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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

(Old headline for reference: "Old People Have All the Interesting Jobs in America")

I think the title of this of this piece is poor and doesn't reflect a great question buried in there.

The piece reflects on how many high achieving young people choose finance, management consulting, and law and laments how those positions are low risk, high reward. The author implies it would be better for America in the face of slowing scientific progress to see young, smart individuals employ their skills in fields like chemistry or materials science.

A great question to be had is what can be done to encourage people to undertake high risk, high reward fields? I agree with the authors point that in a prisoners dilemma style way, at any given point in a young smart persons life, they may be inclined to undertake those professions (consulting, law, finance).

An important question to be asked covered by a poor headline

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There is (or maybe was) a pipeline of grad students imported from India and China that are taking this risk. It makes no sense for highly qualified and by that I mean "academically educated" Americans to pursue PhDs in the sciences. Even the masters programs are largely foreign students since that is a way to get an H1B.

An important part of the reward is American citizenship, which Americans already have, so for them, it's a high risk low reward field.

As America makes it harder to immigrate, and other countries are catching up in opportunity and quality of life, there should be fewer foreigners spend many years and sacrifices in pursuit of the green card.

Or America will cut funding for science and make it more difficult to afford higher education or have a career in sciences while simultaneously making it harder to immigrate.

If you don't have a masters or PhD you aren't "highly qualified and academically educated." And undergrad is a basic degree these days, and you aren't considered to be an academic having gotten one.

I don't see what the fact that master's and PhD programs are filled with foreign students has to do with whether or not it makes sense to get a higher degree. Most of the brilliant people in North America are immigrants.

>I don't see what the fact that master's and PhD programs are filled with foreign students has to do with whether or not it makes sense to get a higher degree.

It's more competitive, low pay during school and lower odds of a well paying job at the end.

A US resident (citizen or child immigrant) can get a job at FANG with a bachelors. A foreigner needs a visa and a job interview, and grad school is a way to get a visa and get in reach of recruiters.

I think that bit was in reference to which institution the undergrad degree was from.

I think that a high risk / high reward strategy works well in two cases.

1: You have little to lose, already so low at the bottom that a failure won't make you much worse off. Why not try something that could catapult you from there? Example: students running a startup from a dorm room.

2: You have so much that constantly losing a bit is inconsequential for you, even if the high reward only shows once in 100 tries. Example: a VC financing 100 startups.

But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much. It will immediately make you so much worse off and close so many opportunities that you only want to play safe.

Stay hungry, stay foolish, they said. It's hard to follow such advice when you just stopped to be "hungry" and started to feel competent, and you don't want back.

> But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much.

I agree with your analysis, and would also add that the increasing concentration of good jobs in expensive cities exacerbates this. When the best jobs are all in places where owning a home costs $500k+, it shouldn't be a surprise that people place a higher weight on their salary.

My own experience exemplifies this. I'm from the Phoenix area, where housing is relatively cheap. But when I graduated college, the only engineering jobs in the area were at Godaddy, boring old-school internal IT shops, or a couple of small consultancies. None of these seemed like they would make for a very rewarding career, so I applied in SF and NYC and took the first job that took me out of Phoenix. I got a more rewarding career out of it, but also got into a very challenging housing market.

The real answer to the question, of course, is that people are at least somewhat rational, and so they're unlikely to race for high-risk, low-reward work when the opposite is plentiful.

Young people will take high-risk opportunities only when they offer higher reward than otherwise-available low-risk ones.

The key questions, then, are:

1) These "unloved" fields: do they actually create more value than the lower-risk fields the author laments young people choosing? If not, then the author's answer is simple: people are making the right choices. If so, however:

2) What forces are preventing workers in these high-value, high-risk fields from capturing as large a share of their productivity as workers in low-risk, high-reward fields can?

Since when are the sciences "high risk, high reward" fields?

They seem like high risk (of not getting one of the few jobs available) for low reward (the jobs that do exist pay extremely poorly compared to writing webapps).

I agree with your sentiment. I think the high reward would be breaking ground in a field or doing something prize-worthy or money-worthy (turning your research into a company or something).

I think the incentives are very misaligned against the hard sciences. This is coming from someone who loved physics in high school and materials science in college, but switched to computer science for economic reasons (I do really enjoy programming, but my first love was for other sciences).

Graduating with a huge student debt that needs to be repaid doesn't encourage exploration and risk-taking, so that would be one of the areas to focus on.

My understanding is that STEM degrees generally have a much more reasonable debt / future earnings ratio than the arts and humanities.

Is that not the case?

I guess it can be argued that those fields fall under "exploration and risk taking" though...

In my experience you are correct about STEM. I live in flyover country, most STEM people I know pay off student debt in around 3-5 years no issues. Only a sample size of ~35, but low cost of living and high wages in engineering goes a long way. Also fly over country tends to have good cheap state schools, so not sure how well my experience translates to the coasts

STEM isn't really STEM when it comes to money though, it's more like parts of TE or graduating from a 'good' school where there's a lot of recruiting. A B.S. in Math from ENMU isn't really any better placed for >50K lob than their BFA friends.

Computer related majors (software engineering, IT, networking, etc.) and most engineering generally pay off as long as you don't end up hating the work.

Hard science majors (especially biology) don't have it so well, unless they go to med school or pharmacy school.

Math is a pretty mixed bag, some math majors get well paying jobs as actuaries, statisticians, modeling, etc, but many (and all I know personally) end up in low paying jobs that you don't need a degree for.

Well if you go to "high paying low risk" on your tombstone will be written He lived the same year 70 times and called that a life. For a lot of people that is not their desire. So I think that there will always be supply of smart risk takers.

Counter: A low-risk, high-reward career maximizes my ability balance work and life. I am pretty much guaranteed the ability to take a long, extravagant vacation every year, spend weekends in the mountains, maintain expensive hobbies, etc.

High-risk, high-reward may be more fulfilling as a career, but the cost of failure is forgoing all those personal things.

For those where work is life and life is work, the high-risk, high-reward career makes sense. For the rest of us, there's consulting or building CRUD.

> I am pretty much guaranteed the ability to take a long, extravagant vacation every year, spend weekends in the mountains, maintain expensive hobbies, etc.

I don't know any management consultants, doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers that do any of those things. At best they have nice things, but they do not have free time. They are low-risk careers, not low effort or low time-commitment careers.

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