&gt; Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k&#x2F;year?<p>I think it is when you condition on the fact that someone is a professor at Berkeley&#x2F;CMU. Roughly 5% of applicants are accepted to top PhD programs, and less than 20% of people with PhDs at top universities (like Berkeley&#x2F;CMU) get tenure track positions. Of those with tenure track positions, a minority (&lt;50%) get tenure, and of those who get tenure, a fraction become full professors.<p>So the professors at Berkeley&#x2F;CMU are well into the top 1% of people with computer science degrees, which makes it entirely plausible that their next best alternative is getting a high level finance&#x2F;tech job.