alt Hacker NewsThere's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.