You obviously haven’t seen the other side :). If you are working as engineer/management/sales in software products, PhD rarely have advantage. However if you walk in to the places like FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, you will quickly find that your background as engineer/management/sales has little value compared to having a PhD in relevant area. These places are buzzing with innovations and creativity advancing the state of the art that rest of the world looks upon. Researchers are leading this front everyday and without PhD you won’t even get that job.