The Real Science Gap

Brandon_R

"No one designed the present system. It just happened"

nothing could be more truer.

D H

Which poster, ParticleGrl? The original poster is twofish-quant, who (surprise!) is a quant, and one who has a PhD in physics. Per another post by twofish-quant, sky-high salaries in that world are the norm:
There is no way the technical world can compete with that on a salary basis.

caffenta

You can pick your specialty based on interest, but you have to be prepared for the consequences. So yes, it shouldn't be based solely on interest. But I don't think anyone was really saying that it should.

twofish-quant

Well.....

The part that's annoying to me is that this isn't a new thing. Physics Ph.D.'s have been forced to look for non-academic jobs since the *early-1970's*. The current situation with physics Ph.D.'s is hardly a new thing.

In my case it is, because I absolutely could not do the work that I'm doing without having gotten a Ph.d.

twofish-quant

This isn't true. The number of Ph.D.'s that go into academia has been roughly constant since the early 1970's. The only time in which the "traditional job" really was "traditional" was a very brief time in the 1960's. It really surprised me when I found this out.

Investment banks hire physics Ph.D.'s to run computer simulations and modelling and to do technical work. I don't spend my days talking to clients or trading. I'm not good at it, and I don't particularly like that sort of work.

I spend most of my day writing C++ code modelling financial markets, which uses roughly the same equations and techniques (and in some situations exactly the same equations and techniques) that get used in radiation hydrodynamics.

twofish-quant

I'm one of them. If someone offered me a job as a tenured research professor, I'd take it. On the other hand, I should have enough money so that within the next few years, I'll be the functional equivalent of a tenured research professor. At some point, I'll have enough money to self-fund my research.

D H

Why is that annoying? Classic language departments only crank out about as many PhDs as academia can bear because that is about the only place a person with a PhD in classic languages can find a job. Physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, and math departments crank out a lot more PhDs than academia can bear because our modern technological society needs those PhDs out in industry.

twofish-quant

It's mostly brainwashing. Since I've been brainwashed into thinking that the research professor is the top of human achievement, that still sticks, even after several years of un-brainwashing myself.

The other issue is that I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or not that you have so many physics Ph.D.'s working for investment banks. There is part of me that thinks that I'd be doing "greater good" if I was doing global climate simulations or designing electric cars. Then again maybe not.

Nothing really. The trouble is all that brainwashing that there is something wrong with that. Also a lot of brainwashing isn't explicit messages. You can *say* that there isn't anything wrong with not being an academic, but talk is cheap. What tends to happen is that people that are in positions of power in academia are academics, and until that changes, it will be sending out those messages.

In finance this isn't a problem because every physics or math Ph.D. that I know of would be willing to jump if there were something attractive. It's not necessarily a bad thing. If people wanted to be here out of love, there wouldn't be such high salaries.

As far a secretly looking down on people that work in industry. There is still this annoying voice that I've been able to manage, but I haven't been able to get rid of that says that I'm doing something wrong.

I don't think so. Also I don't think that there really is an employment problem among theoretical physicists. It's more of a psychological problem. There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you have to get around some of the psychological barriers.

Depends on the industry. If you've done massive cluster N-body simulations of the early universe, then we need to talk. Finance wants astrophysicists. The reason you have so many theoretical physicists working on Wall Street is that it so happens that the skills that you need as a theoretician is *precisely* the skill that you need for one of the jobs in finance.

Not sure that I agree with this.

Which is useful for a certain type of job, but not the type of job that they hire physics and math Ph.D.'s for.

I can open up a textbook in financial engineering and quantitative finance. About 80% of the equations any book that was written in 2005 are *WRONG*. If you read any intro financial textbook, you'll read about the Black-Scholes equation. What they won't mention is that equation is *WRONG* and has been wrong since 1987.

So where can you find a textbook that lists the correct equations? You can't. Even if one magically appeared today, it will be out of date in three to six months. And that's assuming that we understand the markets. There are some things that people don't quite completely understand about the markets. Also different markets can be very different. What equations that work for trading Chinese steel companies won't work for trading Mexican petrochemical companies (and there are people that know scary amounts of stuff about these details).

So who do you call, if you have billions of dollars at risk on some mathematical system that no one completely understands.

Hmmmmmm......

Sounds like a cool theoretical research job for someone that has experience in mathematical model of complex system. Wonder who would be good at that..... Hmmmmm.....

One other thing is that we are talking about tiny number of jobs, maybe a few hundred a year.

twofish-quant

Perhaps, but then you run into the problem with of bad information. People assume for example that computational cosmology is useless for getting a job in industry, when people with that sort of skill is something that investment banks are looking for.

twofish-quant

1) Because for some things they can't.

2) Because people in application development still make decent amounts of money. I know of Ph.D.'s that do work that *could* be done by someone with a bachelors, and they get paid about the same as a bachelors, but it's still decent money.

twofish-quant

And they still do. It's just that people are a lot quieter about making large sums of money so as not to attract lynch mobs.

A fresh out of school Ph.D. is likely to get a total comp of $150K/year. With three years of experience you get to VP level, and the comp there is about $250K/year. It tends to stabilize after that unless you get into management level, and the salaries there are scary.

The cool thing about finance is that people with physics Ph.D.'s are much more likely to get into some sort of middle management role than in other industries.

twofish-quant

The really cool thing is that the people that I know that are making $1M are doing technical things. The thing about finance is that if you have a physics Ph.D., there are very strong odds that you aren't going to be a stock trader, but rather a glorified computer programmer.

Also there's no need to compete on the basis of salary. The people that I know that make $1M would have given that up if they could do something in academia.

twofish-quant

It's annoying to be lied to by people that you trust. To quote Mike Nesmith....

"It's like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo. You're happy to get your stereo back, but it's sad to find out your grandmother is a thief."

D H

As you have noted, this situation has been well known for decades. So who is doing the lying here? It appears to me that part of the blame lies with the students themselves for choosing to go into what they perceive as a sexy field rather than looking toward the long-term. You want to have your cake and eat it too.

twofish-quant

It's been known to teachers. Less known to students, and I refer you to the constant stream of reports talking about a shortage of scientists in the 1990's.

Also it *wasn't* well known to me. I didn't quite realize that the fact that most physicists don't go into academia since the 1970's until a few years ago, when this book came out

http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/CWB.html

In the 1990's, I *assumed* that the lack of jobs was a recent thing, and I was rather surprised that it wasn't. It's funny that among the pages of pages of NSF reports never mentioned any of this.

Also, I'm using the word *liar* deliberately. There are people that you can excuse on the basis of lack of knowledge, but if lack of knowledge becomes a defense, then this encourages people in power to be idiots.

I don't think it is unreasonable for students to rely on teachers for this sort of information, since students are students and teachers are ummmm.... teachers. If someone gets ripped off by a con artist or used car salesman, then well maybe I should blame the buyer, but if tenured faculty expect more respect from me than I would give a used car salesman, then they have to accept some responsibility, and if they don't, they we really start having to ask questions about why they have their job security.

Also it's the job of a teacher to recognize the consequences of what they are teaching, and to realize that teachers teach more than facts, but also by example, they teach a way of looking at the world.

If I get in front of some eight year olds and I'm giddy about astrophysics and the universe, I have to realize that that has consequences, and if I light a fire in someone, they I'm responsible for some of the consequences of that.

I want teachers to accept some basic responsibility for what they teach. Also my cake is being eaten by someone else.

Also, part of how I got around the brainwashing is that I got rid of this "blame the victim" crap. The reason that people lie about this is that it gets cheap labor to keep the system working. If people didn't believe that they would be tenured faculty in the end, there would be more protest and it would be harder to keep the system running.

If I accept all of what I've been taught, then I would end up depressed and hating myself for being a failure. Since there is nothing wrong with me, all of that depression and hatred becomes anger and bitterness, and that's not a bad thing since anger at least gets you up in the morning.

Part of the reason, that I got into finance is that I figured out that a lot of the world revolves around money, and it won't be long before I have enough money to "do something interesting" to the system that I hate.

As far as Ph.D.'s go, there really isn't an employment problem. It's a psychology problem, and I dealt with the psychology issue by getting angry.

Vanadium 50

Twofish, again, I think you are letting your bitterness get away from you.

I got my PhD's in the 90's.

Nobody was telling me that academic jobs were "better" or even the norm. I also looked around to see where the graduates were going, and discovered that most were going into industry.

So who exactly is lying?

I would think that anyone smart enough to get a PhD could figure out that if each professor creates 10 new professors who create 10 new professors and so on and so on it won't be long before we are hip-deep in physics professors. So even if there is lying going on (and I have seen no evidence that there is) a PhD student should be immune to this kind of nonsense.

The fact of the matter is that the fraction of jobs where you get to decide what to work on as opposed to someone else getting to decide what you get to work on is small. People who get PhD's in physics are used to being the smartest person in the room, and conclude "the odds are low, but they don't apply to me - I will beat the odds".

caffenta

I also don't remember ever being told that academic jobs were better. In fact, the prevailing view was that those who stayed in academia were those who couldn't find real jobs.