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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002·

I guess that means that physics isn't that valuable then, and we have an oversupply of physics people.

It turns out that the market believes that building CRUD apps is more valuable and useful to society than whatever it is physics researchers do.

You are right that we don't have a Stem shortage. Instead we have a Technology shortage, and way too many people are going into these other fields that aren't actually very useful.

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Both of you are right. The market has a very limited view of what's valuable, and physics is one of those things that don't make the cut.

The market isnt the ultimate arbiter of what has value.

this is very concerning, I'm actually encouraging my kids to physics (or chemistry, or biology, or math, i.e. STEM), as I feel so few kids are taking on those majors.

on the other hand, more and more are learning programming these days, I recall after 2008(or 2000) some CS departments lost nearly 50% enrollment because coding jobs were saturated then, that may happen again.

still, the "safe" way will be good at coding while specializing in some STEM fields(including chip design, which is mostly software tool usage these days). Wall street is another way out, but I don't like it and won't recommend it to kids.

Probably the safest field to get into would be everyday things, especially plumbing. There's no automating that, pipes will always break and new (and old) buildings will always need to manage complex plumbing systems.

I wouldn't be surprised if some black swan breakthrough in automated assembly/modularization/mobility of housing in less than 30 years halves the availability of manual plumbing work so that when your children just get 1 to 10 years into that career there is a sudden plummet of pay, possibly combined with an influx of workers coming in from previously wrecked markets.

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