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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Feedback on promoting rational thinking about one's career choice to a broad audience - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not sure if you want meta level or more practical, but here is what I regret:
1) You can choose to be a generalist or specialist
2) Largely speaking big cities need specialists and small towns / countryside need generalists
3) I became a specialist and then realized I loathe city life and want to get out, but no chance
Doctors are a good example, if you have one doc per village he better be a GP and not an eye surgeon. While GP's live in cities too, they mainly do pre-filtering and directing people to specialists. In a city, being the best of the handful eye surgeons pays. And you need the pay, because the cost of living is high and real estate is expensive.
(This is the old division of labor as a function of pop density and cost of transportation thing that is known since Adam Smith.)
In my case, I could live rural if I was a generic IT guy or a generic accountant. I do the highly specialized combination of the two which is called ERP consulting. (ERP = SAP, Oracle, Navision...) I am kinda screwed there.
Sorry to hear about your situation there, it sucks to be trapped like that.
Thanks for the meta-level stuff. I'll be writing future blog posts about career choice more broadly, and that will be useful information to integrate into those posts. Much appreciated.
If you're planning to do a series of blog posts about this, I recommend payscale's college career data although you may have to make selection effect adjustments. Mean SAT or GRE scores for each group might be a good adjustment. I also believe they count individuals who graduate but fail the licensing exam. For my profession, the starting salary looked about $10,000 too low. That's my best explanation for the disparity. Bryan Caplan has been writing a book about education. Several of his Econlog blog posts would be useful to you.
Thanks for the tip about payscale, and Bryan Caplan's posts, I'll take a look. Let me know if there are any specific posts you would recommend.
Just glancing through it I came across this: http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm
Thanks for the specific reference!