makedecisions

> you should decide by passion rather than avoidance.

This feels like great advice. Thank you for taking the time.

> Have you looked into other opportunities that would combine your interests?

I did. I also got offers in "my" field, just not such good ones. Perhaps got carried away a bit by the other offer i received. I'll have a look at Argo, thanks for sharing!

> Don't pick an option out of fear of missing out on a job, there will be more in the future.

Feels like so much of the career discussion in CS is concentrated on TC optimization - it's good to remember that one can choose to optimize for different things too.

Not faang but still brand name, like snowflake, databricks, ...

Grants are not really my concern here. I agree that industry experience could be great to increase productivity for a PhD, but I don't think that there will be a way back once I quit.

Thanks for your thoughts!

> You'll have plenty of offers in the future, probably including more meaningful ones.

That would be great. I'm sure that one can and will find stimulating and interesting work without the PhD too - sometimes the ivory tower of academia makes it seem different though. What worries me more is the aspect of leaving machine learning for a different field, and then not finding my way back later on.

> (and yes, I did decline a job offer with a much higher salary that my current one, but I'm happy to have made this call: my salary is still decent, and I do something meaningful to me, and geographically close to where my friends are)

Glad to hear it all worked out for you!

> I wish you the best. There's no wrong answer. Relax and enjoy life.

Thanks mate! It sometimes feels so overwhelmingly difficult to navigate life in your early career. Appreciate it!

Interesting perspective, haven't thought about letting my brain manipulate me into thinking I did the right offer after I make my decision. Thanks for the book, I'll have a look at it!

> Re the money, you might well be able to command a much higher salary as a PhD in computer vision / deep learning, which would be an argument for continuing the PhD.

There are so many factors that influence that _might_: research topic, network, publications, ... It's a bet on an uncertain future. Though I tend to think similar.

> that you are not really excited about your PhD topic

True. But I am excited about deep learning, and I can appreciate the opportunity to learn so much more about it while working on this project.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts! I know that you are right: I can always quit the PhD in the future. But realistically, it's pretty difficult to get an offer from one of the bigger tech companies with high salary as a Junior. So it's FOMO for both options and unfortunately I can't split myself in half. Painful to think about the opportunity costs the PhD has, but also painful to feel like giving up on the opportunity to gain more knowledge.