Proud STEM PhD drop out from MIT reporting in. Aside from a few who went into consulting or banking, I make way more as a code monkey than those who stayed to finish.
Don't get me wrong, I left academia (albeit further on) and think there are lots of sensible reasons to leave.
However if the relatively low pay is either a) a surprise to you or b) a known problem for you when entering a PhD program - then you just didn't do your homework and probably shouldn't have entered the program. Of course sometimes it takes a while to work this out for yourself.
With a few very specific exceptions, entering a PhD program for the money is inept.
I went to a USNEWS top-25 undergraduate program, and had offers at consulting firms, ibanks and science phd programs. My top-10 USNEWS phd program was quite open about a 22k-30k salary for the duration of your phd. The substitution effect had I chosen another route (back of the envelope) was a few 100k in lost earnings.
No one does science (in particular, a phd) for the money, because these are smart, academically accomplished individuals who could find more profitable work elsewhere.
Overall low career pay to work difficulty ratio in comparison to other fields is a clear signal for young people to not pursue that option as a career. Despite the trope about falling education standards, the young people entering college and choosing their concentrations are not entirely stupid. They know that they won't get a job in the art field with that degree in art history. But they also know they won't get a job in the biology field with a biology degree, so they might as well study whatever they like, to qualify for that tier of mediocre jobs that just requires any 4-year degree.
I elected to stop at the bachelor's degree, because I could already tell that continuing beyond that in academia was very obviously not worth it. It wasn't just diminishing returns. After considering the money value of time, it was a negative return.
I am astonished at the huge number of supposedly smart people who will continue to suffer from institutional maltreatment for decades, willingly and without complaint, because they have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that they are lucky to have the opportunity to be worked like dogs without external recognition or remuneration.
Just don't do it. Get a bachelor's degree and go to work. If you wanted to be a doctor or lawyer, be a nurse or paralegal instead. Trade up later, if you can earn enough by working to pay for the extra degree, and you like doing that kind of work. My personal opinion is that nobody should be trying to pursue advanced degrees without ever doing any work in the real world first. When academia has to get its candidates to come back from the real world, rather than sinking its hooks into naive and gullible fresh graduates, a lot of the obvious problems would fix themselves.
Univ: Hey there, chief, how about you come back to school for a rewarding career in academia?
Dude: I have a job now. I can buy stuff like *actual* furniture and food with *nutrition and flavor*.
Univ: No worries. We'll give you a living stipend of $18000!
Dude: That is literally less than what my neighbor gets on welfare.
Univ: Does your neighbor get to work with prestigious professors on cutting edge research?
Dude: No. Is that what I'd be doing?
Univ: Yes! A little. And also doing most of the grunt work for the undergrad classes.
Dude: But after I finish, I would get to be one of those professors, right?
Univ: Welllllll.... possibly. You'd be an adjunct for a while. Maybe forever. [0]
Univ: It wouldn't be prestigious if we just hired everybody!
Dude: But they get paid well?
Univ: Our associate profs get paid a whopping $75000 per year! Full profs get $95000! [1]
Dude: So less than someone with a bachelor's degree in the right field [2], or public servants in certain places [3].
Dude: And that's if I even get a tenure-track job in the first place.
Univ: Discounted membership at the university athletic center?
Dude: Get lost.
Total lifetime earnings is a great way to measure success, from the perspective of how the 7 billion people on this planet, minus you, value your work. If you value your own work differently, that's fine, but yours will be the minority opinion.
But lifetime earnings is a terrible metric for success. It's a pretty good metric for what other people are willing to pay for your time, sure. And it absolutely is something you should think about in how you structure your life. And it absolutely is something a lot of young people do not think about enough.
Fundamentally, money is a tool that constrains the choices you have. For most people, acquiring it also constrains the choices you have. These things are unavoidably in some tension.
Most people I know would be happy to get paid more for what they are currently doing. Far fewer would be nearly as happy to get paid significantly more for the types of significant changes it would make in their lives, considering only the real options they actually have.
Most, if not all, of the people I know who are happiest with how things have worked out are not on track to anywhere near their maximum possible lifetime earnings. Several people I know who are near that track are miserable (not all, by any means).
The reason for this is that most people will have or can make the opportunity at some time in their lives to earn more money in exchange for things like: much more responsibility, much more stress, much less "free" time, much more travel, much less interesting or rewarding work, etc. The reason this comes up so often is that one of the the things the 7 billion people on this planet often are willing to pay your for is to do stuff that they would really rather not have to, things that are fairly objectively not much fun. If you can find fulfillment in it, all the power too you.
Trying to measure success this way ignores most of what is fundamentally important in a life. You're far better off looking at how you've managed to balance your own goals and your ability to make those happen.
It can be hard when you are twenty-two and trying to figure this stuff out, but one part of growing up is realizing that there isn't any universal yardstick or best path, and you have to work out your own path.
If you're evaluating career earning potential based on what other people hate to do, then you're misunderstanding supply and demand. If "how shitty a job is" correlated highly with "total lifetime earnings," then you'd see millionaire sewage maintenance technicians and pizza delivery guys.
On the other hand, wealth consistently correlates highly with happiness (up to a plateau point, usually).
Further, high lifetime earnings expand opportunity. I'm not even sure why this needs to be stated - to suggest that "money is a tool that constrains the choices you have" is so backwards as to be laughable.
The traditional example is a carpenter and electrician building houses. Now, the electrician is a genius, and he can actually frame a house faster than the carpenter. This is how long it takes them for each task, and wiring has to occur after the framing is completely done:
Task |Framing|Wiring|
-----------+-------+------+
Electrician| 44h | 24h |
Carpenter | 48h | 56h |
-----------+-------+------+
If they instead have the Carpenter do all the framing, and the Electrician do all the wiring, the first house is done at 72h, and the second is done at 120h. (If the Electrician helps to frame whenever not wiring, and the Carpenter helps to wire whenever not framing, completion time for each house is shorter at 47h and 75.5h, but that's outside the scope of this example.) The Electrician only had to do 48h of work instead of 68h, a savings of 20h, and the Carpenter only had to do 96h instead of 104h, a savings of 8h. Both benefited from the specialization, even though the Carpenter is actually slower at framing than the Electrician. They have an additional advantage in that they only need one complete set of tools rather than two. The Electrician takes the wiring tools, and the Carpenter takes the framing tools.
They are not refusing to do jobs they don't want to do. They are doing the jobs they are best at doing because it makes them more productive.
If you want to start or support a family, travel, pursue interesting hobbies, socialize with friends, experience local culture, or bump any of the metrics you may have for personal success, having money makes all of those things easier and less stressful. The stress from the acquisition of that money is usually less in magnitude than the advantage it imparts.
Most people stop working harder when doing so would detract from their overall enjoyment of life. Most.
As the Dickens quote from David Copperfield goes:
Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure nineteen six,
result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six,
result misery.
If you can specialize in a skill in high demand that few other people are any good at (like engineering), you will almost automatically be successful.
Yeah, the "all jobs are drudge work" theory does not pass muster with me
"then you'd see millionaire sewage maintenance technicians and pizza delivery guys"
What I'm suggesting is that for any individual skill set and current career X, there are often (almost always, in my experience) more lucrative but similar jobs available X' which are going to be more rewarding monetarily and less rewarding in other ways. Most people reach a point where the latter outweighs the former.
You completely mis-parsed "money is a tool that constrains the choices you have" is so backwards as to be laughable." - you are actually agreeing with me.
The amount of money you have access to constrains choices you have(or in your words, opportunities). The point is, it is hardly the only such constraint, and if you fail to consider the other ones, you largely miss the point.