recognised by a society.
Not GP, but here in Romania state mandated maternity leave is 2 years at low pay or 1 year at a higher pay (the mother can choose which she prefers). And yes, the company can't fire you for becoming pregnant or being on maternity leave (I believe there are exceptions, such as bankruptcy or significant down-sizing). The state pays some of the salary, but the company pays a portion as well. This applies to adoptions as well, but only for new-born babies.
Furthermore, fathers can also ask for paternal leave in the same conditions, also for up to 2 years. Only one of the parents may take this longer leave, but the parent that doesn't still has the right to 1 month of leave.
Even if the 1 month is not taken, fathers can still request 5 days of special leave for this (or 10 if they attend a child care course).
Note that while the pay you get for this period is based on your regular salary, it is typically capped at a fairly low level, so for high-paying positions it still represents a significant income loss.
Is your system sustainable though because romania is on top of defaulting on pension and welfare system in the europe?
Most young people are migrating outside the country for any skilled jobs, huge deficit & debt, and cutting back on the promised welfare doesn't sound good to me.
You have to consider long term sustainability and practical implication.
Nordic countries, switzerland, etc which are famous for welfare systems are funded by financial systems and oil. Other countries are not. Can they afford all these generous benefits?
Well, one of the Romanian welfare system's biggest long-term risks is low natality leading to an aging population. So, reducing benefits for new-born children seems penny wise but pound foolish.
Still, given that the welfare system is mostly financed out of current taxes, if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining. We are not in a good place right now, but we were in a much worse place 10 or 20 years ago, so there are reasons to be hopeful things can be turned around.
Also, lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country (while the legal benefits are nice, often times the quality of the actual services is well below par). So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
> one of the Romanian welfare system's biggest long-term risks is low natality leading to an aging population.
That is true for every welfare system based on social responsibility structure. Society pools money to pay for retirement of everyone at a fixed rate. Young people are entered into the system to fund old people's retirement today and promised that they would get funded by young people tomorrow.
This works as long as enough young people enter the system at intervals to continue the payouts except when that doesn't happen due to demographic collapse or some other reason. Think of a legal pyramid scheme.
> if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining
Not necessarily. Many countries underestimated the life expectancy of people retired and had to run on a deficit as a result so they are taking money from pensioners of future today. They had to fix this by increasing the retirement age, cutting down benefits, removing benefits for people with private savings, etc.
They will only keep cutting. If not, it will fall.
> lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country
I see unemployment among youth as the major reason. Welfare won't be funded by unemployed.
> So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
Reducing unsustainable welfare will because money can be used elsewhere to create jobs, attract businesses, increase employment, etc.
I find it odd that they compare startup equity grants to cash in pocket from the university job, because there's a very high chance that the equity will turn out worthless.
I don't think she did; I assume those numbers are simply the cash figure. The phrasing "a minimum of 160K (like at a startup with high equity)" implies that the low cash number would be accompanied by a large chunk of equity.
You complain that pay is too low compared to the private sector… why not work in the private sector then? Unless there is a reason why you prefer teaching to business? In which case the pay cut is logical.
Comparisons of totally alien industries (non-profit academia to for-profit tech startups) don’t make any sense because everything about them is overwhelmingly different.
The author did work in the private sector, then went to academia and tried to make it work, and now went back to private. They clearly laid out why without much complaining.
My take is that Pamela is championing for higher pay for Unit-18 faculty. $107k sounds like a lot of money until they break it down. And these are the folks prepping the future generation of our field. Pay them more.
The salaries shouldn’t be compared with private, but should be compared with other non faculty salaries within the UC system, or across universities in the world.
A faculty in London, Paris, or other high CoL city would love a pay boost to 107k.
Not really. London is not much less expensive, and I’m not familiar with Paris but it seems roughly as expensive as London at a glance. The big difference is many costs, especially for young families, are socialized in those two places. For example, health insurance.
Some background: the post was written as a retrospective, and the poster did leave their job after 1.5 years. This post enumerates why, which is helpful documentation.
There is a real reason for that: no-one works an adjunct because they want to stay an adjunct (or, at least, I've never heard of that). You work as an adjunct because you want to stay on the academic path while you angle for a tenure-track position.
However, since the supply of PhD students grossly outnumbers the number of tenure-track positions, people do end up in some kind of limbo (post-docs, non-track lecturer or adjunct positions) for a long time.
The tenured positions also don't pay as well as industry but they come with much greater freedom, more flexible balance of research vs. teaching vs. service and incredibly robust job security.
That's really not quite true. There are thousands of lecturers in the UC system, and many thousands more where it is a career choice. Because tenure track is simply just not possible at many places, especially if you want to teach and do not want to do, or do not have a research background. The UC system especially has a career progression for lecturers, though it is somewhat challenging to make it through.
> Unless there is a reason why you prefer teaching to business? In which case the pay cut is logical.
Why is it logical? I'm not saying teaching should match private sector. But if the pay is too low, how are we going to get passionate and talented people who actually want to teach?
I am a professor at a community college in the Midwest and I make less than 60k a year. So they pay isn't nearly as high everywhere in the USA.
But my 3 bedroom house was also less than 130k when I bought it 4 years ago and that wouldn't get you a shack in California.
The "meals ($15/day)" think was a bit of a red flag for me. I think that americans are so used to very high salaries that they live in a very high salary way, which includes eating out at the canteen every day.
Btw this is what keeps americans in america, and also those that get jobs in america get stuck in america: the wages in academia, as you say when adjusted for cost of living, are far higher than almost anywhere else. The main exception being academic jobs in China which pay an absurd amount. I know a lot of professors from around the world who are "stuck" in america bc they are so used to wages like $107k a year. I think it's just a symptom of entitlement culture: "I'm doing an important and noble job so I should be able to live without even thinking about my spending"
> The "meals ($15/day)" think was a bit of a red flag for me.
You’re underestimating the cost of food in the area. Per [0] and [1], even if you “select lower cost foods and all meals (including snacks) are prepared in the home”, a single adult will still spend about $11/day on food.
It's more complicated than that. American faculty salaries are high in absolute terms, but they don't adjust fully for the local cost of living. While you can live a comfortable life as an academic in an average area, good universities are often located in areas with high costs of living. (Or maybe it's the HCOL areas that are concentrated around good universities.) For example, good luck buying a house within a reasonable commuting distance as an academic in the Bay Area.
When I was in Europe, industry salaries were ~50% higher than for comparable academic roles. When I arrived in the US a few years ago, I was surprised that the gap here was ~2x. Today the gap is approaching 3x, which makes scarce necessities such as housing really expensive.
You wouldn't expect to buy a house on a single engineer's salary in Europe either. I still think it's far higher when adjusted for cost of living. I know personally a few people who stayed in the US and I think it's for that reason: moving back home you take a huge pay cut.
Btw, here in Germany the industry salary for a senior engineer is 70k max, usually around 50k to 60k. The maximum academic salary is around 50k to 60k. That said, I know people call Germans "poor people in a rich country". Still, we are happy on this amount.
It depends on the level of the engineer. The average engineer with a few years of experience probably can't afford a house on a single salary. A successful engineer with 15-20 years of experience often can, at least in Finland. As do recently tenured professors with a similar amount of experience.
It might depend on what we call a house. A house with courtyard, a small apartment, a big apartment. In the best part of the city, in the worst part of the city, in a near suburb, in a far suburb. A huge house, a tiny house.
I can get a house in one of the cheapest villages in my country for 2-3 monthly salaries. The small apartment I live in I can get for 1 year worth of salaries. A big apartment or a house in the best parts of the city would take 20 years worth of salaries.
Yes, but you absolutely will be able to buy a flat as a single engineer. That would not be extraordinary at all. In many places, a house in America is what apartment in Europe is - the prevalent kind of housing supported by government policies, zonings and what not.
> Yes, but you absolutely will be able to buy a flat as a single engineer. That would not be extraordinary at all.
Considering the current housing and apartment pricing bubble in many German cities, I'd say that as a single person, this is not be easily affordable. Even as a couple, this won't be cheap.
How many years would the average software engineer in Germany would have to pay for the average apartment, assuming 100% of his salary goes towards that?
The size is not the same though. Not really comparable. You can have cheaper apartments for same sq in US outside of middle of the main cities which are bloated due to speculation and cheap mortgage.
For the past few years I've read that salaries in China are extremely high in some industries (mainly tech but according to you academia too) but I've never seen any number. What "absurd amount" do academic jobs pay in China?
I live in Europe and eating out at the canteen every day seems super normal to me. That is where majority of employed people have their lunch and that includes multiple countries I was in and lower paid jobs.
I have no qualms on the salary. I would love an extra $15 a day for food.
The size of the classes at Berkeley has always had me scratching my head for decades now.
"I found it really difficult to balance CS61A (a massive class of 2000) with CS169A (still a fairly large class of 350), since 169A required a fair bit of work in writing quizzes/exams (5 quizzes, 1 exam), grading open-ended homework assignments, and staff management."
I knew people who went to Berkeley years ago, and was shocked at the class sizes.
I've worked with Berkeley grads, and besides constantly signaling they went to Berkeley; I wasen't impressed with their abilities. (That goes for all the fancy schools though? All the ones we are suspose to be wowed by.)
Then again some of the guys I worked with whom really impressed me were college dropouts, or mainly self taught.
Doing programming as a job has little overlap with what is learned at university. You don’t need a degree to be a coder. It is effectively a proof of work.
A “problem” in the 90s is going to uni was rarer and so I felt a bit arrogant that I was going.
One if the best at your school doesn’t mean one of the best at uni though! And I realised while I like maths, it is the maths you can visualize. My favourite was calculus and learning about limits! Just imagine it getting smaller right. But then it got more and more abstract. I lost the love of studying it and the intuition.
So in a nutshell I am saying Dunning-Kruger. But I could have been just a good coder if I got a job with other coders to learn the craft and nothing beyond 0-16 yo learning. I would have self taught stuff to the same difficulty as the 16-21 yo learning but on applied topics. Learning Windows internals for example or Linux - depending on where the job took me.
$107K in Berkeley for someone with 2 kids won't lead to a lavish lifestyle in the hills, but it should be very doable on a budget so I don't quite understand that complaint. This reads a bit like someone who is used to a more elevated lifestyle in the private sector not understanding how middle or working class people live.
Is it the belief that someone who's entire job is teaching at a research oriented university should be paid similarly to those with greater academic credentialing (PhD) and who balance both teaching and research? That seems to be the implication here. And I don't disagree that teaching is undervalued, but Pamela Fox seems to want the higher status without the 5-6 year academic journey and brutal selection process to get tenure track positions. And academia doesn't reward great performance like the private sector so doing a great job as a lecturer would never elevate her to that upper track.
It is sad to lose great teachers but a part of me finds it hard to sympathize. This reads like a very smart person not doing their homework on the way a system works though ample public resources are available to find out.
I see where you are coming from with this, but isn't everything actually addressed in the post (even though it's not the focus)?
She wanted to try academic teaching, took a pay cut for it, tried for a couple of years, and is factually describing that it's undervalued and exhausting work, even though she has a passion for teaching. Useful info for people thinking about it. Maybe also useful info for people who want to improve academia.
No grand systemic changes are suggested or requested in this post, nor is she asking for sympathy as such.
As a European the salary levels seem very high (top level professor in Germany starts lower than that), but the conditions (maternity leave, health care) are unbelievably atrocious.
I see where you're going with this, but a reasonable counterpoint would be that this is a CS teaching role. Most people with the skills to teach university level CS, who also live in the Bay Area, can probably earn much more than $107k/year, which is the choice she's clearly making as well. I'd also note that, from my read, she's not saying it's immoral or anything, she's just saying "I could personally earn more, so I'm leaving"...
I'm Googling and here are a couple of numbers I find:
- Median rent in Berkeley seems to be around >= $3k/mo for a ~700 sq. ft. (2-bedroom?) apartment. [1]
- Family of four estimated monthly costs are ~$4.5k without rent. [2]
I don't know how accurate that estimate is, but it's around $90k/year in expenses, which is $14k more than the post-tax salary.
Curious what your numbers are that suggest this is pretty doable. Of course I'm sure there are people scraping by with much less, but it seems like doing so would need a fair bit of creativity and not be something that would seem "very doable".
I can give my actual numbers - my mortgage is around 3K/mo plus property taxes. Nanny is $3600/mo. I have another baby coming in a few weeks, so my childcare next year will be an additional $1800/mo for the older one to start preschool. My partner and I split most costs.
We recently bought a house, so we've had some home maintenance costs, which was the big issue that popped up this year - I didn't have the money to split roof-fixing costs, and a big rainstorm caused a leak which caused us to have to tear the drywall out of our bathroom wall. I look forward to having a bathroom wall again in the near future! :)
To the original comment: I agree that my salary was doable (and higher than many Unit-18 lecturers! and than many in the bay area! I am quite fortunate indeed). However, given that I am able to earn much more as someone with a CS background in other roles that I also enjoy, I made the decision to leave the lower paying role.
I did do research this year, by the way, as I managed to get a grant even as an adjunct lecturer. That was one of the things that added to the courseload. The other Unit-18 lecturers in EECS are also involved in research.
Hopefully my reflections make it easier for others to do their homework. :D
The Unit 18 union has done a pretty good job across the UC in making it possible to be a temporary lecturer for a few years as a viable part of a career path. It's not a permanent job, and the costs of living have gone up quite a bit more than either the union or UC projected when the contract was last negotiated. All that said, compared to the pittances that adjuncts are paid at other Institutions, it's a lot better.
This is true, but it also sucks if we assume "part of a career path". That means there's virtually no teaching-focus career paths in the UC system which is terrible for basically everyone. (Students as well as other faculty.)
In reality, there's spots where it very well could be a career path but it's incredibly difficult to make it work in CS. (And in many many other fields too!)
Yeah, this is largely true. Teaching-focused career paths in California Higher-Ed would be at Cal State or the Community Colleges. UC is about research, and expects all faculty to focus on research, although there are some continuing lecturer positions here and there.
For more perspective, it's probably double what they would get for similar role in Europe, insane to me that it would require 'budgeting'.
I also feel like there will be some tension between increasing wages to be competitive with SWE salaries and the staggering tuition fees that students pay in America (orders of magnitude more than their EU counterparts in comparison).
The fact of the matter is that it wouldn't even necessarily need to increase tuition. The UC system is a $50bn/yr enterprise. Lecturer salaries are a tiny amount, and really only about 20% or so of tuition money right now is directly attributed to instruction costs. If the University worked on a budgeting model that valued instruction, then I think the pay gap could be significantly reduced.
This is UK-centric, but this is more like what you would expect a tenured professor to make at a top university, full time teaching roles I think would be in the $25-$40k range post-tax. I know that salaries vary and especially in Switzerland and you can earn a fair bit more, but I think that range would be fairly typical/high for most of Europe.
- Are costs of living (including housing prices) comparable?
- Is retirement comparable?
In the US you need to try to save some of your money for retirement too; not sure if most European countries have a pension-based system or not, but that's another thing to account for.
> not sure if most European countries have a pension-based system or not, but that's another thing to account for.
Even if they do have generous plan on paper, can they actually pay that 50 years in future?
Most won't. I know people from southern EU who haven't received what they were promised for pension and live in poverty today. It's only worse for future pensioners while they tax 25-30% in social security with no cap from your salary for pension and healthcare (You still need private coverage on top).
They also cut pension for people who saved money on side and accrued a livable amount ignoring their past contribution.
As far as retirement goes, government-run pension systems are funded by taxation, so that's kind of a moot point if you're comparing pre-tax salaries. Also in most cases the government pension is not a living wage, so most people have private pension funds in addition to the mandatory public system.
It's eye-opening that the salary of an adjunct faculty member at Cal with 100% appointment with classes taught to 1.5K+ students (CS61A) is less than the tuition fees of 8 students.
It should be an INVESTMENT into the educational institution on the MERIT and VALUE of the degree taught and received.
Thus: If I am lured into an educational track which promises a market level pay/industry-pertinent-education which makes one employable in said field, but results in NOT... the institution should be liable for such and the investment/"tuition" should be negated and a "write-off" to the school.
That's the same as saying:
"Pay me $100 to teach you how to fight!" Gets ass kicked. "You still owe me $100 for TEACHING you how to fight."
I doubt you'll find many people that have side jobs during college to defray costs are partying their way through.
(Trump.edu anyone?)
Research output determines rankings. Teaching quality doesn't.
Now, at least some of this is academia having too strong of a filter, but the year I joined Berkeley - I was 1 of 4 to accept the offer.
At least that’s what I got from the article. Weird for a university professor to blame a union.
[0]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/20/new-report-sa...
Saying things like this is a real disservice to the kinds of people who waste years and decades of their lives trying to return to academia after being rejected. Deliberate gestures of inclusiveness encourage people to keep hoping long past all reason.
I cannot muster a lot of sympathy for people choosing between 6 figure careers.
It's not reasonable to expect a university to be able to match rates of one of the highest paying careers in industry. If universities try to match industry costs for all of their employees, those costs will just be passed on to graduates in the form of more student debt, which is already enough of a crisis.
She should take the higher paying opportunities available to her, and the university should find someone who is happy with what they can afford for the position.
This may be true for lesser colleges, but Berkeley has a 4.8 billion dollar endowment and is teaching some of our brightest minds. They can eat the cost.
It's also worth noting that 6 figure salaries don't go nearly so far in the Bay Area. Food, rent, and services are more expensive here than in most of the state, and taxes are higher than in most of the country. A rough estimate, I'd put this salary as equivalent to 65-70k somewhere like Boise, Idaho.
Endowments are not simply a pool of money sitting around spendable on anything. They are generally composed of thousands and thousands of donations, each with specific requirements for that donation. Some may be scholarships, some to fund specific research projects, some to specific departments or groups (and again with strings attached).
A better indicator of is the salary reasonable, is are there ample job applicants for the positions? If people choose this position over all their other options than this pay is market clearing, paying more is simply taking money from other productive uses.
In particular, the author mentions important issues like cheating, "grade grubbing" (and its primary cause), managing the 100 employees, associated with the course, and revising materials (which I was very suprised to find out that an adjunct would be in charge of!).
(In contrast to the discussion here, which when I read it focused solely on the compensation aspect. Look for something else in the piece! There's more there than money.)
Revising materials is more of a milestone. As technology advances, we should be teaching more up-to-date stuff, so we typically revise what we teach and then share that with other instructors. Sometimes that takes considerable work. In some positions, the program strictly restricts what is allowed to be taught. I typically stick to the core content for about 65% of the course, and then add in my own topics for the other 35%.
I'd consider 60k solid middle class (not lower end of the spectrum).
That being said, I quickly googled the average rent in Berkley and it's around 4k$.
The salary difference (ignoring 9 vs 12 month) seems to be around 50k which is over 4k/month...which should be enough to cover average housing all else being equal. And that assumes no rent for the German counterpart :P
Also depends a bit where you are in Germany. I think in Munich (most expensive) the buying price is around 10k€/square meter and Berkley city from quick googling seems to be around 12,5k$. Not sure around rent prices but I'm assuming they scale to buying prices.
I found the part about health insurance interesting as well. I would probably never willingly under-insure if I had that option (I do not).
She should have married her partner to be on their insurance, that’s what I did.
Except that everything else is more expensive here because of these costs. Any service you can imagine, jack the prices up 50%+.
You can't just change words like that. It's dishonest. Poverty != "low income".
You know something has gone haywire when "low income" and "median" incomes are basically the same amount.
Lower down it discusses the nationally averaged poverty line. At no point does it make any claims to a number for a SF specific localized poverty line. As you say, local values are going to be different, but the national number is far below the "low income" threshold set earlier in the article.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/berkeley-ca/home-values/ [2] https://www.immowelt.de/liste/muenchen/haeuser/kaufen?sort=r...
Actually building the apartments in question took three weeks.
There aren't very many other places in the world where this problem is so acute.
Maybe it’s more appropriate to compare Munich, London, Paris, Amsterdam with Berkeley and see how lecturer salaries there compare with each other. hint: Berkeley adjunct has higher salary even compared to some tenured professors in comparable cities in Europe.
In the UK an experienced postdoc, or one with a competing offer, can make around 40k before having to push for lectureships. Professorial salaries start at 60k and maybe hit six figures for senior staff. Munich is fairly high, I think between 50-70k depending on who you ask (TV-L E13). Scandinavia is not great compared to the high cost of living, last time I checked.
A better comparison is somewhere like Oxford/Cambridge which both have extremely high rent/income ratios - some of the worst in the country - many postdocs, and almost all PhDs, can't afford to live alone. A room is close to 1k a month which is absurd in the UK.
And yes by all means compare Berkeley to Munich or Berlin or any of those cities other than London, where despite being expensive for Europe they don’t come close to Berkeley in terms of cost
I have done training (usually one-off seminars) for years. The prep takes forever. I have known a lot of teachers, and have heard stories about lesson plans. I suspect college profs have that, X20.
And academia (like nonprofits) doesn't have money, so ego can be the currency. Can make for a rather unpleasant working environment.
https://www.dailycal.org/2017/08/18/here-are-the-five-highes...
> "Former chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ gross pay was $562,243. Dirks is set to go on paid leave for the next academic year, during which he will receive $434,000."
This is well over the pay for say, the governor of California.
These thoughts are incredibly valid -- I also wrote something similar after two years, though didn't share it. Salary is a tough sticking point in the Bay, but it's far from the only thing there. At the same time, it'd be one that the University could relatively easily fix if they tried...
The point about inflexibility is really worth underscoring. My calendar is WAY more full during the semester than it ever was as a SWE. While my summers are quite a bit more flexible in terms of a calendar, they are completely filled with prep and research projects - some to fill in a pay gap, some that are fun... I also find the 15 week (really more like 18 week) semester in the Fall quite a slog. In industry it's often possible to take a couple days vacation when you need it without issue, but it's incredibly difficult to recharge during the semester.
- Low pay? check
- Not being able to change or at least select the schedule? check
While I'm curious about giving back in form of some CS/programming classes, it probably won't be instructing at college.
There are however some advantages to an academic job: somewhat more flexible schedule (not when you're teaching), relative freedom to engage in whatever research you wish, no need to sit in front of a computer screen all day, job security.
On the other hand, there's a lot that's more inflexible than in a SWE job: lecture times, university-dictated exam times (at night! I had to sleeptrain my toddler to make them), staff meeting times (hard to find a time that works for a staff of 50-100).
So yeah- more flexible in some ways, less flexible in others, it depends what sort of flexibility you're looking for.
Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.
P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.
Pamela already addressed the inflexibility part. And I'll just echo that I find it worse than how she described. But I've probably over-committed myself, too. Engaging in research-like stuff is very fun, but it is often unpaid for someone who is a lecturer.
As for job security: Non-Tenured folks (like the OP) get relatively short term contracts. And it's easy for the University to not renew them, especially when there are budget constraints. Sure, I never had a contract like this as SWE and I could have been fired before my 1-2 years were up, but my job there felt much more secure. I knew my manager and how the company was doing. In contrast, while I'm friends with everyone - I don't yet have security that I'll be returning in the Fall, even though my name is on the schedule.
Still, the pay is better than I thought and MUCH better than most adjunct situations. Even with all the caveats, I would 100% take this over an industry job that paid 2-3x. Sounds really fulfilling and fun as fuck
https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF03311 -- this is the CS job posting https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply -- this has all the lecturer postings, including related fields.
It's really hard to find folks who are going to enjoy the tradeoffs. (Also feel free to contact me directly. Append gmail.com to my username.)
At my UC, there is a separate ladder called Lecturer Full-Time PSOE/SOE. It's not clear why she wasn't on that ladder. Perhaps Cal doesn't have one.
I can't quite wrap my head around this. Is there an expectation in the US that all meals must be eaten out or something?
Certainly with better planning, I could have reduced those costs slightly.
I would be still hungry after just a starter.
I don't think it's that high (yet?), though you can find restaurants like that. (See [1].)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31478539
Note that I meant for lunch, not dinner. I meant the equivalent of “Mittagsmenu” we have in Germany. The price is generally lower.
Edit: just to be sure my tone isn’t off here, I don’t expect to know what things cost in France and not trying to say that you’re incorrect. I’m just wondering if prices I’ve seen are more or less the norm or the exception.
For the company restaurants, from what I've seen, it depends on the company and how much they are paying, so it goes from pretty terrible to actually decent.
I think I don't mind spending the money, but it is a significant change compared to working from home, or working in an office with food, or just making so much more money that you don't care. (Which is how it was when I was a SWE that worked in an office without free food.)
Well, Switzerland is expensive in general, you will reply. True. Berkeley is expensive as well.
Funny, just by coincidence I was reading notes I kept when I visited Germany from the U.S. by myself several decades ago. I commented back then, more than once, about how annoyingly long I had to wait to simply get the tab at the end of the meal so I could pay. I thought it was just me.
There is some cost of living adjustments but it is pretty minimal. The discipline adjustments are more significant. English department adjuncts are probably paid a lot less.
My biggest surprise was that adjuncts are paid so well. It rivals my salary when I got tenure especially with only teaching two classes per semester and them being co-taught. I've done the visiting/adjunct thing in NYC, and the Berkeley salary is over 2x higher. But I was doing that for the joy of teaching and I had a day job.
There are some professors who earn much more than average, mainly in medicine, economics and engineering from what I’ve read.
Startup idea didn’t work out (and it’s stressful), so I’m back to being a working stiff.
I do have to warn you, if you're not already aware... all those articles about lack of student engagement due to pandemic are horrifyingly correct. I started adjuncting as the pandemic hit and it seemed like each semester was worse than the previous one. I just finished up my last course and it was such a slog. People barely show up, are completely silent when they do. A root canal was more fun.
That said, it's a great feeling when you really make a connection and I hope to return to teaching sometime in the future.
I will put my psu address in my profile, if you want to connect.
Ah yes, I remember this feeling well, the voluntary impoverishment of academia.
So this might add up to 300K. Which is a number that is unprecedented in history. Throughout most of history and to this day in pretty much every place in the world, such a salary would be reserved for the executive branch. It's an insanely high compensation largely made possible by a local tech boom, excessive venture capital, very high local living expenses, and the nature of startups, where maximum spending is considered good: 300K can be afforded because of the potential exit.
That's not how 99.99999% of the jobs work, so the comparison is odd. Not at a personal level, but definitely at a societal level.
I'd slow down on the hyperbole. That number is specifically for the US so let's look at other white collar professions in the US that fall in similar ranges:
- Finance
- Consultants
- Lawyers
- Doctors
- Accountants
- Dentists
...
This person is probably in the top percentile of their field if they're teaching at a top CS school so let's use the high end of those fields and not the average.
Regardless, 300K is not a salary one should expect in pretty much any public function. By comparison, the PM of my country makes 150K.
Qualified candidates to people who teach CS to Berkeley students are likely to be in a similar situation too. Until the tech boom subsides a bit at least. I'd say the comparison is fair, even if a bit removed from most people's realities.
If you don't have a background in programming/computer science and come in fresh with starry eyes, you better be a prodigy in learning, because it's a lot of material in a very short amount of time.
Shouldn't the introductory course sequence be designed to help all students master the material?
What's the point of teaching a class poorly or not giving students enough time?
Does Cal not have enough faculty to teach the follow-on courses if too many students are successful, so they have to prevent students from being successful?
When you have more people entering a major than you can handle, you end up having to weed some of them out.
If that seems nonsensical, well, maybe it is, but (I think?) it's not like the same person is deciding to do both of these at once. One entity decides to overenroll, another one needs to find a way to compensate.
Simple: the idea is that if you will likely fail the degree course, you should better fail fast to decrease your opportunity cost.
The problem is that because CS 10 is not a required course, most freshmen that come into Berkeley, many who were top of their class in high school, think “hm I can just take 61A since it’s mandatory.” It’s not entirely their fault, since Berkeley doesn’t do a very good job of advertising the CS 10 course. It’s fairly new, and there’s still a stigma around it — that you’re “not as smart” if you need to take it. The result is you have almost 2000 students every semester, and many of them are inevitably going to struggle.
I’ve sat in some CS 10 lectures (albeit while I was graduating with a CS degree and TAing CS 61B) and watched my friends do the homework. I didn’t have the luxury of taking CS 10. It’s a great way to learn how to think like a programmer. My personal recommendation is that every incoming Berkeley freshman going into CS should take CS 10, and it should be made mandatory. The CS degree only takes 3 years to complete all the required courses at a fairly leisurely pace, so there’s definitely room to add an extra requirement. Especially since now, the incredibly stupid EE16B has been dropped from the curriculum.
Why was EE16B bad? It looks like it covers some good material in terms of signals, systems, interfacing, and robotics? The labs look like fun also.
Was it too EE or controls focused - maybe a CS-focused hardware interfacing and intro robotics class would be better?
For pure CS majors, it should be an elective. But it was made mandatory until recently. The main complaint is that it’s intense and difficult - regular reports of spending an extraordinary time on the course per week. You can see how a lot of resentment builds up quickly.
Berkeley is a generally place where all the resources are available to you, but you need to do your research and make wise choices.
Berkeley doesn’t have enough faculty for all the students who join. So part of it is just pragmatism.
It also wants to maintain a certain level of prestige. The degree is fairly difficult to get.
This is ridiculous, how do you raise a child in US? Under the table, in your office or what. (in my country, mat. leave is by law and till your child is 3yrs old, employer is prohibited to fire you during this period, again by law. But of course, you'll not get full salary during leave, only some percents)
But also, being at home for 3 years (or 5 if there are two kids) hurts your work super lot even if you formally stay employed. And while they cant fire you while you are away, they can fire you shortly after returning back or you get position designed to make you leave voluntary. Women after that long stay away are penalized a lot. (And also, both leaving work and going back to it are pretty large adaptations.)
It works for food, why not?
A little more seriously, raising kids properly is the most important thing there is for society, that should be explicitly recognised by a society.
Which country?
Do you also get maternity leave for adoption?
Furthermore, fathers can also ask for paternal leave in the same conditions, also for up to 2 years. Only one of the parents may take this longer leave, but the parent that doesn't still has the right to 1 month of leave.
Even if the 1 month is not taken, fathers can still request 5 days of special leave for this (or 10 if they attend a child care course).
Note that while the pay you get for this period is based on your regular salary, it is typically capped at a fairly low level, so for high-paying positions it still represents a significant income loss.
Most young people are migrating outside the country for any skilled jobs, huge deficit & debt, and cutting back on the promised welfare doesn't sound good to me.
You have to consider long term sustainability and practical implication.
Nordic countries, switzerland, etc which are famous for welfare systems are funded by financial systems and oil. Other countries are not. Can they afford all these generous benefits?
Still, given that the welfare system is mostly financed out of current taxes, if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining. We are not in a good place right now, but we were in a much worse place 10 or 20 years ago, so there are reasons to be hopeful things can be turned around.
Also, lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country (while the legal benefits are nice, often times the quality of the actual services is well below par). So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
That is true for every welfare system based on social responsibility structure. Society pools money to pay for retirement of everyone at a fixed rate. Young people are entered into the system to fund old people's retirement today and promised that they would get funded by young people tomorrow.
This works as long as enough young people enter the system at intervals to continue the payouts except when that doesn't happen due to demographic collapse or some other reason. Think of a legal pyramid scheme.
> if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining
Not necessarily. Many countries underestimated the life expectancy of people retired and had to run on a deficit as a result so they are taking money from pensioners of future today. They had to fix this by increasing the retirement age, cutting down benefits, removing benefits for people with private savings, etc.
They will only keep cutting. If not, it will fall.
> lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country
I see unemployment among youth as the major reason. Welfare won't be funded by unemployed.
> So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
Reducing unsustainable welfare will because money can be used elsewhere to create jobs, attract businesses, increase employment, etc.
Comparisons of totally alien industries (non-profit academia to for-profit tech startups) don’t make any sense because everything about them is overwhelmingly different.
My take is that Pamela is championing for higher pay for Unit-18 faculty. $107k sounds like a lot of money until they break it down. And these are the folks prepping the future generation of our field. Pay them more.
The salaries shouldn’t be compared with private, but should be compared with other non faculty salaries within the UC system, or across universities in the world.
A faculty in London, Paris, or other high CoL city would love a pay boost to 107k.
However, since the supply of PhD students grossly outnumbers the number of tenure-track positions, people do end up in some kind of limbo (post-docs, non-track lecturer or adjunct positions) for a long time.
The tenured positions also don't pay as well as industry but they come with much greater freedom, more flexible balance of research vs. teaching vs. service and incredibly robust job security.
Why is it logical? I'm not saying teaching should match private sector. But if the pay is too low, how are we going to get passionate and talented people who actually want to teach?
Btw this is what keeps americans in america, and also those that get jobs in america get stuck in america: the wages in academia, as you say when adjusted for cost of living, are far higher than almost anywhere else. The main exception being academic jobs in China which pay an absurd amount. I know a lot of professors from around the world who are "stuck" in america bc they are so used to wages like $107k a year. I think it's just a symptom of entitlement culture: "I'm doing an important and noble job so I should be able to live without even thinking about my spending"
You’re underestimating the cost of food in the area. Per [0] and [1], even if you “select lower cost foods and all meals (including snacks) are prepared in the home”, a single adult will still spend about $11/day on food.
[0]: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/41860 [1]: https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...
When I was in Europe, industry salaries were ~50% higher than for comparable academic roles. When I arrived in the US a few years ago, I was surprised that the gap here was ~2x. Today the gap is approaching 3x, which makes scarce necessities such as housing really expensive.
Btw, here in Germany the industry salary for a senior engineer is 70k max, usually around 50k to 60k. The maximum academic salary is around 50k to 60k. That said, I know people call Germans "poor people in a rich country". Still, we are happy on this amount.
I can get a house in one of the cheapest villages in my country for 2-3 monthly salaries. The small apartment I live in I can get for 1 year worth of salaries. A big apartment or a house in the best parts of the city would take 20 years worth of salaries.
Considering the current housing and apartment pricing bubble in many German cities, I'd say that as a single person, this is not be easily affordable. Even as a couple, this won't be cheap.
So with 50k in Romania I'm better here than moving to Germany. Although, Glassdoor shows a bit better salaries for Germany.
If you’re looking for that, I hear there’s a school down on the Peninsula.
The size of the classes at Berkeley has always had me scratching my head for decades now.
"I found it really difficult to balance CS61A (a massive class of 2000) with CS169A (still a fairly large class of 350), since 169A required a fair bit of work in writing quizzes/exams (5 quizzes, 1 exam), grading open-ended homework assignments, and staff management."
I knew people who went to Berkeley years ago, and was shocked at the class sizes.
I've worked with Berkeley grads, and besides constantly signaling they went to Berkeley; I wasen't impressed with their abilities. (That goes for all the fancy schools though? All the ones we are suspose to be wowed by.)
Then again some of the guys I worked with whom really impressed me were college dropouts, or mainly self taught.
If I started a new business, excuse me Start-up, which college applicants hide in for 4 years would have no bearing on my new hires.
And yes--I'm the guy who spent way to much time hiding in college. It was cheaper in the 90's though, and I lived with my dad way too long.
One if the best at your school doesn’t mean one of the best at uni though! And I realised while I like maths, it is the maths you can visualize. My favourite was calculus and learning about limits! Just imagine it getting smaller right. But then it got more and more abstract. I lost the love of studying it and the intuition.
So in a nutshell I am saying Dunning-Kruger. But I could have been just a good coder if I got a job with other coders to learn the craft and nothing beyond 0-16 yo learning. I would have self taught stuff to the same difficulty as the 16-21 yo learning but on applied topics. Learning Windows internals for example or Linux - depending on where the job took me.
Is it the belief that someone who's entire job is teaching at a research oriented university should be paid similarly to those with greater academic credentialing (PhD) and who balance both teaching and research? That seems to be the implication here. And I don't disagree that teaching is undervalued, but Pamela Fox seems to want the higher status without the 5-6 year academic journey and brutal selection process to get tenure track positions. And academia doesn't reward great performance like the private sector so doing a great job as a lecturer would never elevate her to that upper track.
It is sad to lose great teachers but a part of me finds it hard to sympathize. This reads like a very smart person not doing their homework on the way a system works though ample public resources are available to find out.
She wanted to try academic teaching, took a pay cut for it, tried for a couple of years, and is factually describing that it's undervalued and exhausting work, even though she has a passion for teaching. Useful info for people thinking about it. Maybe also useful info for people who want to improve academia.
No grand systemic changes are suggested or requested in this post, nor is she asking for sympathy as such.
As a European the salary levels seem very high (top level professor in Germany starts lower than that), but the conditions (maternity leave, health care) are unbelievably atrocious.
I'm Googling and here are a couple of numbers I find:
- Median rent in Berkeley seems to be around >= $3k/mo for a ~700 sq. ft. (2-bedroom?) apartment. [1]
- Family of four estimated monthly costs are ~$4.5k without rent. [2]
I don't know how accurate that estimate is, but it's around $90k/year in expenses, which is $14k more than the post-tax salary.
Curious what your numbers are that suggest this is pretty doable. Of course I'm sure there are people scraping by with much less, but it seems like doing so would need a fair bit of creativity and not be something that would seem "very doable".
[1] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/be...
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Berkeley
We recently bought a house, so we've had some home maintenance costs, which was the big issue that popped up this year - I didn't have the money to split roof-fixing costs, and a big rainstorm caused a leak which caused us to have to tear the drywall out of our bathroom wall. I look forward to having a bathroom wall again in the near future! :)
To the original comment: I agree that my salary was doable (and higher than many Unit-18 lecturers! and than many in the bay area! I am quite fortunate indeed). However, given that I am able to earn much more as someone with a CS background in other roles that I also enjoy, I made the decision to leave the lower paying role.
I did do research this year, by the way, as I managed to get a grant even as an adjunct lecturer. That was one of the things that added to the courseload. The other Unit-18 lecturers in EECS are also involved in research.
Hopefully my reflections make it easier for others to do their homework. :D
In reality, there's spots where it very well could be a career path but it's incredibly difficult to make it work in CS. (And in many many other fields too!)
I also feel like there will be some tension between increasing wages to be competitive with SWE salaries and the staggering tuition fees that students pay in America (orders of magnitude more than their EU counterparts in comparison).
Out of curiosity, how much do you believe it would be in Europe post-tax? In California this would be around $76k.
- Are costs of living (including housing prices) comparable?
- Is retirement comparable?
In the US you need to try to save some of your money for retirement too; not sure if most European countries have a pension-based system or not, but that's another thing to account for.
Even if they do have generous plan on paper, can they actually pay that 50 years in future?
Most won't. I know people from southern EU who haven't received what they were promised for pension and live in poverty today. It's only worse for future pensioners while they tax 25-30% in social security with no cap from your salary for pension and healthcare (You still need private coverage on top).
They also cut pension for people who saved money on side and accrued a livable amount ignoring their past contribution.
No. The US is far and away the richest polity on Earth. Nowhere pays comparably.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_househo...