Comment by jtbigwoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtbigwoo | Hacker News Reader

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This is how many, many professions work. Musicians, writers, inventors, athletes, research scientists, pilots, and even small business owners all have the same career path. A few really driven, really lucky ones win the lottery and get to be household names. A small minority (maybe 1 - 5%) make an upper middle class living. The other 99% work for poor wages until they give up or get used up. It sucks, but it's hardly unique to science. If you're in a profession with a massive oversupply of labor, you can pretty much be guaranteed to see this kind of structure.

I also spent half the article thinking that the author's struggles with vocabulary and grammar might explain his/her struggles to get ahead. Perhaps he/she is a non-native speaker and that's adding to the trouble?

As an ex-classical musician, I can attest to your first point. However, the science Ph.D. glut seems to be generating more angst these days than it used to. I attribute this in part to rising tuition costs and greater student debt loads and an ever increasing disparity between supply and demand. I believe this Economist article was recently referenced on HN:

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs.

For pilots, I don't think you want to be one of the ones who gets to become a household name, as that generally only happens when you are the pilot during a crash or serious emergency.

I also spent half the article thinking that the author's struggles with vocabulary and grammar might explain his/her struggles to get ahead. Perhaps he/she is a non-native speaker and that's adding to the trouble?

I also noticed the many grammatical flaws in this post. I did a little digging, and the author does indeed appear to be a non-native speaker. (He's Italian: http://wiki.devicerandom.org/Who_am_I.)

"Perhaps he/she is a non-native speaker and that's adding to the trouble?" - that's a red herring.

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