- it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a graduate degree. I dropped out for health reasons with an A+ GPA and still have to delicately explain what happened to interviewers. It looks worse than just having a masters degree.
- “just one more year of misery and then your career prospects will increase dramatically” is a very powerful argument and not just a sunk-cost fallacy.
- young people in PhD programs tend to have a lot of identity and psychological investment in getting their PhD and working as a researcher. For most PhD students, the occupation that most fulfills them is their research. It strikes me as very strange that you think PhD students have some secret marketable passion that they would pursue but instead they somehow got stuck in graduate school. Speaking for myself: a PhD program was the only feasible part for me to do something fulfilling. My current work as a software developer is tedious and boring by comparison and, frankly, not at all what I wanted to do with my life.
- PhD students rarely have any savings and their meager stipends are the only income they have. So “pursue [something] that actually fulfills you” is most likely impossible, since that ‘something’ is probably not a routine office/engineering job.
That's something people who have no real world experience say. For one thing, nobody is forcing you to put any information on your CV. Lastly, only the lowest of the low judge such things so harshly that they won't even interview you.
And put what for the career gap? It's easier to just put the truth than to make something up for the gap years.
I was speaking to my real-world experience!
My intent was to point out that the parent's perspective is not necessarily a common one inside of academia, and even though that unfortunately isn't the experience you had, it's regardless one that would mostly come about after grad school anyway.
My career in software is also “fine” and even somewhat “lucrative” given that I don’t work at for-profit companies. But it’s not how I pictured my life going and it was a difficult adjustment.
For all that you may be able to go from a tiny salary to a six-figure salary, you still need to admit failure at some level, and that’s hard.
I found that academically excellent people are especially easy to get in this type of trap -- maybe because that "never give up" and "overcome the difficulties" rather than giving up is engrained by the process.