>>13241010PhD's in physics are fine. The problem comes down really if you want to do something completely down the theory chute, since that becomes a problem of accommodating people entirely on grant money not expected to make returns. This is especially true if you work on anything in cosmology or certain parts of high energy.
If you do anything in condensed matter, applied physics, whether it's theory or experimental, computational physics, engineering, material science, etc., you'll have a lot of work cut out for you. I mean, look at the entire semiconductor industry.
>>13248864working on QC with a physics, math, CS, chem, etc etc. PhD is fine. You get exposed to a LOT of interdisciplinary research which makes it eas(ier, though not trivial) to work on things adjacent your field. This is really important for marketing yourself both to academic committees and to industry employers. I've seen people in QC work in both theory and experiment, go on to work on other technologies (know a guy who went from QC to optical tech in VR) or parts of science, some go into parts of math (this is pretty common with the error correcting / quantum complexity / infomation crowd, who you find often jumping into von Neumann algebras and subfactor theory),. etc..
Point is a PhD is hardly hopeless unless you wish to study things completely unmotivated. In some sense, the PhD market is no longer a safe haven for those who want to do pure research (this is usually a rude awakening for some math students lol) but a necessary process to get into R&D or applied theory.
If you like things that have application, you won't starve. If you're like me and like pure math but have no qualms where that pure math shows up (robotics, graphical processing, and error correction are *so* fruitful for the working theorist in current year), then you won't starve either. You just have to learn how to sell your expertise in a way that impresses more than your professors.
