I wonder if/when this will happen to programmers. I keep thinking that the job market for programmers will be radically different in ten years, what with the enormous amount of people "learning to code" these days. He did however suggest people to become programmers in 1999, and if you followed his advice then, you would probably still be quite happy with that decision today.
It's a completely different situation. Programming leads to some serious concentrated rewards, while science leads only to dispersed rewards. As a result, there are plenty of people wanting to invest in programming, but mostly governments want to touch sciences.
That of course does not mean that the job market for programmers will always be good, only that when it stops being, it will be for very different reasons.
But the scientist generally wins less than a programmer who has a moderately good year making a website to help people find other people who would like to walk their dog.
It's almost impossible to sell a public good. A career that focus on them will inevitably get less monetary rewards than one that focus on excludable ones.
A scientist gets less money than a programmer because despite creating much more total wealth on average[1], nobody needs to pay to get a share of the results, thus nobody has much of an incentive to pay.
As a related concept, life ain't fair.
[1] Does he really? I'm going with the common opinion, but I'd love to see data on that.
Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. You could also say, "Academia has the potential to absorb about 10% of PhDs produced annually." That's fine for CS, where most people want to go into industry anyway and industry understands the product. Not so much for, say, physics, where more PhDs would rather stay in academia and you have to explain very quickly why someone should hire a PhD physicist before they slam the door in your face.
There is a huge imbalance in new phd/new tenure-job openings. also, the proportion of faculty jobs with tenure is shrinking. both of these are massive 'caveats' to the use of 'stable'.
I actually meant that the demand for programmers matches and evolves with the supply, and has certainly room to grow for a while, whereas academia has been completely mismatched for years.
Programming is a profession that's become a part of society. It function as electricity does, in that without electricity modern civilization wouldn't exist.
Science is more of an investment that is important to the future of society, but can only be achieved if basic needs of a society are met. It's like other profession such as math, art, or philosophy in that it makes the society itself more flavorful, and progressive.
... can only be achieved if basic needs of the scientist are met ...
This has an obvious interesting long term evolutionary effect. If via mandatory poverty and celibacy we force everyone out of academic science who cares about the future, the long term results will be (insert something probably very negative for the future here) Or another way to put it, is if everyone involved has a predisposition for extreme recklessness, maybe its time to close down dangerous areas of research before its too late.
Aside from absolutely everything else mentioned, if you strongly select for recklessness and lack of concern for the future, historically the occasional misguided soul would leap off a building, and in the future you might end up with organic chemists, nuclear physicists, internet-era programmers deciding to take an entire city with them.
So even in the most self centered inhumane analysis of the humans involved, not enforcing a vow of poverty, celibacy, an recklessness on scientists is at the very least a security matter. At least issue food stamps or welfare or something?
Is that new though? I remember loads of people signing up to CS courses (both university and vocational, as well as self taught) during the 1st dot com boom in the late 90s. In my native Israel that was particularly extreme, everyone was trying to get into "computers".
And yet 15 years later we still have much higher supply of work than workers when it comes to experienced talented programmers.
Everyone is learning to code due to this massive movement of programming as of late, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will be learning to code effectively nor efficiently.
