>I wonder if there's a good way to think about the relevant counterfactual: how happy would PhD students if they did not pursue a PhD?

I would be damned miserable.

>Plus, the pool of PhD students consists entirely of people who said "yes, working in relative isolation, for years, with little pay, on a topic most people don't care about, sign me up!".

Look. I've done both industry and academia. Money is great. I would be happy to get more money in academia. However, working in tech in a crowded cubical farm in a massive company, for years, on a topic most people don't care about, is not so different from academia as we typically believe.

> However, working in tech in a crowded cubical farm in a massive company, for years, on a topic most people don't care about

That's not the only way to have a tech career, though. Maybe that's the highest-paying option for most people, but you can also do remote work, work for a small company, work less than full time (if you're good enough) etc. Basically there are ways for regular people to have not-super-stressful tech careers. It doesn't sound like there's a way to do that for PhD's unless you're already independently wealthy.

I dunno. Most people I know who've tried to have more laid-back tech careers eventually got laid off and had to hit the interview circuit pitching themselves as more ambitious.

And I really don't think they were underperformers. I think the industry is just structured so if you stay in one job long enough, trying to avoid stressing yourself out over "moving up", your company goes under.

Just to give a data-point when it comes to this question: I'm doing an in-industry PHD in Europe where I spend half my time at my university's lab and half at my company, working on the same project that I love, so I'm in a good position to compare the two.

As a result of this scheme, I'm terribly depressed half the week, the environment in academia is so much worst and so very hostile. I was discussing it with my university colleagues and apparently we're one of the better labs in the country when it comes to team cohesion and work environment so I suspect it's not an isolated problem.

I dread going to my lab, I feel like calling in sick every morning that I have to go there. I get no work done at all during the day I just wait it out until I can get home and start working. The buildings are run-down, the people are non-responsive staring at their screen until lunch which is the only time we get a bit of human contact, people have irregular hours unless they have to teach in which case they're in their class the whole day so I see and talk to no-one for two days. The work-life balance is nonexistent. My advisor is great but as mentioned in the article, she's the only one who cares about my work on the university's side of things and I barely see her once a month. Also there's none of the small benefits that you get in a company like free-coffee, food, etc... At my lab we have a water-boiler on the floor, plugged into a socket in a corner of the room.

All in all it may seem like small things but it comes together to make it a terrible environment, and I'd like to think I'm a fairly emotionally resilient person but if i had to spend any more time there I'd quit in a hot second.

May I ask where are you? I have been in many European universities and I always got free coffee (not food, but neither in private companies).

I'm in Germany though I won't say more than that for obvious reasons ;).

The coffee example was the first thing that came to mind but really it's so much more than that. At work we do weekly team meetings, we get regular themed events during national celebrations as well as over the whole year like baking contests, sports competitions, vacation photo contests, ... We get a sense of direction from management, we get a sense of purpose from our work and the whole company is focused on working together on a single goal to release our products, we get to interact with other departments and talk to people with a huge range of skill-sets, we're made to feel our work is valued, etc ... Obviously there are drawbacks that I won't go into, it's not all rosy, but a lot is done so that work feels like a pleasant part of the employees' life and not a dreadful grind to get through.

Though the environment is weighing on me and I seem to have only negative things to say, I'm very grateful for the opportunities that my university has provided for me, and I love my labmates. I often feel it's a personal failure that I haven't been able to bring over some of my company's positive traits to our lab to spur some life into it, and that someone else might have done better in my place.

This is a good point. There are too many confounding factors. I recently finished my PhD and reflecting back, it was hard and a lot of work, certainly not what I imagined as an undergrad. I worked most weekends and holidays and have a few projects that failed and grants I couldn't produce the results, subsequently losing funding. It was a bit debilitating watching friends and family enjoying the 9-5 lifestyle.

Honestly, what kept me afloat were my Chinese and Indian colleagues that pretty much lived in the office but were candid about the experience.

I'm not staying in academia because physics AP's don't make that much compared industry positions (I want a cybertruck :) ).

However, I'm glad I finished, because it's opened quite a few doors in industry to work on cutting edge tech with problems I want to work on.

On the contrary, what kept me alive during the PhD was that if I do well, I won't have to get a 9-to-5 job

Yeah, you’ll get a 7 to 7 job.

Excuse you, academics at the top of the food chain have the complete freedom to choose which 60 hours to work every week.

I knew professors that slacked around all day long. In principle, you can work only one month per year writing an excellent research paper. And of course, planning your lectures during the rest of the time.

This is not my experience with the newer generation of professors in STEM.

Writing that paper means making getting funding and that means networking (giving talks, creating/maintaining collaborations), participating in inter/intra department grant writing, managing students to produce the work, etc.

Of course you could write an amazing research paper but more often than not it won't go to an amazing journal unless you have positive connections in the field (-ie potential reviewers and editors).

Papers in good journals -> Easier to get grants.

A major part of the tenure packet is grants and awards.

Teaching is not the top priority.

You can live just off your usual salary, you don't need grants if you're frugal.

Typically the university pays professors salary and gives you a startup fund.

Professors have to bring in grant money to fund students, build a lab, travel to conferences to advertise the work, etc.

Plus the university gets a little slice of the grant.

If you don't bring in grants you'll be fired. And good luck funding a lab w/o grants.

Not everywhere is like the US.

> how happy would PhD students if they did not pursue a PhD?

I think we can get some of this data by examining mental health after grad school. I know for a fact that my anxiety attacks are all gone since graduating and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have happened if I'd gone straight to industry instead.

Don't you have similar worries in (at least top tech) companies as well?

What did you have anxiety over that is so different? I guess in grad school you worry about papers getting accepted/rejected, potentially funding running out, failing to produce interesting research and dropping out, this type of thing right?

In companies you have performance reviews, promotions and layoffs, office politics etc. to worry about.

I think the biggest difference between academia and industry stress is that stress in academia is so personal. Your entire career is building up your own personal brand of research, which has to be novel, interesting, reliable, etc. If something goes wrong, like you don't get a grant or you find that you made a mistake or a paper gets rejected, you can't blame your company's leadership for poor decisions, so it's a much more personal reflection on your abilities as a researcher. The rejections are also typically much more often along the lines of "this was a bad idea, I don't know why you spent the past two years doing this" and less like "could you fix your code formatting to match our style guide." And because nearly everyone who does a Ph.D. does it out of their love for the field, feeling like a failure at philosophy is much more personal than introducing a bug or whatever into your code.

a. Advisors have infinitely more power over you then any future manager

b. You can switch jobs but you cant effectively jump gradschool. If I want a change of pace another job is always available.

c. Grad school has greatly diminished returns if terminated early. 5 years of PhD work but no thesis defense means you dont have a PhD. Lots of companies you can just leave and they still count towards your experience.

d. Grad students get paid peanuts, you have to worry about finances. Tech jobs pay a ton, I may worry about promotion but I dont worry about going to a restraunt/buying nice things/etc. If I want something most of the times I just buy it.

All of this makes grad school substantially more stressful than a normal job.

I see I'm interested in the differences of US vs European (continental, e.g. German) system here and to what extent all the American blog posts and comment threads are applicable here.

In Germany it's not considered grad "school", you're a full time "scientific employee" employed by the state and on a somewhat different plane of bureaucracic existence you're also a "doctoral candidate". The pay gap between academia and industry is also much smaller. It surely exists, but a scientific employee gets about 45k eur gross per year. Straight out of a masters it's typically 55-65k, or if you're really good maybe 75 (roughly) .

And I know people who dropped out and found a job without issues. In whst world does it not count as experience that you've mentored masters and bachelor students, probably took part in industry cooperation, traveled the world for conferences and gave talks, did in-house miscellaneous IT work, like you would at a startup.

It's really hard to compare an American PhD student straight out of bachelor's in medieval philosoohy of religion vs a doctoral candidate after a masters in Germany researching, say, machine learning for energy efficiency.

So here are some super rough pre-tax annual numbers for a STEM path in the US (looking at my peers who did physics and some of whom went into ML, which is what I did)

Grad student ~30k

Postdoc ~50k

Assistance professor ~ 100-150k

Distinguished full professor ~ 250k-350k

Industry after masters ~ 100-150k

Industry after PhD ~ 150-300k

Distinguish engineering fellow in industry (physics) >500k

Nowhere even close.

I work at one of the major tech companies. I manage a team and a production system that could cause serious trouble if it went maximally off the rails. I sleep great.

In grad school I had panic attacks. I felt like shit. My self confidence was terrible. And this was despite publishing modestly successfully. In grad school the feedback you get for your work is (as best I can tell) almost entirely random (paper reviews are totally broken). Many people either have a completely absent advisor and no mentorship or a slavedriver who expects you to work insane hours and steals your credit. It does not surprise me even one bit that a huge number of grad students have mental health problems.

>"yes, working in relative isolation, for years, with little pay, on a topic most people don't care about, sign me up!"

The question is whether the person making that decision feels forced into that decision because of the circumstances in their life. I think a lot of people who have issues during their PhD are there because they are under immense pressure -- from their parents, peers, or wallets -- and the life of a grad student can only compound that stress rather than alleviate it by providing some measure of satisfaction.

Who does a PhD because of immense pressure from wallets? Aren't PhDs a terrible financial choice in the vast majority of fields?

That is why you are under pressure. You have to get by with very little money and it causes stress.

Not everyone starts a PhD right after undergrad. It'd be interesting to look at PhD students who started later in life and see how they take the program. Anecdotally, they have a lot of problems too.