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Comment by wanderingmind | Hacker News Reader

Most of these students have learnt statistics and importance of random stratified sampling. Unfortunately they are not using them in real life to get feedback on an event so important that you might spend a good part of decade of your career on it.

That said, personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term. I think gambling is one of the few that ranks higher than PhD. They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure. On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations.

Not teaching economics in school and colleges to all students is partially to blame as many undergrads believe just doing a PhD with minimum wages can make them happy. But when commitments increase and when they realize academic jobs are very few they become disillusioned and desperate.

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While it may be true that many PhDs are not a financially good decision, I think the answer is not necessarily so clear cut for a computer science PhD.

I didn’t have any sort of foot in the door at FAANG level companies before my PhD (ask me about my 3x rejections from Microsoft!), but I was able to parlay my CS PhD into such a job, and the earning potential there is profoundly higher than would be found elsewhere. Enough, even, to offset 6 years of lost earning potential.

Obviously this is just my experience, and those talented undergrads who can ace a Google interview are likely better off just taking it, but it’s not like the PhD was a vow of poverty.

CS PhD is the outlier and not the norm. Most fields even in STEM its impossible to get a high paying job in the field of your thesis.

In chemistry at least, the PhD is the entry card for non-technician work. Post-docs are seemingly required for the academic path, and are of some use for pharma, but the union card is a must.

Does the salary compensate the amount of effort to get there though?

I had a friend who was a chemist but she left the field to pursue data science instead after her pharmaceutical company started even more layoffs in R+D - it seems pharma companies are more interested in intellectual property law than drug development these days.

This seems more like a reason to avoid Chemistry than to get a PhD.

You don't always get to choose what you're interested in, as much as it might seem on HN.

I think there’s something to be said for cultivating a passion rather than falling into one

Plus with a PhD you don't always choose where you go, you go where the door is open.

Not true. I worked in an engineering company that has a lot of jobs that require a PhD. Pay well, too.

Lots of engineering companies have positions where they value PhDs.

Will it offset the cost of not earning all those years? Probably not.

Will you get those jobs without a PhD? Probably not.

On other hand, are the jobs that are not those jobs much worse? For pay and career development at least? Counting the 3-4 years you have extra experience in industry.

From what I can tell in engineering fields in industry, the biggest differentiator is the PhD tends to give you more autonomy.

IMHO they're not worse, they're different. The PhD-enabled jobs there aren't worth it purely in pay, they're worth it iff you really want to do a different type of work.

Oh boy, I was having a quick brunch at a software industry conference before Corona and I happened to sit next to this dude: he was getting into software testing after having worked his ass off a PhD and a post-doc in physics. Not to berate software testing but… wow, I lost my appetite thinking how bad his hand had been.

I work in civil engineering (in Europe), and all companies I've worked at have been full of PhDs doing work related to the thing they did their PhD in.

In my experience, civil engineering may not have cross-topic applicability like some other engineering disciplines. For example, someone with a PhD in concrete may not be able to jump to hydrology. But am industrial engineer who did a PhD in healthcare optimization could more easily parlay that into other optimization work. A aerospace PhD could work on windmill design, etc.

So get a job in a field outside your thesis. FAANGy companies are happy to hire PhD from "other quantitative fields".

There are bootcamp grads with jobs at Google. There are self taught people. A PhD is a very expensive way of getting into a FAANG if there are people who manage it without a university degree of any kind.

There is a difference between front-end HTML/CSS typesetting and bleeding edge cryptography work.

Yes, and there are self-taught people working at Google who do bleeding edge cryptography work. Many, many fewer than those with PhDs but I know tptacek and daeken are excellent and have no formal qualifications.

If your goal is to get a job at Google a PhD is a poor way to get it.

> Yes, and there are self-taught people working at Google who do bleeding edge cryptography work

And we’ve come full circle to the topic of survivorship bias

We might have different definitions of "bleeding edge". I meant cryptography research, with implication that work is publishable.

Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.

a PhD is really an absolute minimum requirement for those jobs, and with extremely fierce competition for those jobs, I would be seriously surprised there is anyone there without a PhD who is doing actual cryptography research. Not aware of any exceptions to this general rule.

"a job" could also be a janitor. yes, don't need a phd for that. for some jobs it's a bare minimum qualification.

(not to say people should necessarily strive for those, but such is life)

Googler here. Believe it or not, a lot of cutting edge work (even cutting edge crypto) is happening outside of the research organization. We even publish papers! And yes, some of those folks doing crypto work don’t have PhDs.

Hiring is weird. You definitely don’t need an advanced degree to get your resume looked at, but a PhD from a top program will at least get you interviews and so it gets you over one difficult hurdle.

It would be great if you could point to a specific example of a published article where a named author does not have a PhD. I 100% believe you but just to shut down those who believe that a PhD is a necessity to do research.

> Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.

This would imply that Google Research is a great deal less meritocratic than Economics research, where someone like John List, who went to an unranked school, can end up teaching at UChicago. More generally ranking is not as big a dealn in Europe in at least one country, Germany. There are definitely people with doctorates from schools you've never heard of working at Google Research.

I don't think Google Research is as credentialist as you paint it. I'm willing to bet $200 at even odds that I can find one person working at Google Research as a researcher who does not have a PhD. My email is in my profile.

it is possible, as i stated just below in my comment i'm simply not aware of any exceptions.

to be sure, i specifically selected cryptography in the very first comment for a specific reason. math subspecialties require rather unhealthy amounts of training that is best started as early as practically possible. it is very hard to do, a mentor often helps and speeds up the process, and by the time you start doing original research as a fully self-taught mathematician, well, you might as well get get some recognition of your efforts by way of getting a degree, plus potentially get funded to do it. why not?

due to several factors, in all probability, successful applicants for mathematical research (cryptology) positions will have a phd, if nothing else simply because prior original research is likely to be required. competition pushes up the entry barrier as high as possible, for better or worse, and so the exceptions in research without a phd are going to be exactly that - exceptions.

the school ranking is a bit of a red herring here. while reputation of the school itself does matter quite a bit of course despite everyone doing their best to pretend it doesn't (but insist on sending their kids to the best school possible), it is simply that very often talent is sought out from specific groups/departments/professors who just happen to teach at this institution, wherever they are located. it's just that most of the time large well known institutions have budgets and brand recognition that attracts top talent, often from around the world. brain drain is real.

just to be sure, its not that i recommend everyone goes out and gets a phd in math (personally, i think that even a masters degree is a complete waste of time for the vast majority of jobs), but that in some situations it is a de facto pre-requisite. it likely will not pay off financially and it is a big commitment that can crush you mentally, emotionally and potentially even physically. some departments have sadly a reputation for high suicide rates.

btw. john list does have a phd, and spent 8 years teaching elsewhere prior to UC. not sure if that supports your meritocracy argument, as one would think someone with his reputation today could advance quicker.

> john list does have a phd, and spent 8 years teaching elsewhere prior to UC. not sure if that supports your meritocracy argument, as one would think someone with his reputation today could advance quicker.

I know John List has a PhD. I said he went to an unranked school. You had previously said

> Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.

and I was pointing out that Google Research seemed unlikely to be more credentialist than university economic research, implying that there would be quite a few people at GR with PhDs from non-top schools.

I don't think there's much disagreement between us. I doubt there are more than 20 researchers at GR without PhDs, if that many. May your research and life be fruitful.

> I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term. I think gambling is one of the few that ranks higher than PhD. They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure.

Financially, I don't disagree.

The amusing thing is that I often would say the exact same thing on the other end of the coin. Going to industry right after your undergrad is one of the worst things one can do intellectually. People who want to grow intellectually[1] typically will grow more in their grad school years than most people will in their life. I can clearly see it when I look at my friends who did not opt for grad school.

And even within a particular discipline, for a lot of disciplines, there is virtually no way you can attain that particular knowledge while having a full time job. Life gets busy.

It ultimately comes down to values. Some prefer the money, others the knowledge. Personally, I appreciate the adage: Money comes and goes, but knowledge tends to remain with you.

> On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations.

People who plan and aim properly for a career in academia probably pick up more marketable skills than the average industry employee. Self promotion and networking matters more in academia than in industry. There's also stuff like grant writing, public speaking, etc.

[1] Not all people who pursue a PhD want to grow intellectually, but a significant portion do.

This is an important point. Doing a PhD is not a great choice financially (usually). But where else can you invest a few years into personal growth and attaining knowledge on your own terms?

As much as my PhD was stressful and grueling at times, I wouldn't want to miss those years for the personal growth they facilitated. But then, that might be survivor bias speaking...

I'll have to talk to my former colleagues who quit the program to figure that one out.

Out of curiosity, how old were you when you did your PhD? I wonder if the personal growth is more meaningful when one does the program during more formative years.

I started my PhD rather late after quite a few years in industry. Honestly, I felt like it held back some personal growth because there was more structure than self-guided learning

I was 30-35. I had worked in the industry for a few years before that as well.

But working at a company taught me very different things than the PhD did. It feels like I learned to program at the company, and I learned to think at the university.

> Going to industry right after your undergrad is one of the worst things one can do intellectually

What does this mean? Do you mean this as psychological maturity? Domain knowledge expertise?

Extremely few people outside academia are (1) world class at anything, even in a tiny subfield (2) advance the state of the art (3) can explain it in a way clear enough that you can reliably learn something from what they wrote about what they did and how they did it.

That combination describes what a doctoral disserataion is.

The opposite is true in my field, which is half-way between CS and humanities. I've read a few hundred PhD dissertations now and most of them are really not great.

Not a few are more jargon than substance, covering up mediocre ideas with a sugar frosting of math symbols and bizarre wordy academic pseudo-abstraction which obfuscates simple ideas instead of clarifying complex thoughts.

A few are straight out pandering and careerism, with style and content apparently designed to appeal to a specific supervisor.

I was considering a PhD and the quality of the work was the biggest factor that decided me against it.

To be fair it's a fairly niche field. But even so - literally only a handful of those dissertations come close to matching your criteria.

> doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term

This is a borderline absurd statement. There are so many other bad things that people can do with their time. Even a PdD in the most strange topic will give you the opportunity to learn things that you can use later, even if it is just to become a high school teacher. It beats a lot of other things, including doing nothing.

Sure. It's just monetarily this is a terrible decision compared to picking up basic tech skills, taking literally any job in tech that you can for experience, and then job hopping.

There are several assumptions here. Here are a few I can immediately think of.

* You are smart enough to keep doing this.

* You do not get burnt out, more chances of that with boring work.

* Your job does not get effectively automated.

Are the first two of those going to apply for anyone doing their PhD? (I'm not sure if they're boring, but I assume it's a bit of a grind for most?)

Sure, likely with lower probability because of self selection.

>That said, personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term.

As a PhD (concentration in semiconductors) I agree with you. After a decade in the field, I'm trying to break into software engineering using knowledge I mostly gained in high school and undergrad (and studying in the evenings recently). Even down-leveling I can keep my compensation mostly flat, so essentially I lost 5 years of my career by pursuing a PhD. One could argue that I worked on more interesting problems, having a PhD, but over time I've realized companies will exploit your enthusiasm to either keep your pay low or work you for long hours. Consequently, I mostly care about money these days.

Another downside of the PhD was how blind it made me to what was acceptable work. Now that I am highly-credentialed, I need to work in R&D, I thought. It took a long time to de-program. What helped was getting a more diverse set of friends, some of whom owned their own business in "boring" areas and had done quite well for themselves.

> personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term.

Obviously this true… in particular, anyone getting a PhD in a quantitative field could make more money in tech or finance.

You seem to misunderstand why people pursue a PhD. At some level there has to be love of learning and pursuit of knowledge.

Getting job in academia is difficult but not impossible…

Everyone starts a PhD with love for knowledge, the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation. People under-estimate how bad is the PhD/postdoc pay and how long they need to sustain it. They are better off with a Masters and having a good career and then spending spare time on pursuing knowledge.

Lots of phd are hired by industry. 3-5 years for the degree and 0-2 years post-doc’ing and you’re set for low-mid 6 figure income. Yeah, you’ll have to move from time to time, but people need “new discoveries”. And as a point of reference, getting a significant drug to market 3 months early is worth billions. People who can do that are gold. And sometimes, you save people’s lives.

The people who’ve been working in the mRNA fields did ok. Successful tech CEO’s might have more money but Nobel laureates are, just maybe, more useful.

> Successful tech CEO’s might have more money but Nobel laureates

While we're at it, let's get kids thinking about how valuable it would be to win a gold medal in the Olympics when deciding if they should make sports the #1 priority in their life/career.

You ain't getting a Nobel in CS no matter how good you are.

> Everyone starts a PhD with love for knowledge, the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation

This describes almost no one I knew when I was in grad school. It probably helped that I picked a school that paid well and was in a LCOL area. That's the advice I would give those pursuing a PhD.

You can choose to put off kids till you have a PhD. Plenty of people can get a PhD before 28.

It doesn't stop with PhD. You need multiple postdocs to get an academic job by when you are well into the thirties. If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.

> It doesn't stop with PhD. You need multiple postdocs to get an academic job by when you are well into the thirties

Not true in many fields, and by the time most people have postdocs, they're makibg decent enough money that they don't need to keep their lives on hold.

> If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.

I don't know what to say to this, other than that you have very strong opinions and I can't tell what you're basing them on -- or whether you're basing them on anything more than the strange belief that study is useless and school makes people poor.

> If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.

Either of the following are good reasons:

1. To do research in industry.

2. To gain the knowledge acquired via a PhD.

I got one at 24 with 11+4+4 years of schooling. Most had it by 26-27 with a year or two more schooling in there somewhere. But an organic chemist prof told me that one has to run n reactions to get out. You can spend the time to do 2/day or you can complain how long grad school is.

> Everyone starts a PhD with love for knowledge

This isn't true, especially in stem and the sciences.

> They are better off with a Masters and having a good career and then spending spare time on pursuing knowledge.

In most places I'm aware of, a terminal master's degree or a master's degree program is a degree mill and a racket, costing tens of thousands for a course ofstudy that's too short to teach students much anything useful, let alone provide real knowledge or understanding.

Every single person I know who has a stem PhD is doing interesting, cutting-edge work, and almost everybody they work with has a PhD, too. The kids with a BS in CS, by contrast, almost never wind up with jobs in those settings. They almost never get jobs at Microsoft Research. They don't get paid to think.

> the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation

Again, this simply isn't true. This wasn't my experience or the experience of anybody I went to school with or met when I was in acadenia. PhD programs in the US are funded and usually pay poorly in absolute terns but well enough. And grad-student insurance is usually quite good if you're in the US.

A PhD from a good program opens doors and pays for itself many times over, sometimes materially, sometimes in ways that are difficult to quantify.

Doing a fully funded PHD in the US is the best decision versus continuously living in a third world country. It’s a life changing moment.

I would second this. Source: personal experience.

> Unfortunately they are not using them in real life

You don't suppose that's because the N on "get the type of professorship you want" is too low to draw reasonable statistical inferences?

> Not teaching economics

I took undergrad econ, it didn't keep me from making stupid decisions, especially if those stupid decisions are rational, e.g. "I'm willing to roll the dice on a high beta event". The problem is not a lack of rationality; it's that the system is actively irrational, and it is in the interest of continuation of the scientific industrial complex to continue to lie to grad students about the nature of scientific promotion. If they knew the truth they would quit doing good science, or quit science.

I'm not sure if I would call the system actively irrational. It's extremely well-measured, as scientists are good at measuring things.

The academic job market is hyper-efficient and gets close to a Pareto distribution very quickly. I agree that economics programs don't do a good enough job teaching about the implications of systems which distribute outcomes according to a Pareto distribution (which are many).

Hyper efficient for what? I can tell you it does not select for good researchers. It selects for people who are able to play politics. There are a lot of nonrational things that go into politics, for example the color of your skin (e.g. good luck getting an academic position if you're asian! Or if you're ugly), Just random shit like "who your boss was. Is your boss gonna write a letter of recommendation for you", or timing. I had a grad student friend who worked for prof who was very good at placing his students in academic positions, but oops the prof had twins during his second year and the grad student got absolutely fucked for mentorship at a critical time.

Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Freeman Dyson (who did not have a PhD):

“Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I'm now retired, but when I was a professor here [Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they're supposed to do something brilliant. They're under terrible pressure — not from us, but from them.

So, actually, I've had three of them who I would say were just casualties who I'm responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in mental institutions. And I should've been able to take care of them, but I didn't. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does destroy people. If they weren't under that kind of pressure, they could all have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that's my diatribe. But I really have seen that happen."

Here’s more from Freeman Dyson:

I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

And also, of course, it wastes a tremendous amount of time — especially for women, it’s particularly badly timed.

If they’re doing a Ph.D., they have a conflict between raising a family or finishing the degree, which is just at the worst time — between the ages of 25 to 30 or whatever it is. It ruins the five years of their lives.

And I see the difference in the business world. My daughter happens to be a businesswoman, so I meet a lot of her young friends.

The life there is so much easier for women. They start a company when they’re 20; they go bust when they’re 22. [Laughs] Meanwhile, they have a kid, and nobody condemns them for going bust. If you’re in the business world, that’s what’s expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it’s a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It’s also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

[The Ph.D. system] was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it’s fine. But the trouble is that it’s become a kind of a meal ticket — you can’t get a job if you don’t have a Ph.D. So all sorts of people go into it who are quite unsuited to it. [...]

Anyway, so, I’m happy that I’ve raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.

Yet Bethe had a different opinion. Some profs or mentors don’t mentor willingly or well. Some create scientific family trees that are quite extensive. Different strokes and all that.

I believe that's the fault of some institutions called Ivy League in the US. They want people to believe that they only do "brilliant" work, and many students really fall for it.

Being at the Institute for Advanced Study is probably worse than being in any of the Ivy League or comparable high-level universities. Among its resident scholars, besides Dyson, were Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This leads to many people who work there feeling like they don’t measure up, and are impostors.

Richard Feynman noted a problem with the environment:

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

> They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure.

That probably tells more about your country than about doing a PhD. In where I came from, financial security was something you had by default if you had some social capital, useful skills, determination, and a degree. You had to be particularly unlucky to lose it after that. Financial security only became a relevant concern after I moved to the US.

I have met few PhD students who made the choice to get a PhD based on money or a higher earning potential. It's seems odd to criticize the choice solely on that criterion.

> I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term

Strongly disagree. Somewhat true only if you're doing phd just for the sake of completing it, without any particular plans on what you're going to be doing next, and how/why your degree will aid you in that (both from time-spent perspective and from financial perspective).

Sometimes, pursuing a graduate degree is a great idea if you're looking for a specific type of job that requires it. Example: many quant roles in high-echelon trading firms require a phd in math / stats / cs.

Depends on the uni / advisor / field / topic, but in my particular case (math/stat/quant-finance) completing the dissertation was fairly easy, all things considered. I had enough free time to travel, party, tour with a rock'n'roll band, record music, work in another country for over a year, and find myself a wife. Then defend the dissertation and immediately find a job in the field.

It depends on what you are doing in your phd. Biotech $$$ jobs expect a phd. If you take up some code and do some statistics over your phd thats usually enough to walk into a lot of lucrative data analytics jobs in a number of fields. there are a lot more jobs in industry that demand a phd than in academia these days. the old narrative that phds go on to become professors is pretty antiquated, only a fraction don't go into industry these days.

> the old narrative that phds go on to become professors is pretty antiquated, only a fraction don't go into industry these days.

Isn't that because there aren't enough spots in academia? I'm under the impression most PhDs want to stay in academia (or perhaps adjacent true R&D departments) but there aren't as many positions.

For a change over time in that regard I'd suggest: many more people are going to university, presumably at least proportionally many more PhDs, ratio of undergrads to PhD-holding staff roughly constant and <1, hence proportion of PhDs awarded that stay in academia goes down.

Most people do not want to go into academia. It's a grind. It's hard to get a job, and you are going to be stressing about grants forever until you retire. Most people these days in grad school see all the bullshit their PI has to do for the department and say, "maybe I should get the hell out of academia, because this stress won't end and at this point I just want a 9-5 job." If you are interested in R&D, you are paid mountains more cash, like ~3x, going right into industry with your PhD than doing a post doc for 55k. The people still doing post docs are the massochists who want an academic life, or they need more qualifications that they didn't get in thier grad school training. PhDs are rarely unemployed.

Can you go a bit more in depth on why PhD is a bad idea? Is it any different for the different fields/disciplines, and what if one already has some money from parents?

It depends on your relationship to work, relative to your outside life. The PhD in a good institution is essentially semi-supervised playing, where you are given access to resources and people to come up with and answer interesting questions. The probability of the utility and monetary value of the knowledge varies across fields significantly, and so the main point is to learn how to learn and how to identify and answer questions.

This style of PhD is a lifestyle choice and a vow of "poverty". For context, at a school like MIT or Berkeley a typical fully-funded stipend is about $30k USD annually (gross), which you will make until you finish (at age 27-30, depending on when you start). Once you run through the cost of living in the area, you start to see that some compromises must be made to your quality of life. If you have independent money these compromises are less necessary, but if you are not careful it can alienate you from peers, in the same way that having money generally means you live in a different world than others.

If your goal in a career is to make enough money or have enough stability to support your actual life (family, community, hobbies, etc), doing a PhD is not a particularly reliable path. Having one opens doors in life, but you have to value that over the alternative for the decision to make sense.

(I have a chemistry PhD)

That describes how things work at American universities. The worst part is not even the pay but the idea that people doing PhD are students instead of professionals. (Some places even talk about postdoctoral students.)

Your experience can be very different in countries that see junior researchers as professionals. You get a solid middle-class salary, and while you earn less than your friends who went to the industry, your life is not qualitatively different from them. Some travel extensively during their PhD, while others have kids and buy a home.

The opportunity cost for doing a PhD is much lower in the latter system.

I traveled much more during my PhD than in an industry job before it, simply because the funding for conferences (if I had publishable research) in far-away places was more accessible than vacation money+vacation time during the industry job. Like, a conference isn't a vacation, but I did visit a bunch of beautiful places (e.g. Japan and Iceland) that I likely would not have seen otherwise.

The most familiar argument is that the years spent earning a PhD carry an opportunity cost, compared to getting out into the workforce sooner, earning money, developing skills on the job, and building a career. Of course, the comparison is laden with assumptions about both career paths.

I believe there is an even bigger issue, that is not quantified or discussed, which is that PhD programs have extremely high attrition. Things can go wrong, which result in either having to quit or start over. Your advisor could lose finding, change jobs, or die. You could get sick. I know two people who got into serious ethical disagreements with their advisor. One had to lawyer up. At least when you read stories about jobs from hell in industry, you know that the person can at least walk away with the money that they already earned.

The non-PhD career path involves assumptions too. Having marketable skills, getting a lucrative job, moving up in the ranks, and putting money away, are all hypotheticals with their own survivor bias issues.

Disclosure: Physics PhD.

Except CS, or if you an international Olympiad champion, PhD is a bad idea across the board. Even if someone thinks they want to do a PhD, its better to work for a few years to understand market forces so they can do a thesis that is not fully removed from reality. This medium blog post from economist is a worthy read

https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-wast...

Keep in mind that the system is also slightly different overseas.

In many non-European, non American countries, a PhD is three years after your undergraduate (with honors year, 4 year undergraduate instead of the normal three).

Very different equation.

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