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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

I think prestige is a big factor (and kind of a trap): people want to work in a prestigious field regardless of lower salary, worse working conditions etc. That's why there is so much competition. Kind of like how academic positions are so competitive despite low pay.

EDIT: Also an oversupply of graduates who feel they need to work in their fields of study. Actually I think "graduate oversupply" is the main issue. Feels like such a waste to work elsewhere if you've dedicated years to studying something, it's a major sunk cost.

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This is the most believable explanation.

There's probably less than 500 people in the entire world that are making actual design decisions for the most advanced nodes.

So the status benefits would be higher then practically anyone in SV outside the C-suite and a few well known personalities.

Maybe it's less common today, but I would say the overwhelming majority of people I went to undergrad with ended up doing things that were only tangentially related (or not related at all) to what their degree was in.

Yep, 50% of graduates from my course went into finance, after spending 4 years learning about electrons. Joke's on me, they probably started at more than what I make now.

It sounds like you went to an ivy league?

Not OP but not necessarily. I have a similar percentage of Physics+Applied Math major friends who attended Cal and UCLA who ended up in Consulting and/or Financial Engineering.

That makes sense.

A lot of the sciences aren't really terminal degrees for people who want to actually pursue the subject of their major as a profession explicitly. So if you don't want to go on and get a physics PhD--which may not be a great career trajectory anyway--going into something that interests you and pays generally smart people who aren't scared of numbers well isn't the worst place to go. (And you're probably actually better off with that physics degree than you would have been with an undergrad business degree.)

Agreed!

I am one of those disaffected STEM grads btw - T10 STEM program grad -> Engineering internships -> Policy Stint -> BSchool -> MBB -> Product Management

The business portion is easy to teach, and hiring for Finance+IB+VC+Consulting+PM roles is increasingly oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool grads from top programs (eg. BSBAs @ Haas, Wharton, Anderson, Ross, Stern)

I'm pretty similar--engineering undergrad/masters -> worked as an engineer in oil business for a few years -> MBA -> product management -> various analyst/marketing roles that followed from that fairly naturally.

To add to that, given when I went to school and the fact that I wasn't a CS major, I didn't touch a computer in undergrad. (Not literally true--I took a FORTRAN course which I didn't use until much later.) Never touched a PC until I was working and that was initially an Apple II we ran a couple of analysis programs on. But... like many of my classmates we ended up in the computer industry anyway.

>increasingly oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool grads from top programs

I assume the idea is that they have not only already been filtered by the schools, but they're presumably not dummies if they got the program with flying colors, we can do a sanity check that we can put them in front of clients, and teach them what they need to know.

> engineer in oil business

Oh whoa! That industry definetly played (and still does) a big part in technology today. I heard a lot of stories about the HPC/Simulations and Networking research done by the ONG sector.

> we can do a sanity check that we can put them in front of clients, and teach them what they need to know

Exactly! That's how I do hiring for interns and new grad PMs as well! Also the added benefit of having technically adept candidates makes imparting domain specific knowledge easier (if I'm a Cybersecurity PM, I'd like to have someone with networking+os chops along with business sense)

I was actually an engineer for an offshore drilling contractor. More planning and running shipyard jobs than doing HPC stuff though I was also involved in a couple accident investigations.

But got in at a hot time and had a planned departure to grad school just as things were having a major downturn.

Yea that makes sense! Would love to hear stories about that!

No, but it was a decent enough British one. Still seems wasteful of everyone's time to hammer in MOSFET equations to someone who has subzero interest in electronics ("doesn't recognise a screwdriver in practicals and no intention to start now; it's not in the exam" level of apathy). But then again they all got Firsts by absolutely smashing exams and I didn't. So, I have to say they could really focus on something they didn't care a jot about, for years, as a means to an end (landing a job at Deloitte, in the case of the screwdriver person) in a way that I never could.

If you just wanted to learn differential equations or something there must be way more effective ways to do that, and it would free the engineering teachers to teach engineering to aspiring engineers, who are being turned away in droves to make space for City-fuel grads.

However, as they say, the market has spoken, especially in a country where "industrial policy" is either "lol" or "sell".

The UK job market is a bit different from the US tbh. It feels like there isn't enough respect for Engineering+STEM in the UK. Almost everyone from good programs seems to end up in S&T or Consulting or IB.

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