Yes, unless that PhD puts you on an earnings track where you can quickly make up for a few lost years of wages and saving. Otherwise, the compounding effect of having missed investing a few hundred thousand dollars _at a young age_ is substantial.

Yes, this is a hard calculation to make.

A couple of years ago I would also have said that a PhD is not worth the opportunity cost. I look back to the the time when my wife and I were both fresh out of college and in our PhD programs. We lived _very_ frugally. After housing, food (all cooked ourselves, no take-out or eat-out), transportation (had to live outside of the city), we had maybe $100-$200 left over each month (in 2000-2004 dollars). We had no money to set aside for retirement or investments. We did take out interest free student loans and put them in a CD and paid them back immediately after we graduated, so that helped provide a little investment income. We worked hard to scrape by on a poverty-level stipend without going into debt.

Shortly after we got real jobs, I looked at our friends who went to industry right after college and they were significantly better off, and continued to be better for a quite a while (that whole compounding rewards things).

However, now that I'm senior in my position (real senior, not SV senior label), I have much more stability in my job than my non-PhD friends have. The PhD is pretty valuable for the work I do, and that keeps me as the lead on most of our contracts.

I can't say if I would be better of right now if I went to industry right away and started making money and savings, or if the stability has put me in a better place.

I don't have the massive income as an SV tech job, but I have also never been cut at a layoff, so I don't have to worry about the variability in income.

As an aside, I will say that a PhD is non-trivial and you should probably only consider it if you _love_ the field. If you're just using it to buy yourself some time or to live off the stipend because you can't find work, you probably won't have a fun time.

First off: SW is an outlier. The opportunity cost is a lot lower in most other STEM fields. And for a few, the net wealth is actually more with a PhD (see what jobs you can get with just a biology/chemistry undergrad, for example).

It is problematic to view it purely from the perspective of money. Consider the huge non-financial opportunity cost to not doing a PhD. If you get a PhD, you still have a chance of founding a business and becoming a multimillionaire. If you don't do a PhD, you'll almost certainly not get the benefits of the PhD ever.

I look at my friends who went straight to industry after their undergrad, and compare with myself and those who did a PhD, and there's a notable difference. If your advisor is not a slave driver[1], you'll have more time to introspect and be exposed to many perspectives/disciplines, at high concentration, than you have time for with a full time job. You can do it after work, but only if you opt not to have a life. It will takes perhaps 10 years of consuming all your non work time to perhaps match up 5 years of grad school. Pretty much no one goes this route.

Put another way: If your son discovered he had more earning potential if he never completed high school, would you say "Go for it!"?

[1] And contrary to what you read on HN, many are not.

You should not get a PhD for the money. That's always been the case. It's a research degree. If it will open doors for the type of work you want to do, that's the only time it's worth it.

Traditionally, the reason to get a PhD was that it was the only way to get an academic job. In 2023, I don't recommend academic employment. Sadly, it's just another type of employment today. I started my first academic job in 2002 and things were different back then.

It's not a 0 dollar difference, that would be doing something not for money, but a huge negative difference is doing something for negative money. Bad idea IMHO. Life isn't a video game; you only get one play thru.

Somebody has to do it. We wouldn't have the civilization we have if we had no scientists. Similarly, we need teachers, caretakers, stay at home parents, and somebody has to repair the phone lines and pave the roads. If every person on the planet simply pursued the maximum pay career available to them, we wouldn't have much of a society at all.

You should certainly be aware of the financial sacrifice you're making to do socially impactful work and consider this in the decision calculus, but I don't think you can say zero people should ever make that decision.

Also, being told "should" by people about this life decision that means losing huge amounts of real money - opportunity cost is a real loss of money in economics - is really messed up in my opinion as someone who was in a PhD program for 3.5 years after college and lost over $400,000 over my lifetime as a result. People are always going around telling people what one "should" do about the PhD question as if it's some theoretical idealistic thing instead of a real actual person who's life is going to get impacted. It's like, who are you to tell anyone what they should do, let alone about something that will cost them so much? It's messed up. This is my opinion.

What do you feel has changed in the last 20 years? (This has been discussed a lot but my impression is that people compare today to the 1960s more than to the 00s).

You could start a business based on your research. Make a mint and bring your research to life!