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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

What I've observed is that virtually every science grad student is aware of the academic job situation, unless they are deluding themselves or have their heads in the sand. In fact, my dad (chemistry PhD) told me this was already common knowledge in the 1950s.

Disclosure: Physics PhD.

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Another Physics adjacent PhD.

When I was in my 20s, I was aware of the situation anecdotally from other grad students. However, I wanted to shoot my shot and by the time I hit my late 20s and 30 all of those weekend hours in the office and the low pay made those software jobs very alluring. So I jumped ship.

I miss research in academia quite a bit, I still read papers and review articles if I'm contacted. However, I don't think I'll go back with the work-life balance and higher salaries in industry.

Maybe your choice of field was fortunate here, don't they say if you don't have your Nobel in physics by 30 you never will?

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-a...

That saying doesn't seem to be true at all if you sort by age. If you have your nobel prize by 30 you are an outlier.

There are similar sayings for mathematics that don't hold up. I don't really understand where the perception comes from when it is easily fact checked?

I think the phrasing is a little off; the way I’ve heard it is that most Nobel winners had done the majority of their research before they were 30. It just takes a few decades for their contributions to the field to become apparent.

And PhDs and tenure track aside, many undergrad science degrees are probably not much more useful as a credential than liberal arts degrees that many here like to mock. There's nothing wrong with majoring in biology if that's your thing. But unless you're pre-med or plan to get a PhD, it's probably not a more useful major than history or English--and may be less useful depending upon what sort of job you're looking for.

In my view, the undergrad degrees that are useful as credentials are exceptions: The licensed engineering and medical fields. Even the vaunted computer science degree is not a meal ticket: You still have to prove that you can code, and are competing with people who are self taught.

Now there are some things that, while not formal credentials, are still hard to avoid for certain occupations. People with math and physics degree can be quite competitive for certain kinds of quantitative work. Oddly enough a music performance degree is almost unavoidable if you want to be a working classical musician. Those are areas where it's possible to be self trained, but almost prohibitively difficult.

You can both be aware of the situation and delusional.

Many people I’ve spoken to with tenure track aspirations genuinely believe they’re in the top 1% of their field, and thus have a good shot at making it. I’d wager that far more than 1% of graduate students/postdocs believe this about themselves. In general, the vast majority of people will rate themselves as above average for any given ability, even though that’s by definition impossible.

> the vast majority of people will rate themselves as above average for any given ability, even though that’s by definition impossible.

Not "by definition". It's easy to build a probability distribution such that an arbitrarily large majority of samples are above average (e.g. if it has a long tail to the left).

Fine, I should have said “above the median,” if you insist on being so pedantic about it ;-)

Very true. When I was doing PhD in pure maths I had random people explain to me that a PhD would not necessarily give me an advantage in the job market. Like I would come to do a PhD without figuring that out.

I have found that having a PhD in pure math has been enormously helpful in making me look more attractive to the job market.

Not specifically in pure maths, but agree I also found that a math PhD is good to have for jobs in AI, finance etc. But an equivalent industry experience might be worth the same at least.

For what sort of jobs?

For me, data science, quantitative finance, software engineering jobs. A large part of software development is about identifying and building abstractions to solve problems, which is also what mathematicians do. A common sentiment I've seen expressed by hiring managers is that someone with a strong math background can become very competent in a wide variety of technical fields.

I know several PhDs who actually thought a doctorate in music theory or similar fields was a ticket to a good job.

It may have been bad in the 1950s, but there was an acute acceleration of how bad it got in the 1990-2010 era.

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