Why Science Is a Lousy Career Choice 694
Hugh Pickens writes "President Obama had a town hall meeting at Facebook's headquarters last week and said that he wanted to encourage females and minorities to pursue STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). However, Pastabagel writes that the need for American students to study STEM is one of the tired refrains in modern American politics and that plenty of people already study science, but they don't work in science. 'MIT grads are more likely to end up in the financial industry, where quants and traders are very well compensated, than in the semiconductor industry where the spectre of outsourcing to India and Asia will hang over their heads for their entire career.' Philip Greenspun adds that science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. 'The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children,' writes Greenspun. 'Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it.'"
They don't. (Score:4, Interesting)
Deja vu (Score:2, Interesting)
"The average _____ that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children"
Same could be said substituting "teacher", or many others.
Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Solution: destroy "financial services" industry. At this point it serves no purpose whatsoever, just sucks resources. Trade and investment can be handled without giant middlemen running their scams.
Re:what's really going on? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Think before making your career choice (Score:5, Interesting)
If car manufacturing in the UK is anything to go by, the cycle works a bit like this:
1. Companies outsource manufacturing to cheap overseas country.
2. Manufacturing more-or-less collapses in UK.
3. The UK now has a large number of skilled workers who have experience building cars and a shortage of work for them. It's fair to assume they'll work for slightly less than they used to demand, and shipping cars is remarkably expensive. So a number of foreign manufacturers set up factories in the UK.
4. Manufacturing brightens up - though the factory owner is no longer a British company.
Examples: BMW manufacture the Mini in the UK. (They also manufacture a number of engines. Yes - the UK ships car engines to Germany for BMW cars!)
Toyota, Honda and Nissan also have factories in the UK.
Re: not really concerned (Score:2, Interesting)
"Entrepreneur" == "risk sink". An overwhelming majority of "entrepreneurs" failed, and yet society felt no effect of their failures because they just died in poverty, and those few who succeed, end up creating the companies that make up for the loss of production and employment due to failures. Without a method to predict at any extent if something is valuable enough to develop, "entrepreneurs" making nearly completely random choices and funding everything from their own pockets, it was the best way to drive progress.
A very long time ago (the end of Industrial Revolution) society outgrown the need for this -- we don't need every successful thief or descendant from aristocratic family to bet his life savings on some crackpot idea to determine those few ideas that weren't really so crackpot after all. Too bad, people who would otherwise destroy themselves in >99.999% futile search for riches, now have a reliable method of mooching those riches from the society by becoming financial middlemen. Effectiveness of the system is exactly the same as with crackpot "entrepreneurs" -- except now it is low because all profit is skimmed by those crooks.
Re:Put it another way (Score:5, Interesting)
I found this Wikipedia article rather interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development [wikipedia.org]
Of the various stages of ethical development I take pride in guessing (not necessarily objectively, mind you) that I may be at stage 6 of ethical development. But take what you know of the typical corporation and they are almost always at stage 2. Only the smaller ones who have a large stake in the communities in which they operate, ie not investor-owned, and tied to a single community, even reach conventional development. I find it interesting that the justifying "philosophies" of libertarianism and objectivism would reject this model, saying that only stage 1 and stage 2 exist, stage 2 obviously being morally superior, and any further stages are still manifestations of stage 1. But our culture as well as our economy do not reward anything beyond stage 2, they disregard it or even punish it.
Relative income (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1970, engineering and law paid about the same. The IEEE tracks this. Dentistry paid better. Real estate sales paid worse, on a par with auto sales.
What happened? Something few want to admit. Major parts of science are mined out. The return on investment from pure research has dropped since the 1970s. There was a long period when a small team might produce something like the tungsten-filament light bulb or the transistor. Now, it takes an army of researchers to get a minor improvement. That's why the big corporate research labs went into decline in the 1980s and are now mostly gone. Notice that high-energy physics hasn't produced much in the way of products in half a century. (Low-energy physics has produced substantial results, though.) Semiconductors have made huge progress, but huge resources were required to accomplish that. A modern wafer fab costs billions. The payoff for cleverness has declined, and salaries have declined accordingly.
(Biology is still making real progress, and has plenty of work ahead. Outside bio, though, things are slow.)
Re:what's really going on? (Score:3, Interesting)
NO!
If they will do it for a quarter the pay, but live in a cheap to live area in a completely foreign land, then it has nothing to do with pricing out of teh market, but rather a lack of PROTECTIVE TARRIFFS.
The issue is that our current policy enforces corporate capitalization and does not protect human resource.
STEM is worth the bother, but we need to reinforce it by protecting it --- you tax US businesses on their imported labor. And if they don't like it, they can move to india.. Then we can tax their products instead. THIS IS NOW UNEQUAL NATIONS STAY BALANCED.
Re:The problem isn't the profitability of Science. (Score:3, Interesting)
Students and education are not factory systems into which you can blindly invest capital with a rational expectation of getting more money out the other end. It may happen, but it's not of a very high nor reliable return.
You need to look into the federally guaranteed student loan system. You can't discharge those loans in bankruptcy, and if by some miracle you lose anyway, the govt will make you whole. Also the rates the students pay are pretty high, at least compared to something like T-bills.
Yes the students lives are ruined as they're turned into debt serfs, but the destruction of the middle class has always been the purpose of govt, right?
Ever wonder why an education bubble is brewing? Why tuition goes up 15% per year, every year, for decades?
Speaking as a male physicist (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, but you've missed the whole point. (Score:4, Interesting)
All the stock brokers are now being pulled from MIT & co.'s STEM programs. Aren't you glad knowing the guys making all that money loved science & designing things in High School?
Google & others are making significant progress towards populating marketing with the same crowd too. There is also a lively field of academic business research desperately trying to ensure that STEM majors are more qualified than undergrad business majors.
Sales may take slightly longer though. Sorry, people still love a good bullshit artist.
Re:Bleh... more slashdot career flamebait (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans are so damn greedy they don't understand that driving an economy car and living in a normal house doesn't mean that you are poor.
People have a warped view of things thanks to TV, I think. Saw some cop show last year where they went to a detective's home, and she lived in some palatial apartment with a view that would impress Richard Branson.
I'm doing really well in engineering. I have my little house in a quiet neighborhood. Just bought me one of those new big MINIs. I can flex my time, and have leisure time to do what I want. But to a lot of people, because I don't live by myself in a 4000 sq ft house and have two $100K+ cars, I'm a big loser.
Re:what's really going on? (Score:4, Interesting)
Believe it or not Slashdot, the guys at the top are usually there for very good reasons. They are not stupid, they are not idiots, and most of them are pretty damn good at what they do.
I'm one of those privileged cunts people whine about. I went to a nice private school and am quite familiar with the old boys'/girls' network.
I can assure you that while most aren't stupid, and some of them are even quite good at what they do, what they are not is uniquely able or qualified. The fact that they're in the position rather than any number of other people of equal or greater competence is that they know the right people and play the right tune (which is often very different from the tune the company claims to play).
In other words, a meritocratic market would certainly cause upper management pay to drop to one tenth of its current silliness. But why would you threaten your own security by actually practicing the competitive capitalism that you preach? No, you're far more secure and productive if you cooperate while preaching to everyone below you to turn against each other in ruthless competition.
Re:what's really going on? (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe it or not Slashdot, the guys at the top are usually there for very good reasons. They are not stupid, they are not idiots, and most of them are pretty damn good at what they do.
I've worked directly with a lot of CEOs and other senior leaders at companies. My observation is that there is always a baseline of high personal drive and ambition, and usually a good amount of charisma and intelligence as well. The people who get to the top get there for a reason, and it isn't usually prep school or family connections. Many CEOs come from typical middle-class backgrounds.
That said, at the senior-most level it's hard in practice to determine just who is "pretty damn good at what they do". At a large company it can take five or more years to figure out whether a given strategy was brilliant or misguided. Contrast that with a line factory worker, whose contribution is easy to measure. Because it's so hard to measure the performance of a C-level leader, there gets to be this self-perpetuating aspect to the people in those roles: Once you attain that role (somehow), then wherever you go in the future will also be a C-level role. And if you're a corporate board looking to hire at that level, you go with someone that has prior experience because you don't really know how to measure them anyway, and you're pretty risk averse. In effect the pool of candidates is artificially restricted because of a lack of good information. Ironically C-level people end up making more money precisely because it is so difficult to measure how well they perform.
In net, I'd guess at least one person out of 100,000 has what takes to be a credible CEO of Goldman Sachs, if they were given the chance. Of course we'll never know.