Accelovation has a job for a Computational Grammarian. They are looking for someone with a masters or PhD and the salary will be “commensurate with education and experience.” I would probably be qualified for this job (at least according to the short description) and even more so when I graduate next spring. I have at least worked with building LFG-style grammars in a couple classes and this is one particular area I find entertaining. Building grammars can be tedious at times, but it’s also like a giant puzzle with many sub-puzzles and you have to find a way to put them all together. Same with building finite state transducers.
But I’m always bothered by job postings that don’t list salary ranges. I don’t want to show up for a job interview and have them ask, “what were you thinking in terms of salary?” If I give them a number too low, they’ll think I don’t even think I’m worth much, so they shouldn’t hire me. If I give them a number too high, they’ll think I have a high opinion of myself and am not worth the asking price. I operate on the assumption that these are reasonable thoughts and not just remnants of social insecurity. Am I nuts?
I want some resource that I, as a job seeker, can use for free that will tell me what I can expect to be making at a certain job. When I’ve found the occasional resource, they have things like “Computer Analyst IV” and “Database Administrator III”. But nothing like “Computer Science Researcher” or “Computational Linguist” or “Language Technologies Researcher” or whatever. The closest I have found is Payscale, which let me put in “Computational Linguist”, but then asked me a few questions that basically amounted to “never heard of it.” Scientific Linguist was the closest thing, but not really accurate. When I tried “Scientific Researcher”, I got that there weren’t enough results to compare.
Blerg.
