Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
> There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?
I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.
