> But the Big5 have tons of locations

Name one Big5 job in the entire U.S. south. Or at least one that pays as well as them.

There aren’t any.

Facebook is in Austin; Amazon is in Dallas

Austin isn’t the south.

Raleigh / Durham probably is the best tech scene in the south. No mega companies but a good number of second tier, ie. Redhat, Sas, Epic, and so on

Last I checked, Austin is south of the Mason-Dixie line and has plenty of small towns around it that will be glad to remind you that you’re in the South.

RDU definitely has an enterprise tech scene. So does DFW!

AWS has several thousand engineers in the Virginia suburbs of DC, with a bunch of local VP-level management

(and that's not including anyone who works on the us-east-1 region)

Apple and Amazon could end up choosing Raleigh for their HQ2. So maybe that'll soon change.

I've only ever lived in Raleigh and I'm very skeptical they'll pick Raleigh for HQ2.

I'll be very excited if Apple ends up deciding on Raleigh though, it could easily push up salaries significantly.

Then don't live in the south. You'll get paid more, the weather will be nicer, and you'll meet less numbskulls with confederate flags painted on the hood of their trucks. Win/win/win.

Google's Skia team* is in Chapel Hill, Microsoft has a team in Raleigh working on VSTS. I know a few folks that have interned there.

I just started a job as a data scientist at a FAANG company. PhD + 2 years of experience for $200k total compensation (plus another $50k in one time bonuses/relo). It’s almost double what my previous (non-tech) employer paid. Although I’m starting to wonder if I should have gone the software engineering route instead. SWEs get double the RSUs as data scientists for the same experience level (so ~250k for my level) and they also didn’t spend 4 years working on a PhD to get there. Oh well... I can’t complain. Very happy with my current situation.

I'm in a somewhat similar boat and have seen DS positions at FAANG not pay as well as SWE. Why is that?

I’m not sure. At average companies, I think SWEs and data scientists make about the same. But the top companies have a much larger software engineering population to choose from, so they can afford to be picky, and the pay correspondingly reflects that. There’s about 20x as many software engineers as there are data scientists in the world.

I think this is changing though, and I think “data scientist” will soon be split into sub-roles. Some companies like Lyft have already changed their title scheme. Business analysts are now data scientists, and those who were data scientists are now research scientists.

The company I work for has an internal job role that isn’t public and an external title that is. So a “data scientist” may have an internal role of “business analyst” or an internal role of “applied scientist”, and there’s a big difference in pay despite the same outward-facing title.

I think the pay scale goes:

Data scientist (business analyst) < data scientist (non-CS PhD) < software engineer = core data scientist (CS PhD) < AI researcher (ML PhD + great publications)

I have a non-CS PhD so I think that’s why I don’t make as much as a software engineer or a core data scientist.

Base salary and bonus is generally the same for all roles for a given experience level; the difference in comp. comes from the RSUs granted.

Or you negotiated poorly for your first and second jobs. Do better next time. There is a wide variance both within and across companies.

On the other hand, top PhDs in machine learning are earning 2 million a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-int...

If you have a PhD in CS and are being paid less than someone with an undergrad, something is wrong.