Many years ago, I had a regular tennis game with an older guy who was a doctor working for the Federal government. He was a nice enough fellow, but as I got to know him I realized he was not that smart, and was probably not that good a doctor.
Of course, any licensed physician can get some sort of job at decent pay, but I think there was a reason he took the job he had. The hours were good, too, we used to start our tennis game at 5 PM on a weekday.
My father used to be a recruiter for Hewlett Packard back in the glory days of HP engineering. On his first assignment at a university, he and his fellow recruiters were poring over the students’ resumes in an effort to find the most attractive candidates. My father noticed that any students who had GPAs below a certain threshold (like less than a B average) were immediately withdrawn from consideration.
Being naive and concerned for the welfare of these students, my father got to thinking that the IBM recruiters, the DEC recruiters, etc., were all doing the same thing with the resumes they were examining. This made my father wonder what happened to these sub-B average students. So, he stopped his fellow recruiters, pointed to their stack of resumes and asked, “What happens to all the students in this pile?” Everyone froze, then turned and looked at my father. After a moment of silence, they responded: “oh, don’t worry about them, they’ll get government jobs.”
True story.