The problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact.

We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.

Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qualify for an academic position.

> The problem is really one of supply and demand.

I would blame the monopolization of the economy. A few corporations purchasing big chunks of the industry control the job market create a bottleneck where supply of jobs is controlled by a few corporations. Once all jobs are controlled by a few decision makers the precarious work conditions, diminished salaries, abuses, etc. come naturally.

> Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate.

Even if everybody had high education, companies would still compete for the best employees. There is no competition for employees because large corporations have agreed to not do so.

Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.

In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitations, or similar milestones to wrap up this period of peak productivity, but those remain national oddities.

> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.

Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.

This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.

Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't. And we still don't know exactly why. The current leading theory is it's something to do with the balance of fast vs slow switch fibers that make up the muscle, but we don't know without more derivative and incremental research.

Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.

Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.

Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.

This chestnut gets trodded out every so often but it's frankly absolute and total nonsense sold by anti-intellectuals and bought by people from all walks of life.

Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.

VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.

Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.

In a master’s, you learn a lot about a little

In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing