>>12934912>>12934848I actually found out this is why you see fewer CS PhD’s saturating academia as opposed to other fields. It’s not because they’re dumber on average or whatever /sci/ drivel, but because there’s a huge amount of brain drain in CS - if you’re smart, can do mathematics, and study how to push the limits of what we can do with computers, there’s a huge market that wants to pay you handsomely for your time. Obviously this isn’t just CS PhD’s, but it affected them and physics PhD’s particularly hard due to how cheap yet effective Monte Carlo is, how computers changed finance and technology, and how both subjects tend to have a lot of researchers who study heavy amounts of optimization. This is also why you see econ and engineering PhD’s there too.
I don’t want to begrudge people for chasing the finance money since it solves a lot of problems the alternative offers, but at the same time, I can’t help but feel like it really is selling out and closing a door on research.
Working in an industrial lab makes sense because you’re still doing research and solving problems, even if there’s more financial incentive in those problems. But the prospect of doing finance work for suits just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t want to be the pair of glasses some rich yuppie uses to bleed their clients dry.
tl;dr I’m too much of a hippie to do finance
