A PhD student at Carnegie Mellon costs approximately $80,000 per year. (Research programmers and post-docs cost about the same.) Given that PhD students have to take classes for the first couple of years and are therefore running at 50% capacity, this means that each effective person in my research group costs on average $100,000 per year.
I'm from Guatemala. For $100,000, you can hire 4-5 extremely competent full-time engineers there (even accounting for the 50% overhead rate inside CMU). My question today is: would it make sense to take 5 engineers instead of a PhD student next time I have extra money?
I understand that CMU PhD students have a much higher IQ than the average programmer, and that for certain tasks you can't just rely on programmers, but if the exchange rate is 5 to 1, I think the experiment is worth a try.
And from there, it's a slippery slope: why not just move my whole research group to India or China, since a large fraction of our PhD students come from there anyways?
Part of the goal of being a professor is mentoring, and I love that part: I am not saying we should get rid of PhD students, but that perhaps a mix of some outsourced coding and PhD students would be a better investment for everybody.
Disclaimer: 100% of my PhD students are working on projects of their own choosing, and if anything my biggest flaw as an advisor is not giving them enough direction (instead of micromanaging them).
I'm from Guatemala. For $100,000, you can hire 4-5 extremely competent full-time engineers there (even accounting for the 50% overhead rate inside CMU). My question today is: would it make sense to take 5 engineers instead of a PhD student next time I have extra money?
I understand that CMU PhD students have a much higher IQ than the average programmer, and that for certain tasks you can't just rely on programmers, but if the exchange rate is 5 to 1, I think the experiment is worth a try.
And from there, it's a slippery slope: why not just move my whole research group to India or China, since a large fraction of our PhD students come from there anyways?
Part of the goal of being a professor is mentoring, and I love that part: I am not saying we should get rid of PhD students, but that perhaps a mix of some outsourced coding and PhD students would be a better investment for everybody.
Disclaimer: 100% of my PhD students are working on projects of their own choosing, and if anything my biggest flaw as an advisor is not giving them enough direction (instead of micromanaging them).