This makes me want to start a company whose sole strategic insight is to hire absurdly smart and conscientious people who are willing to work for comfortable middle class pay by tempting mid-career (postdoc or late-stage Phd student) physicists away from the academic career path.
Well, there are people who take 8+ years to do a Phd. A software engineer with 8 years of experience under his/her belt has a serious career going, while a lot of physicists are stuck in career limbo.
My guess is that a company that has access to a lot of smart people is going to be able to figure out a way to make money. It’s a cliche among people who think about starting companies that the “idea” isn’t actually very important compared to the quality of the team. HP was founded without any specific product in mind; the founders were just good friends who wanted to start a company together.
Notably, these are NOT “absurdly smart and conscientious people” as those actually bother to get their PhDs in a more reasonable timeframe. When someone is an ABD for multiple years it’s a bad sign.
My guess is that a company that has access to a lot of smart people is going to be able to figure out a way to make money.
First, that’s not self-evident—some agglomerations of smart people do well and some do not. Second, making money is not your only concern, you also have to make money in such a way as to keep these absurdly smart people interested and motivated, otherwise they would just leave. And that is a notably harder problem.
Notably, these are NOT “absurdly smart and conscientious people” as those actually bother to get their PhDs in a more reasonable timeframe. When someone is an ABD for multiple years it’s a bad sign.
It depends. In my phd program, tons of people stayed on longer in order to boost their publication records to be more competitive for jobs. Either way, after an average length phd + 1 postdoc (in some subfields of physics, especially theory, two postdocs is often the norm to be competitive for tenure track jobs), you are talking about a person with 9 yeas of experience in research making less than 60k a year.
I would guess that there is in fact an arbitrage opportunity here. My impression is that to some extent certain finance firms already do this. But probably more could be done along these lines.
This makes me want to start a company whose sole strategic insight is to hire absurdly smart and conscientious people who are willing to work for comfortable middle class pay by tempting mid-career (postdoc or late-stage Phd student) physicists away from the academic career path.
So a “late-stage PhD student” is now “mid-career”? X-D
A bigger question is what value will all these absurdly smart people be producing in your company?
Well, there are people who take 8+ years to do a Phd. A software engineer with 8 years of experience under his/her belt has a serious career going, while a lot of physicists are stuck in career limbo.
My guess is that a company that has access to a lot of smart people is going to be able to figure out a way to make money. It’s a cliche among people who think about starting companies that the “idea” isn’t actually very important compared to the quality of the team. HP was founded without any specific product in mind; the founders were just good friends who wanted to start a company together.
Notably, these are NOT “absurdly smart and conscientious people” as those actually bother to get their PhDs in a more reasonable timeframe. When someone is an ABD for multiple years it’s a bad sign.
First, that’s not self-evident—some agglomerations of smart people do well and some do not. Second, making money is not your only concern, you also have to make money in such a way as to keep these absurdly smart people interested and motivated, otherwise they would just leave. And that is a notably harder problem.
It depends. In my phd program, tons of people stayed on longer in order to boost their publication records to be more competitive for jobs. Either way, after an average length phd + 1 postdoc (in some subfields of physics, especially theory, two postdocs is often the norm to be competitive for tenure track jobs), you are talking about a person with 9 yeas of experience in research making less than 60k a year.
I would guess that there is in fact an arbitrage opportunity here. My impression is that to some extent certain finance firms already do this. But probably more could be done along these lines.