The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
The fields where you are bound to academia for a reasonable ROI are definitely the humanities, since there is essentially no demand for a history PhD in the private sector, or an English PhD. It can help for job hunting in an unrelated field, I guess. But, a chemistry PhD? or any other applied lab PhD, it's not like you're shooting yourself in the foot by getting an advanced degree in such a field.
As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...
I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.
Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.
I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.
My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.
(No, not me, I don't have a PhD.)
If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.
As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.
My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.
Personally knowing a couple PhDs who did the rounds, it is highly competitive.
Research Scientist positions are also embedded in product teams in Google IIRC, certainly less "prestige" than DeepMind though, and probably easier to get into
(Also for the broader audience: Harvard here probably carries less weight than the likes of UT Austin)
Of course, one of them also supports fascism; I'm not "both sides"ing.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/musk-vivek-ramaswamy-h1b-vi...
Combine that with very visible people actively promoting that, or representing that, you get yourself a discussion about knowledge, money, and capitalism. And if you dig deep enough you get current affairs and later on, philosophy involved as well.
If you were to remove all incentives on "get educated so you get paid more" and only focus on "get educated so you'll enjoy what you learn more" that might change the enrolment, but as a side-effect, it might also make it harder to find enough people for all manner of work.
Going down this thought a bit more, how much is enough? (money, knowledge) Is there such a thing as a goal or limit? Or better yet, is there a fixed quantity where it's all turned into a zero-sum game? Probably not.
So if someone will put effort in their hoard, would it then be good or bad for society at large? And either way, would such a person do it regardless of the side-effects on everyone else? Even if it has an outsized impact? Would we then not want to talk about someone with a big hoard trying to add a relatively small amount to that hoard at a cost that might be relatively big for everyone else?
After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure.
Neither was investing in rockets. At one point, he was down to bankruptcy if one more rocket exploded. What car executive would be crazy enough to bet it all on reusable rockets?
> be crazy enough to bet it all
Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.
As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is not a good thing. In a way, it mostly read like "a skewed mind made a bunch of bets and got lucky". Perhaps mostly an example of survivorship bias in a business sense.
Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.
There are of course also examples of people on their death bed realising their hoard doesn't really matter anymore and they might give most or all of it away. But that doesn't mean the hoarding never happened. It doesn't turn someone into a genius or a saint. When such things happen, we might consider it commendable, but that doesn't mean history disappears.
In a way it works not like a balance or a sum but more like a ratchet; it's about the degree to which someone hoarded stuff and how they acted with their hoard (doesn't have to be money, can be property or secrets or power or knowledge etc).
Did you know he gave away free Starlink to victims of hurricane Helena and the LA fires? When FEMA did nothing?
He's also going to rescue the astronauts abandoned in space.
My gawd, Elon is pure eeevil!!
You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.
Besides, Elon's dad at one point invested in Elon's company. Elon was already a success in business by then. From $20,000, he became the richest man in the world. All by luck! Pretty amazing!
Me, I could scrape up $20,000. Could I turn it into the richest man in the world? Nope. I would never have taken the risks Musk did. Nor do I have his work ethic. Nor am I as smart as he is. So I'm not envious of him.
Walk down my street with me and I’ll show you.
> Nor am I as smart as he is.
Are you kidding?
Lots of people seem to think that Musk has blundered his way from success to success. Nobody blunders $20,000 into richest man in the world.
There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.
> There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.
Of course. And the biggest barriers to success are:
1. not getting educated in what you want to do
2. being risk averse
3. not willing to commit to the work needed
4. doing drugs and alcohol
5. believe your friends and acquaintances telling you you can't make it
This forum is part of ycombinator, an outfit looking for startups to fund. You're already in the right place at the right time.
claim, meet data: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10990269/#:~:text=%...
I’m no fan of Musk, but he clearly isn’t guilty of the hoarding aspect, as WalterBright pointed out.
I think we’re at the “so what are you going to do about it” phase where the courts and congress are going to tisk tisk at the most, because they don’t want the deep pockets of Elon and Co to primary-them-out
Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.
Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.