Are there fields where “people hire people smarter than themselves” (smarter, better, faster, tougher, sexier, whatever) and conversely, fields where decision makers are afraid to do so?
Off hand, I would say that in tech fields the advice is to hire the smartest person you can, and if they are smarter than you, then so be it. I never regretted hiring the smartest people. In at least one case, the person climbed higher than me on the ladder, but that did not trouble me. It felt like a positive-sum game.
I would guess that in situations where it feels like a zero-sum game, things are quite different. My guess is that it is more likely to feel like a zero-sum game in a non-profit.
His next question.
Why, for example, are many history Ph.D.s driving cabs (now Uber) and not teaching high school?
I am not sure that having a Ph.D is predictive of having the skills or the inclination to teach high school. I teach at a private high school in a very positive environment where the students want to achieve, and it still can be unpleasant and unrewarding at times. Moreover, as a volunteer, I get to opt out of a lot of the garbage jobs that paid teachers are expected to do.
If I had to make a living, and if you gave me the choice between teaching at the median public high school and working for Uber, then I’d be an Uber driver.
Government agencies are pretty zero-sum I think. There are only so many deputy director spots and if you miss out on the one in your area, that’s that. And it’s worse because a) your skills may not translate super well to the private sector, so if you leave you might actually have to take a lesser position in terms of salary or authority and b) private sector firms have, shall we say, different cultures, quite often, than government agencies, in terms of productivity, accountability, etc., which might make the transition more difficult.
One area of the private sector that I think is pretty zero sum: professional service firms organized as LLP’s and LLC’s. At the couple CPA firms I’ve worked at, it was clear that management was only keen to make a few new partners a year, at most, and then only if the firm’s revenue growth justified it, so competition was pretty fierce. If you didn’t make it and decided to bail out, you had to figure that at a new firm, it would take you at least a year or two to earn the trust of the management there before they would consider offering you a partnership, too. You could always head off to work for a client or something, though, although that was like admitting defeat. I would say these situations aren’t entirely zero sum, clearly, but in periods of low growth, like we’ve been in for some time now, they start to look like it.
A couple of years ago I was talking to the head of the science department in a large school district west of Boston. The history department had just advertised an opening and gotten three hundred (300!) applications. A newly minted PhD could only come in under a provisional certification, meaning she would have to get an ed degree in the next five years.