Great summary! This is exactly how it feels at 3 years in. Every sentence in a paper is a careful balance between adhering to science, the funding agency, the supervisors, and myself.

shrug I think that life is a process of navigating obstacles while acquiring skills. Its not a RPG with you choosing a character that you have to stick with until the end.

Branch out... you'll be surprised at where your PHD learned skills will lead you.

Unless you want to be a professor of computer science. There, everyone is hiring.

But yes, you make less as a professor than you do in industry.

In other words, what's the actual, practical need for a person (or a smaller nuclear family) in the US to actually earn $400k a year?

Similar to the US, university-employed PhDs definitely tend to make less than many industry professionals in my country as well. Then again, it is nonetheless a very acceptable standard of living. As civil servants, life is very stable (as compared to e.g. one-person companies), and they are by no means poor. Most importantly, though, a doctorate program will very probably train you into a better, more analytical thinker (I've seen very few examples of the contrary).

For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?

It really depends where in US. $60k/yr in NYC or SF or Seattle will be hard -- you'll need to get housemates to share the costs of housing. But $60k/yr is some small town in Vermont or Montana is comfortable in my guesstimate.

Does comfortable mean being able to find specialist doctors? Or even just enough doctors? Being able to eat a variety of fruits/vegetables year round? Constant supply of avocados? Being able to live near family? How secure is one's income, or how many possible buyers are there for what you are selling? How are the schools for one's kids? Will the school community be of acceptable quality?

Of course, these answers will vary person to person.

One thing to keep in mind is that you might $100k+ in student loan debt by the time you actually get your phd. So for that reason you go for the higher paying job.

The lowest salary offer I got on my faculty job search, with an apology re: salary bias against folks without clinical degrees, was half again what's quoted there.

There's certainly an argument to take a pay cut to do a PhD if you enjoy doing it.

The thing is - go ask real PhD students 2 years into their PhD whether they're enjoying themselves. Given the 50% drop-out rate, you can probably guess what the answers will be...

If you believe this is accurate 60k is doable, 30k is not.

I doubt you could do 38,169 without a roomate.

Well first of all the front page of HN with tons of companies laying off massive amount of their workforce is one reason. Professors have insane job security.

Another reason is that professors only have to work 8 months of the year. Quoted figures for professor salaries are for 9 month contracts. Your quoted figures are too low by 2-3x. Only the smallest no-name colleges pay $60k, and there’s no point in being an adjunct in cs with so many instructor openings at top schools.

To make up the difference in salary, I’ve established my own consulting firm and I do tech consulting. So I have the best of both worlds: stable salaried employment and I’m my own boss.

Speaking of being my own boss, I really don’t have one. The chair isn’t really a supervisor, and while I have accountability, how I teach and what I do day to day is determined by me.

Work life balance is really nice. Some days I’ll go in at 11:00 and be done by 4. Today I won’t be going in at all and I’ll work from home for 30 minutes and be done for today.

The rest of the time I spend on “research”, which is just my open source passion project. Most hackers are trying to figure out how to work on their own open source project full time, this is how I’ve done it.

Before being a professor it was impossible to get people to contribute. Now I have dozens of students who make contributions, and every year there is a fresh group who wants to get involved.

Also I’ve got access to alternative funding sources not available to people who aren’t professors. Yes, you may have a 400k salary at FAANG, but I’ve got a $4M government grant that I use as fun money to buy my own hardware for my own flights of fancy. Literally whatever I want to do, not what some FAANG CEO like Musk or Zuckerberg wants me to do.

Anyway, I like it, and I’ll never these kinds of job perks are hard to put a price on.

As if obscure knowledge is worthless. Trading the opportunity to make money for obscure knowledge is the whole value proposition of a Ph.D.! If one doesn’t value obscure knowledge, yeah, a Ph.D. Might be a bad value proposition for that individual.

And the ones that do pay orders of magnitude more.

Most important part is quality, low-stress time with your beloved.

I have friends who recently lost most of their physical possessions (including house) to a volcano, and they don't have high income or good insurance. They are rebuilding from a low place.

The wife is an absolute gem. Keeps talking about the flow and accepting the moment. She radiates optimism and joy.

For example, in Spain:

- Typical PhD duration: 4 years. It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years (there is a hard cap) and if you want to do it fast, typically 3.5 years or so is enough in most fields if you do it full time.

- Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).

- Most students do their PhD either with a grant or a contract. So it's basically a normal job. Not a high-paying one, mind you, but a job. You typically get something in the range of 1200-1600 €/month and social security. Enough to live reasonably well (not luxuriously, but comfortably) in almost any city that is not Madrid or Barcelona (in those two you'd need to share a flat and it wouldn't be very good, but in most of the rest of the country, a typical rent is around 600 €).

- I don't have figures on drop out but I don't think it's anywhere near 50%, if I had to give a pessimistic estimate I would say 20% at most.

Of course, the bit about becoming a professor is still true (although the competition is somewhat different, less about brilliance and more about sweat... very roughly speaking, churning out more papers than your competitors even if the papers aren't that great. But there are still much fewer professor jobs than PhD candidates).

In the UK an undergrad is 3 years in most cases, then 3 years for a PhD, so 6 years total.

Some institutions will technically admit you for a PhD with no prior degree at all, but nobody does this in practice.

Tbh most Master’s, esp MSc, don’t add anything.

Yes, but not a graduate degree.

For comparison, at least in Austria, you need to have finished both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in order to be able to start a PhD.

That's usually not the case in the USA (and some common law countries), where you only need the equivalent of a Bachelor of Science in order to start the PhD. You then do a small version of the Master of Science in parallel with the PhD.

It is possible to do the MSc over 5-6 years and spend some time working, whether in parallel with studies as a teaching assistant, or taking a term/year out to get some industry experience. But in terms of credits gained, an MSc is 4 years net of studies.

- Usually 3 year (a post graduate education expected, otherwise 5 years) - Considered a job, you are paid USD ~4k a month (depending on field)

> It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years

And we still wonder why nobody is trying to paint a new Giocconda now, and where are the big results.

First they repeat ad nauseam that only want the very passionate people, but then require you to choose a mediocre theme to work on it and to solve very complex problems that nobody has figured before, in a couple of years, plus other to write. And then the grants delay the payment for three years.

This happens by two very simple reules

1. Anybody starting in science must be dumber than this boss.

I want to study a complex theme for six or ten, or twenty years with my own money, well... is my problem. Who are the politicians to say that I can't do it?. Oh, the second rule:

2. Any grant money give for a politician must benefit the politician career. Period. This means that science is now crushed to fit electoral intervals of four years. Period.

Unexpected maternity? Two years of covid?, say bye to your career and the investment of decades of study

There is the problem that research funding (also after the PhD) is associated to projects that only last for a few years, but that seems to be pretty much universal.

Is that €400 total to complete a PhD programme? Or do you mean specifically _tuition_ fees are small, but there are still other fees applicable? (Just clarifying, cause in Ireland when I was at university, they spoke a lot about "free tuition fees", but universities still charged thousands per year to students for "administration fees", to cover everything that wasn't explicitly tuition).

Also worth bearing in mind that international students (i.e. non-EU) often have higher fees, which can be as high as double or triple what home students (EU) pay. (Though if the total is only €400 that's still obviously really good!)

But putting all the fees together, it's less than €700 for the whole PhD programme. There are no administration fees or other large fees.

The capped length sounds nice, but I think the years they shave off are mostly just at the start, not the years you spend grinding out research. The first year of a US PhD would typically be separated out as an independent Master's degree in Europe.

I have no idea what the academic culture is like over there, so I can't actually say whether it would've been better with regards to the things I disliked about PhD. But the facts you presented don't make me optimistic. A lot of them I don't consider problems in the US personally, and the absolute biggest problem for me is the ridiculous professorship job pipeline.

I'd also be cautious about that 50% US drop out number. It is likely < 20% at a T25 program in any STEM field in the US, certainly in my field that is the case. Perhaps it is higher in CS because people intentionally master out after 2 years to take a lucrative tech job. But I wouldn't consider that failing with the kind of connotation "drop out" has.

I would suggest extra caution before attending a mediocre (or worse) program of course.

I assumed reality would be somewhat less grim as my sample is probably biased towards the ones who complain, but maybe it's so biased that it doesn't even resemble reality at all.

Barely subsisting is definitely not true for a STEM PhD at a decent program though. You're getting paid way less than you could probably, but as long as you're willing to have a couple housemates (usually fellow students) and are not yet supporting anyone else it's a reasonably comfortable wage. Keep in mind that solid health insurance and student perks like university gym membership are also provided at 0 cost.

This might be controversial, but people who have excess expenses (for whatever reason) in their mid 20s probably shouldn't undertake a PhD in the first place. That's the only way a STEM researcher who didn't settle for a subpar school could possibly end up in additional debt as a PhD student IME.

Post doc wages, given the career stage and associated job culture/benefits, are notably shittier. Debt still feels like an exaggeration to me, but a 35 year old with a lot of training and unclear future career prospects should at least be able to support a middle class family lifestyle with their postdoc wages. A 25 year old that is working towards an actual degree and still benefiting from student status is such a different situation.

In hindsight, the maximally enjoyable thing might be to work for FIRE and then pseudo retire to being a PhD student. A PhD can be inherently valuable, the problem is just how tied it is to an insane career path.

Anyway, it's possible the posting students are humanities PhDs? At a good place they still don't pay tuition, but will often get basically 0 stipend. So they legit need loans for living expenses. Either that or Twitter amplifies complaints from schools that one really should not do a PhD at.

> Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time.

You didn't waste your time as you know now the state of the art, and also why your method isn't better.

> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings.

The world is a big place. There's more to academia than Ivy League in the US. And don't believe all professors are geniuses! I think it's possible to somewhat assess your odds to get an academic position when you start a PhD.

On the downside, academia is very competitive and being a second rank professor drowning in teaching and administrative duties isn't the most rewarding thing to do.

> Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.

This also depends in which industry you want to work. Not all fields/companies pay as a well as Google. And having a PhD can also open doors in industry.

It’s important to try working with multiple mentors if you can. I actually started with a different person, and he probably would have been considered by most to be ideal. I was basically totally funded to do whatever I wanted with very little mentor interaction. Interestingly, this wasn’t great for me. In part I wasn’t interested in the subject, but more than that I greatly benefit from weekly mentor interaction to check in with my direction. Now I don’t have funding (working to support myself while doing research), but I’m happy as a pig in mud.

There are senior high - paying FAANG roles outside webdev where quantitative skills like the ones acquired in subjects like Math/Physics/Theor. CS are imperative, in which you can get straight into after graduation without even having to go through the absurd LeetCode hiring process (it's significantly easier if your advisor recommends you to an old friend on the industry).

> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.

This is very accurate, especially in the US where tenure seems to be largely reserved for people that come from financially strong families who effectively support them from undergrad to tenure track.