4 ms·

Does anyone know what happened in Physics in the early 2000s? The number "Employed" spikes from ~30% to ~40% in a very short time span and then falls rapidly to

• lutorm 12y ago
  I wish they would draw those graphs in a more honest way. Now it looks like there's a very high time resolution when in fact there's one data point per year and they've done some spline fitting to them... It looks like it's the 2001 data point that has a higher value. I'm not sure what happened in 2001, and without knowing if academic or industry jobs are responsible it's hard to guess, but it would be interesting to see if there was a corresponding uptick in funding for physics research grants at that time.
• analog31 12y ago
  I'd like to see those as absolute numbers, and preferably un-smoothed. The corresponding "dip" seems to be in post-docs. I got my physics PhD in the late 90's. Anecdotally during that time period, morale about employment was pretty low. As I recall a handful of activist students got the American Physical Society to acknowledge the issue. Physics Today was starting to print articles about non-academic employment, though mostly speculative. Possibly as a result, I saw what seemed like a real push among physics students to pursue industry options, including programming. Many of us were good programmers. My thesis project ran on thousands of lines of code that I wrote for hardware that I designed. And those years seemed pretty good for engineering employment. My impression is that interest in joining the post doc cadre evaporated, and students with any sort of engineering ability grabbed whatever industry jobs they could get.
• yen223 12y ago
  Speculation: Dot-com boom, followed by the dot-com crash affected everyone, including academia.
  • ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    Especially related to optical networking.