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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

The guy is barking up the wrong tree. There is indeed a crisis in science, especially in pharmacology, but it isn't caused by an oversupply of biochemists, it's that since 2004, and especially since 2008, everything that isn't academia has stopped hiring. It's not that the source is too plentiful, it's that the sink has become plugged up.

There may be a cautionary tale in there for computer science: once the VC carousel stops the situation in computer science will be quite as bad.

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This is why for CS and any one else really, it is absolutely crucial to save and become debt/mortgage free while things are good. Also, if possible have some fallback skills, either computer related or not.

The percentage of programmers working in VC-funded jobs is tiny. I won't say that it wouldn't have any effect, but the effect would be minor. You might have to go and do some drudge programming work in an anonymous department inside inside BigCorp, and you might not get paid quite as much, but it would not be catastrophic - the need for software only continues to increase in the modern world, and I for one don't see any reason for that to stop any time soon, regardless of what VCs may or may not be doing...

> There may be a cautionary tale in there for computer science: once the VC carousel stops the situation in computer science will be quite as bad.

The difference is that CS is something that every company increasingly needs, not just tech companies. Most companies have never needed and will never need science.

This was written in 1999.

I know. It's all bullshit what the guy writes, this essay and all the others on his site. This one here (http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/defense.html) is really something fierce.

That's why I said the unemployment crisis isn't caused by an oversupply of scientists - up to about 2004 most everyone with a PhD degree could find employment in industry. But this fellow Katz doesn't even mention industry. He is either ignorant or intentionally dishonest. There is no excuse for either.

While I don't know whether he's right or wrong, he definitely mentions the industry in the article. He first says, "computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D" and later, "there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences".

Other professors and PhDs I've talked to have basically said the same things as he says here. There are definitely jobs for PhDs in CS in industry, but whether you would be considered a "scientist" for those jobs is debatable, as most of the time you don't have the same level of freedom you would have in academia (or at least that's what I've been told).

The author is a physicist; where would one find employment in the physics industry? The "physics industry" is pretty much academia, with the exception of a few DoD positions. Physics Ph.D.s frequently go into finance and software development, but since neither of those use physics (except limited amounts of software), I think they would fit into the "career change" that he did mention.

I graduated with an B.S. in Physics about the time that he wrote, and his analysis pretty much matched what I saw in the lab I worked in. Of my physics classmates who I know what happened to them, all got jobs doing no physics (including the newly minted Ph.D. who was supervising me). I talked with the postdoc in our lab (her second postdoc position), looked at the number of Ph.D.s and postdocs at Ohio State (lots), looked at the number of open positions in the Physics Department at Ohio State (none), and decided I did not want to postdoc until a professor died and then hope that I get picked. So I said physics was a fun, stimulating, foundational undergraduate choice, felt like I understood the entire world, and promptly pursued software. (Fortunately, I was aided by being tired of school and not really enjoying physics research)

One of my physics classmates did software for a while, then decided to do a Ph.D. in (rocket) propulsion, which is physics-related. "Industry" for him is pretty much limited to NASA (who else is going to employ someone looking into new forms of propulsion?) Turns out he doesn't want to work for NASA bureaucracy, so he switched back to software again.

I think the author is right on, at least for his field of physics.

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