Could we please reopen these questions about salary and treat all salary questions in a uniform way?

Question

This question and this other one have been recently put on hold for being strongly dependent on individual factors.

I think that the closure of the above questions is unfair and unwarranted, given that this community has well received many other, even much broader, questions about salary in various parts of the world, and I would like to encourage everyone to treat in a uniform way certain types of questions.

A few examples:

After my PhD how much salary should I expect as a professor of computer science?

How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe?

What's the net income of a W1/W2 german professor?

How much non-salary income do computer science professors make in the United States?

Academic salaries at European universities

Answer 1

I propose that any such question should be rephrased as follows:

Where can one find salary data for job type X / country Y / field Z?

If the question is just "What is the salary range?", then what would an answer look like? If it just gives specific figures, then it can't be expected to be valid into the future. If it comes from someone's personal experience or guess, then it's purely anecdotal. What you really want are statistics based on large-scale data from a reliable source. So if such a source exists, then why not simply link to it? That way, people will be able to find well-referenced data into the future (assuming the source continues to update their data, which many do).

Also, if the source turns out to give a broader range of data (covering multiple job types / fields / countries) then the question can be broadened retroactively, so that people searching for any relevant combination can find their source in this question, and not have to ask separately.

This way, instead of giving people fish, we're teaching them to fish, or at least telling them how to get to the river.

Answer 2

There is a question What is the average postdoctoral salary in China?

and the question listed in this meta question, I think we should either close those salary questions altogether or open them all because the US is a country, China is a country, Germany is a country, Canada is also a country, …..

Answer 3

I don't understand why these questions were closed. The closing rationale is given as "depends on individual factors". While undoubtedly some universities will pay more than another, one can still give an answer based on salary range.

For example here's the rough salary of a Computer Science professor in the United States:

The average Professor - Computer Science salary in the United States is $110,787 as of July 31, 2018, but the range typically falls between $87,575 and $155,093. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.

The equivalent for engineering teachers in Pakistan/India would answer the question.

Answer 4

I am conflicted. While on the face of it all questions for the form

What is the average salary for position X make in field Y in country Z?

seem to be a good question for the SE format since there is presumably a concise evidence based answer that will not become rapidly outdated. Assuming position X is related to academics, then these questions are relevant to our community and potentially one that someone may not have easy access to resources to answer. For example, a US trained Postdoc looking to move to Japan might not know where to begin to lookup salary info and there may not be a specific job that they are applying to during the early stages of researching job opportunities.

I think the issue I see with them is that there are an awful lot of permutations of X, Y, and Z and we would get bored answering these questions. That in and of itself is not a reason to close the questions. I however am not intrigued by any of the listed questions and have not upvoted any of them (and have only left a somewhat snarky answer on one of them).