More people may major in science, but there are more jobs in engineering

From Big Scope Status Bias by Robin Hanson. A series of "data points" where people's decisions are at variance with the known facts.

I like item 10:

Even when designing from scratch, most real work is testing, honing, and debugging a basic idea. Yet in school the focus is more on creating the basic idea.

Indeed. It is easy to generate a large portfolio of ideas. The hard work is prioritizing and winnowing them.

A lesson here seems to be that while it can raise your status to be associated with big scope choices, you should expect a lot of competition for that status, and a relative neglect of smaller scope choices. That is, more people may major in science, but there are more jobs in engineering. You might impress people by focusing on creating designs in school, but you are likely to spend your life maintaining pre-existing designs. If you want to get stuff done instead of gaining status, you should focus on smaller scope choices.

Chasing status.