It's not that there are no career prospects in other industries. It's simply that certain careers can be bootstrapped on your own, and others you need to help/training/licensing/whatever to get into. You can't become a doctor or civil engineer by just hacking on your own & applying to jobs.

This comment sums it up => "I'd consider it if I didn't need a four-year degree.", (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20101794)

That's not true. My physicist friends from university ended up in various different places. Many of them with a technical or analytical twist, yes, but certainly not all in the 'tech industry': several data scientist, a quant, various opportunities at insurance companies, one who builds spy satellites, somebody who builds lensing systems for lithography, and of course a few who became software/system engineers. None of my acquaintances from uni struggled to find good employment in various industries.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, other than quants and insurance companies I'd consider all of these "tech jobs". Or does "tech" now mean "webdev"?

I would have thought that in this context "tech" meant "software".

Eh, I don't live in the US and I'm not up to date on the slang, but honestly a sentence like "some people work in technology while others design equipment for IC manufacturing" sounds quite silly to me. I'll try to remember now.

Apologies for being obtuse. It was me, not you, that failed at communication. :)

The type of work, though, and skills required are quite different, regardless of that they technically both develop and involve 'technology'. Semiconductor lithography requires a pretty exciting mix of skills starting with plain physics (classical and by now a bit of quantum optics), materials science, mechanical engineering, data analysis/science, software engineering (both for simulation and analysis of production of lensing systems), and I'm sure I'm missing half. It is quite different from "writes software for a software company", which is the framing I had interpreted from the comment I originally responded to.

I don't think your interpretation is wrong, just the context of a HN thread makes it more likely "tech" is software related.

That's the gross oversimplification I went for, indeed!

Building spy satellites could be argued to be electrical engineering, space/flight engineering, physics, data science, etc. In the interpretation of tech industry == software, these are career options that are open to physicists (and similar grads) that aren't in the-HN-type-of-tech.