Academia is not a good industry to be in and people should stop trying to go. This is well known and has been for a long time: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l....
In short, the games industry treats people like crap because there's a large supply of talented programmers, artists, and testers who want to work on games.
In other words, because they can.
Maybe this has changed in 15 years, but my first job was at EA, and I was part of the infamous (at the time) "EA Spouse" class action lawsuit. It was pretty bad back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...
Luckily I didn't care as much about games as some of my coworkers, so I moved onto friendlier parts of the industry. More people should vote with their feet. (And I think that has happened, especially with the ability to self-publish, which really did not exist 15 years ago.)
I realize that some people may have been "swindled" by romantic ideas about academia from decades ago, and it's hard to get off that path. But yes I would agree this issue is well known by now, and most people should stop.
It's good that more people are writing about it though, just like it was good that EA Spouse wrote about the games industry.
No dream, especially those where you're working mostly for other people, is worth your health or sanity.
I might have worked in more boring areas, and there might have been some crunch time, but nothing like I couldn't leave under threat of firing or taking me to the limit.
I've nearly completed a PhD in engineering. A while back I decided that academia is likely a dead end unless you win the lottery. If the adjunct situation won't improve until people stop taking those jobs, I'll do my part. I'd like to periodically teach a class or two, but I would never adjunct as my sole source of income.
It also covers a bunch of human costs, such as the staff handling payroll, grant reporting and other compliance costs around the grant, the campus fire protection and police departments, etc. etc.
To say that the overhead goes to flashy buildings and fat admin paychecks is a bit of a misrepresentation. Those buildings almost always have a major donor and a substantial endowment component. The academic (especially physical and biological science) divisions do actually need to pay for office space, lab space, heat, staff to run it, clean it, make the computers go, etc. If you think my salary was ballooning while building and running everyone’s HPC clusters, I can assure you it wasn’t in any sense other than perhaps slowly deflating over time. Compared to whatever the football coach and president are being paid, there are thousands of people on staff who aren’t getting those fat paychecks.
Try 90% and almost all of it goes to the football coach or the dean’s legal fees.
https://osp.mit.edu/facilities-and-administrative-fa-rates
HMS declared rate is 58% but there are a lot of loopholes (as at other R1s with Institutes)
I took my Ph.D. and joined industry rather than try tenure track lotto.
Back when I was thinking on pathways, I was a fresh faced noob with a few papers to my name competing against senior scientists with decades of publications from the former soviet union. This made the decision much easier.
If you have a partner that could be good or bad depending. Your relationship will be stressed, I have seen several relationships flounder due to the process and pressure, but also I've seen several come through ok, and a couple blossom. Alot of these observations correlate with normal tracks for romantic relationships, life is full of surprises and challenges, but the big fact is that people who have lost lovers and spouses during Ph.D's often blame the Ph.D (in my experience).
If you have (young) kids I strongly recommend that you think really carefully. The difference here is that no matter what happens you have dependants, and you will have to be very lucky not to get compromised by this relationship and the Ph.D process. Something will have to give, and this might mean that your work is devalued or derailed.
Always remember that a Ph.D is a gamble and an indulgence. No one needs one, and no one is guaranteed success. On the other hand it gives you skills and training that I think are very hard to get any other way and for me it was one of the best periods of my life (one of!)
Good luck.