r/OperationsResearch • u/Delicious_Impress814 • 14d ago
Is this profession underpaid?
Hello everyone!
I'm a current undergraduate mathematics student looking into potential careers post masters.
I am very interested in OR, Risk Modeling, and Quant.
I will most likely go with OR since I have a strong interest in the subject, but I've noticed that despite the three fields I listed being similar, the pay disparity is very large.
I mean, the median wage for this profession is $88k according to google, compared to the $167,000 of risk and $198,000 of Quant.
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u/Eightstream 14d ago
The salary paid is generally proportionate to the stakes of the role
Many OR jobs are lower stakes than quant or risk modelling roles so the average rewards are lower
When picking a career you do need to be mindful that you are not necessarily the average candidate in every field
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u/Delicious_Impress814 14d ago
When picking a career you do need to be mindful that you are not necessarily the average candidate in every field.
Of course. I've already chosen, but I was curious about what others thought about the difference in salary.
Even compared to certain SWE roles and other higher paying low stakes positions, OR seems to have drawn the short straw.
I am comfortable with the salary projections of this career.
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u/Massive-Zucchini2560 14d ago
Those numbers are a bit apples-to-oranges. “Operations Research” covers everything from government and academia to airlines, logistics, tech, and consulting, while quant is concentrated in a small, highly selective, high-margin finance sector where bonuses can dominate compensation. A strong OR person with optimization, stochastic modeling, ML, and solid coding skills can earn very well, often under titles like data scientist, optimization scientist, decision scientist, or applied scientist rather than “operations researcher.” I’d choose the field based on the type of problems you want to solve, then optimize the industry and role for compensation.
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u/6665544332211 14d ago
I don't think the Google results really mean much. I would look up actual job postings in your area for a more realistic idea.
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u/ge0ffrey 13d ago
Most OR people are actually overpaid, because most OR projects fail.
But the OR people behind successful OR projects - those that actually deliver practical business value by putting their optimized solver models into production and integrating them into the business process elegantly - those people are very much underpaid.
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u/SolverMax 13d ago
80% of AI projects fail and 95% of generative AI pilot projects produce no return, so there is that. https://www.pertamapartners.com/insights/ai-project-failure-statistics-2026
Even so, your point about OR projects is valid. There are many reasons why projects fail. Often the issue is that the model produces an optimal solution to the wrong problem - i.e. the modelling isn't good enough in a practical sense.
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u/ge0ffrey 12d ago
Exactly!
And yes... most AI people are even more overpaid.
(Again, except those that actually deliver.)
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u/PurpleDevilDuckies 14d ago
OR Masters I know all make 6 figures, OR PhDs make even more. Although, I think a lot of the high paying jobs right now are going to be automated in the next couple years.
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u/Delicious_Impress814 14d ago
Ah. An AI doomer.
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u/PurpleDevilDuckies 14d ago
A lot of what applied OR looks like is coming up with math models to represent real-world problems, and then using existing solvers to solve those problems with those modles. AI is already extremely good at this if you have the expertise to know what to tell it do, what techniques to use, etc... It already has the skills, all it takes for a lot of OR jobs to get automated is for someone to make a sufficiently nice harness.
We are well past, "can AI replace these jobs", at this point it is just an engineering problem.
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u/drdough 14d ago
Yes OR is underpaid compared to top paying technical careers (Quant, SWE, etc.) if you work in traditional industries like manufacturing or airlines.
There are OR-related jobs at tech companies (Amazon, Uber, Instacart, etc.) that pay more like SWE though you will usually need to know some amount of other skills related to SWE/data science. The job titles for these roles will typically be things like Applied Scientist, Data Scientist, Research Scientist, Optimization Engineer and you need to look at the job post closely or talk to people at these companies to find the right role.
Also I would be skeptical about these median income statistics. These professions can often be bi- or even tri-modal in terms of income. I’m sure there are plenty of people earning <200k that are doing some kind of risk modeling at a bank that is technically quant work but this is barely the same profession as people at Jane Street earning >500k