More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking, as there was no relevant industry to pick them up... and as someone with several postdoctoral degrees, yet no house or meaningful assets... who could blame them for going into banking in this large miserable sprawl of a city utterly devoted to it?
This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.
I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and that's not a bad thing.
But the average person takes a real risk of underemployment with that approach.
A friend of mine with a degree in marine biology works as a barista, another with a philosophy degree works as a retail assistant.
As a non-wealthy, not particularly bright creative writing major, the focus of your degree only holds you back if you let it, or if you are utterly unwilling to work outside of your focus area. Tech, especially, has an absurd number of on-ramps for anyone willing to do the tiniest modicum of extra-curricular work.
Most are becoming educated and going into significant debt to get a specific job, or salary.
But if you know you’re going into banking anyway you might as well do something vaguely relevant like accounting, economics or statistics.
I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.
Despite this, 56k people graduated in biological sciences but 24k people graduated in computer science.
(Graduation data is from 2019/20 so may have changed slightly, but unlikely enough to move the needle)
As a sibling comment has pointed out, there are too many software engineers in the UK.
This does not seem to be a specific phenomenon. Only a few of my former PhD condensed matter physics colleagues did not end up in finance.
I think the big problem is too much reliance on on service sector.
The brutal hard work gets done off-shore for poor pay and the spoils(profits) get shipped to the western finance capitals of the world where people who put in little effort get the cream.
It's still dependent on rich countries having historical leverage (economic, political and especially military) over the poor countries where the dirty manufacturing and hard labor happens, rather than based on any meritocracy.
Like any race to the bottom, it works great until you hit the bottom. Only now you don't have any of the fundamental industry, and you've lost all of the domain knowledge of those industries. Short-term thinking is incredibly seductive.
What you say is true of cheap consumer goods, but remember everything else. Even with some consumer goods, its pretty even - the UK exports cars about as much as it imports (by value, not numbers though). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers...
Its other big goods exports are things that are not that visible to consumers.
There are definitely people here who think like that, and we do still import cheap labour for some things (difficult low paying jobs), that British people “will not do” ( which means ”will not do for minimum wage”) but in general we have had what the govt and central bank call “wage inflation”.
We are also talking about the north of England and non-EU immigrants strongly prefer certain areas, tilted to the South. Where I live I see few non-white faces.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...
It will still keep most population away from industrial production. Same thing happened is agriculture a century ago, when machines made 90% of agricultural workers redundant, and huge farms are run by half-dozen people.
(Wait until AI will make a ton of service workers redundant.)
And the focusing on a more abstract economy- produces a inability to even perceive physical products, limitations and overall reality and the world. If everything is an abstraction, then problems like climate change, running out of energy or societal instability, surely can be doctored, narrated and abstracted away. And they cant. Which is a fundamental incompetence that is pretty obvious by now.
One stuck in such a delusion, would imagine it optimal to blast furnace a mountain of money towards "elegant" formulas, unable to perceive, that those formulas at the end of the day have to produce fertilizer to feed a world of billions even when the crops fail.
How does one get hired into banking with a physics degree? For what kinds of jobs? Where I live right now you only get into banking with a economics/business degree. Anything else and your resume goes in the bin.
I've also hired a boatload of people with STEM degrees. In fact (massive generalisation warning) I prefer hiring them to those with computer science degrees.
But mostly, in a resume, I'm looking for 1) evidence of competence (do you know what software is and how to make it), 2) evidence of interest in the domain and 3) evidence of being able to communicate with others.
Everything else specialist can be taught / learned. You don't need to know either how to balance a tree, or how to calculate the value of an IR swap.
My experience: even when it comes to only implementing financial products, banks prefer mathematicians/physicists as software developers.