Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...
> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats
when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.
Was thinking about this the other day, though it seems they would need to be fairly shortsighted not to realise this before they chose it as a profession. Never the less, it is a stable income (til AI takes over the bulk of designing all of those franchise locations, anyway, or whatever). People respect the career.
Imagine not reading up on it after reading Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", and deciding to major in architecture in college. I would have felt brutally misled.
Computer game programming probably felt like that to a lot of people in the 80s and 90s.
Honestly, can't think of many fields that would not feel disappointingly limited and too competitive for 'the good projects' now. :(