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Comment by D_Alex | Hacker News Reader

>is there really a shortage of smart and skilled people?

Hell yes, and there always will be, for the right values of "smart" and "skilled".

>Given the low pay for many scientific positions... etc

The sad fact is that the low pay you mention causes so many really smart people to turn away from science as a career.

>Maybe the upside is that with the tap of smart people turned down a little, conditions will improve for the people who are left.

If you turn down the tap for the smart people going into science and non-zero-sum businesses (like stock trading etc), I am certain the conditions "for people who are left" will become worse than they would have been. Absolutely certain.

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If there is a shortage, then why aren't they paid more highly and treated better?

Because if you want to actually do science it doesn't really produce profit, it produces knowledge and results which someone else may use for profit decades or centuries later and the idea of "shortages" or "supply" or "demand" are all ideas that come from the market which is not relevant here.

There's high pay for brilliant scientists who want to work on weapons manufacturing or oil drilling or high frequency trading or building scalable advertising platforms but not for doing actual science.

Then it sounds like we should be fixing the funding issue, not importing cheap labor to work in bad conditions.

Nevertheless, BLS statistics tell a different story.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste...

For most Ph.D.’s, the United States has a surplus of workers, especially in tenure-track positions in academia. The exceptions are certain fields within industry, such as petroleum engineering, process engineering, and computer engineering, and other fields in the government sector, such as nuclear engineering, materials science, and thermohydraulic engineering. Academia tends to absorb the Ph.D.’s who are unable to find positions in industry into postdoc positions. At the bachelor’s and master’s levels, there is consistent demand for employees in software development, as well as in high-growth areas such as mobile application development, data science, and petroleum engineering.

Generally speaking, there is a large surplus of science graduates, and many cannot find a job in their field and are looking to transition into other fields like software development.

You're just trolling this guy. Science knowledge is not transferable. I cannot make a rocket scientist do high energy particle physics research. If there is no demand for rocket scientist then his wage would be low.

How hard is that to understand?

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