Is vocational training and an apprenticeship necessary to be a master carpenter? No, it is not: but it makes it far easier to become one.

And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work.

You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.

Conferences / other publication venues don't require you have a PhD to submit to them. However, figuring out what a good novel research problem is and solving it rigorously is much much easier in an academic environment --- both because you are financially supported to work on said problems and because you have a community of people to tutor you and give you feedback.

I think the financial part is important. Funding in academia is interesting to say the least. Especially when it comes to grant funding, which can often have interesting requirements that are impossible to have privately or as an individual.

no, not inherently. it helps, though.

note that a PhD in a computer science department is going to be much less bad than the humanities PhDs described in the article.

- they are fully funded, stipends are somewhat higher (at least not total starvation level), and there is the opportunity for lucrative industry internships

- students in general have leverage, because it's possible to leave and go get a high paying engineering job

- there's a bias towards continuing in academia but it's not taboo to go to industry; you don't have to lie about this.

- for a combination of these and other reasons, i don't think an abusive culture has set in: professors don't feel like they need to haze their students.

i don't mean to imply that everything is beautiful and perfect but it is way less culty.

I'm about to finish my masters in CS, where I focused in machine learning. While I don't research at my school, my current job is a software/ML engineer in a machine learning focused team; I consider my role between a software engineer and data scientist.

While I don't do academic research, I spend a non-trivial amount of time reading papers and keeping abreast of new research that is relevant to my job. If the research seems relevant enough, I'll dig deeper and implement the research into a workable model. The software engineering portion really kicks in when I productionize this model and make it a usable product.

So in regards to your question, if you want to do fundamental, academic research then go for your PhD. For the kind of work I do currently, then it's more about the group you work with in industry.

Do you mean to be able to do machine learning research or to be able to get someone to pay you to do machine learning research?

nope:

http://colah.github.io/

A PhD is not required.