Thanks for this response. The field is theoretical stats/CS related, so I just need a desk, notepad and a computer to do research. Maybe some data that has already been collected by someone else. Hence the low startup costs, hence the ability to go to TT after PhD. Extramural funding is important to support your salary and get tenure but not as critical as in the wet lab, as I understand; definitely not at the volume as wet lab researchers.
I am surprised by the >70k difference. How does that work? My understanding is that the department will only pay you for 4 days for research and then an extra day for clinical if you do the 80/20 thing. Where does that extra 70k come from? Is this an average that also includes ppl doing say 50/50 or the majority clinical? It would make more sense in that case
I work in the same field. It's not as simple as you think. 1) what's the point of getting on TT if you don't care about getting tenured? 2) Tenure at any reputable institution invariably requires your own grant, either methodological development or infrastructure oriented. You can get promoted if you have lots of soft money FTE on other people's grants, but you won't get tenured. Not really sure if that kind of a job is really better than being a doctor. You basically won't have an independent line of research that you can claim is your own. You are just a practicing statistician. Maybe you don't need to BRING a grant TO the job market (like the "wet people" do), but you will still need grants in the long run. 3) It's no longer true that biomed related CS research, especially certain fields of CS (i.e. machine learning) doesn't require a big budget. Essentially what's going on is you have to get money to develop a small software/data science team to do very specialized/boutique but fairly heavy duty software development. Most of "wet lab" budget isn't related to equipment but because it's labor intensive. Similarly clinical research are expensive because of labor requirements. It used to be that you can have one postdoc and take care of all of the analytic needs of multiple research groups, but in the age of "Big Data" you often need multiple data scientists to work on various facets of ONE problem or generate a usable product/impactful paper. Also the degree of collaborative work is going up--since you often need physician/domain expertise. Where do you get other people's time/effort? You have to raise money. Doesn't have to be NIH. Can be Microsoft. Can be the Ford Foundation. Still. 3 grants a year. Rinse, repeat. Yes, it's not as competitive yet in this area to get grants, but I can assure you it'll get there in good time.
FYI, the same job in industry is not very different. You are in charge of managing a team of junior developers/software engineers to solve a specific problem on a deadline and a budget. There are actually some advantages of the NIH system since the deadlines on feds schedule are always millions of small puzzles, so you can blame other people when things don't get done on time, and nobody works on holidays. Good luck with that if you work for Facebook--go eat pee and sleep at the office.
I suppose if you are doing theoretical CS or pure theory in stats you could aim for a pure hard money spot with mostly teaching without having to raise much money. But that kind of job typically comes with the low salary I was talking about as well as other undesirable features (i.e. teaching undergrads/MPH students stats/CS 101 at an unsustainable 4/4 schedule).
W.r.t. salary: you eat what you kill. Academia is as corporate as corporate. Small schools have limited endowment. Large schools that have big endowments don't want to waste it on people who don't have a track record for raising money. So they may give you some hard money support, but it will come with strings: teaching/service (esp. in your case, statistical service). They can't justify budgeting a large endowment on your salary support if you don't show enough promise to bring in money later on. Now that said, if you are a super star and publish in NSC all the time they might give you a startup, but that's a separate issue and you wouldn't come here sound confused. The reason that academic physician salary is 70k+ higher is that full time physician salary is 100k+ higher. So if they don't pay you 70k+ higher you leave. Simple supply and demand. Believe me the amount of RVU they'd be able to get out of that 25% FTE will be WAY more than 70k. It's just a matter of exploiting you a little less than others if they see "value" in your ability to raise money through some other mechanism.
Feel free to formally apply and not take the offers of course for your own entertainment, but to be honest I would just go ahead and informally have your CV shopped by dept chairs of the places you are interested in. They'll tell you the truth. If you are really a superstar they'll tell you. In fact if you are really a superstar you should've already developed a national reputation and people would've reached out to you already, and your own dept chair should be making calls on your behalf. "Formally applying" is really just a formality.
