Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories

Your comment feels like something I could have written a few years ago. I made the transition following a eerily similar same path. I did a PhD in experimental particle physics, then a postdoc offered though a Medical Physics Program (though not actually related to clinical radiation therapy) that I took largely because it allowed me to stay in a familiar location. I was stressed and needed a change. I was reading up on data scientist and data analyst positions but did not feel confident in applying.

I started attending software meetups in my city and chatting with folks. Meeting others in person was key for realizing the given the breadth and pace of the field, there would always be something new to learn so I needed to take the job posting "requirements" with some grains of salt. Someone encouraged me to attend a recruitment night his employer was hosting, and I figured it would at least be good interview practice. I ended up getting an offer and have been a Software Engineer for three years now. While the referral surely helped, the practice of explaining my experience to programmers at these events and learning where my skills were applicable and how to translate that into the jargon of the software boosted my confidence to actually attend the event and interview.

There were some rough patches at first, being thrown into a front-end project with practically zero experience in html and javascript, but in the end analysis code and front-end code are both debugged with breakpoints, test data and when that fails printing to the console. Recently I have been dusting off my analytical skills by playing with machine learning frameworks and hope to take my career in a direction that builds off both my academic and practical experiences.

You are confusing philosophising about a better way to live with knowledge of empirical results in politics and economy.

I know very well communism as such does not work, and that at our current stage of development we need prices and markets for resource optimization. And laws and judicial systems and so on.

But.

The play chips are imaginary. We play by the rules due to convention, not due to a law of nature.

The rich are better off not because only a marginal percent of population can be better off, but because how the current economic system stochastically distributes the captured value from various economic processes.

Their main happiness comes not from being "better" than anybody else, but because their resources enable them to avoid the lower rungs of maslow's hierarchy of needs and focus on self actualization.

Society can change. Anything else is misogynic fantasy. USA was born out of hate of kings and aristocracy and the taxes imposed thereof, of the hate of existing status quo of hereditary benefits and cronyism of state power.

Sure, it was not better for a large category of population, but it was a society designed, that functioned differently than anything else before it, and remains functioning to this day. It was born into a world where anything else but a strong monarchy was a whimsical daydream.

Change happens. There is no reason to accept status quo if it seems unsavory. One must remain a realist and a humanist while one is at it.

Saying "nothing but the current system is possible" is delusional denial of empirically proven changes societies and economic systems can go through.

This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get. The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever).

Candidates aren't draining away—they're being pushed away, either at the selection stage or through terrible conditions. (When taking on real firm-wide risk with millions of dollars is less stressful than basic research, you know something's gone terribly wrong!) The macroscopic problem isn't that finance and industry are luring people away, it's that so many more people want to do research than the system can possibly support.

You could argue that finance is luring away the most qualified candidates, but I don't think that's true. More importantly, since research careers are so impacted, institutions can get away with really noisy selection processes—if you thought tech hiring was bad, just look at how faculty members are selected.

The other part, of course, is that trading is not useless. I recently started a job working on supply chain optimization, and the problems we solve and the models we build actually look a lot like what certain kinds of traders do. I don't think anybody would argue that doing math to eke out a 10% reduction on spoilage at grocery stores is socially useless, and yet that's very similar to the sort of efficiencies that come out of better markets—it's just that the value is more abstract, in large part because the public markets are much more decentralized and abstract than physical supply chains.

Look, I'm not saying trading makes a marginal impact on par with basic research, either at an individual or a global level. But it's not useless, and I wouldn't be surprised if a trader at some small firm was just as useful to society as the 10,000th engineer at Google. (Not that we can really measure that.)

The markets, after all, are a gigantic, distributed coordination system running large swathes of the economy. That's pretty important too!

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

Richard Feynman, "The Dignified Professor"

http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html

As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio-political issue, which might very well be the case).