Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs

Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by 1letterunixname on Thursday December 08, 2022 @02:28AM (#33905225)

Law degrees are another racket. There are too many people in the US with JDs. Only 23% are using them productively.

Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends.

If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist.

Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost.

Biotech, data science, AI/ML are also good bets. What's not a safe bet is generic "programmer" likely to be automated out of a job and salaries are likely to crash when there's an oversupply of lower-skilled talent. Most programming will become trivial or eliminated by automation, as is already beginning to happen with AI code completion.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by jawilson2 on Thursday December 08, 2022 @09:26AM (#33908182)

> Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends

Half of the trading quants on my team are physics/math PhDs. Very few econ/finance degrees. Not that there are an ocean of these jobs available, and these are probably outliers compared to the 95%+ of people graduating with those degrees, but it is still a data point.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by mnky9800n on Thursday December 08, 2022 @09:32AM (#33908237)

Most places I know hiring PhDs to do AI/ML are hiring people with phds in a non-AI/ML field. Why? Because it is a lot easier to teach someone how to string together pytorch or tensorflow or whatever codes then it is to teach them physics, hydrology, sociology, etc. Certainly this is how my company hires.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by wittycardio on Thursday December 08, 2022 @11:36AM (#33909874)

I think it's more likely because PhDs in AI/Ml are extremely expensive to hire. A PhD in AI generally does more than string together pytorch and tensorflow.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by drdunce on Thursday December 08, 2022 @03:55PM (#33913271)

Maybe in US? PhD AI/ML hire in UK is ~£33k salary.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by wittycardio on Thursday December 08, 2022 @05:46PM (#33914847)

An AI PhD from a reasonable university will easily make 200k + at SV companies

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by drdunce on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:31AM (#33919398)

Again, in US? I'm from a Russell Group uni, so are friends. Most I've heard of is 37 from a friend that spent over 3 months applying and did some hard negotiating. Can you give some example companies hiring with this salary in UK? I'd be genuinely interested, as I believe would many friends/colleagues.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by wittycardio on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:11PM (#33925929)

In the US, though I imagine DeepMind and FAIR pay a lot more than 37k pounds in the UK too

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by drdunce on Saturday December 10, 2022 @09:28AM (#33932879)

I don't think it's quite 200k and I wouldn't describe getting into DeepMind as easy

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by wittycardio on Saturday December 10, 2022 @10:55AM (#33933643)

Don't think it's easy but yeah those are the kinds of places that would pay 200k in the US

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by mnky9800n on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:06AM (#33918863)

Doing what?

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by wittycardio on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:12PM (#33925934)

Doing machine learning or data science

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by drdunce on Thursday December 08, 2022 @04:10AM (#33905892)

PhD in AI/ML is no longer a good bet, hasn't been for about 5 years.

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Re:Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about... by amazon_illegal on Thursday December 08, 2022 @03:00AM (#33905465)

if you had a tool that manufactures tesla parts, could you assemble a tesla?

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