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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that this also depends on field. CS has been hot for a long time now, it's also not extremely expensive to make a dent - or particularly unlikely. In Physics, we graduate an order of magnitude more Phds than there are posts for Phds. There are few remunerative fields which hire Phd physicists.

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High paying jobs in finance are stuffed with physics phds.

Many good physicists with PhD degrees don't have the character traits that are necessary to be hired and/or to be successful in finance.

Sure, but I was just giving a counterexample from my personal experience for the claim that their aren't many good paying jobs for Physics PhDs. In my career I have come across a weirdly large number of physics phds in very lucrative roles and that covers various fields, finance, in the software/tech industry (especially in data analysis type roles) and other places.

I knew a lot of physics (and other) PhD's when I worked in finance but I always wondered if they would have chosen to go into that field if they knew that's where they'd most likely end up.

Having studied physics and finance, physics tends to be much more interesting to study.

While somewhat true, I suspect that the path for these phds was both more error prone and harder than alternative pathways to the same position. My understanding is that the use of physics Phds for this role has fallen over the years as financial engineering and quantitative finance have evolved.

You see similar patterns with Physics Phds in AI teams. You are likely to encounter one over your career, but it's not typical.

> In Physics, we graduate an order of magnitude more Phds than there are posts for Phds. There are few remunerative fields which hire Phd physicists.

IIRC, that's even worse in the humanities in both regards.

I'd kind of think doing a career change would be easier for a Phd physicist, because they could benefit from stereotypes especially if they switch into some kind of quantitative or math-y field.

My understanding is that, as you say, Physics PhDs tend to have pretty decent paths into computing or math stuff. It's hard to be a physicist these days without being able to write some code in at least a scripting language, so fields like data science can fit them well.

The challenge is probably in finding pure physics research positions in a specific specialization.

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