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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the industry. If you're getting a PhD in biotech, good industry jobs are only slightly less difficult to land than tenure-track positions. For the big names (Genentech, Amgen, etc.), getting a scientist position is just as hard, if not harder.

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Why is it that people who are bright and want to do actual work have it astronomically harder than the bullshitting rainmakers and mediocrities who get to run the economy?

1. Because the rainmakers handle the money.

2. Because the scientists are taking little risk compared to the founders and investors who build the institutions that support their research.

3. Because humans are hard-wired to respect rainmaking and distrust science. Social behavior has been humanity's evolutionary killer app for the last 1500 centuries. Science has existed for maybe 5.

1. Upsetting, but true. One major virtue of many ancient societies is that they had social checks and balances that put those with talent and intelligence in positions of higher status and more power than those who happened to incidentally have the money. Ours fails in that regard.

2. The founders are not mediocrities. The people who come in later and use social manipulation to control resources they didn't create are the mediocrities.

3. Interesting and reasonable point.

People can do anything they want. The problem is that they want to be compensated and need to spend money (supplies/facilities etc). In the case of research, they are most likely not developing anything that anyone will want to pay for, or else they'd be doing product development and be a business. So they are left to try and get money from others, some might say charity, so that they can carry out thier work. In the US and throughout the world a lot of them are financed through government taxes.

There are independent research labs and research positions in companies, but in general they are trying to solve business related problems.

"Those mediocrities who get to run the economy" - I'm not sure who you mean exactly, are probably involved in business and thus vvoluntary are interacting with people who value whatever they produce. If you are referring to politicians, well they are adept at spending other peoples money.

It isn't fun to have a do-nothing job, especially for the type of person who would consider doing a Ph.D. in a biotech field.

However much that helps.

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