Oh, piss off!
0 comment Thursday, May 22, 2014 |
Saw this a few days ago and it's still making me itch (incidentally, thanks to Grumpy, PhD for reminding me).Check out #2 on the list:2. Biological scientistHours/week: 38.4Hours/year: 1,992Annual earnings: $65,329I'd like to know where the hell they got those numbers...that amounts to about 250% of my income for 1/2 the hours (= 500% of my so-called income). I've never met a "biological scientist" who works less than 40 hours/week. Most of the ones I know work at least 60 hours/week. So how is that the "average" hours/week are under 40?Their calculations amount to an hourly wage of $32.80. Wanna know mine? It's $6.26 assuming a 60 hour/week average, or $9.39 if I worked 40 hours/week (which I don't).I think that's probably pretty close to the mean for a grad student, post-docs don't make a whole lot more (not even close to the "average" salary reported in this article) and as far as I've seen they work similar hours to grad students (>60/week). Keeping in mind the relative frequency of grad student and post-docs to faculty in the biological scientists population (I'm too lazy to look up concrete numbers on this one, but it's safe to assume that the faculty are vastly out-numbered), this would mean that the smallest sub-population (faculty) would have to be making hugely more than the trainees in order to pull the mean that high. Again, I don't have concrete numbers for this, but I don't think that the relative increase in faculty salaries over trainee stipends can possibly skew the mean that much given their relative representation within the population.Perhaps they are including people who work in industry. I have no idea what they make, but it rumored to be much, much more than us starving academics. But I sincerely doubt that those industrial scientists are working such few hours/week to skew the average below 40 when there are so many academics out there working 60 hours/week on (my very anecdotal) average.So who are these biological scientists making better than $30/hour? PIs work waaaaay more than 38.4 hours/week around here so I know it isn't them.

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