The way that the success or failure of a graduate student's scientific career is in the hands of a very small number of people without oversight has no parallel in private industry. If you're lucky and spot trouble early on you can maybe get a new project/advisor, but you can't change graduate programs. You're committed for 4-6 (or 7 or 8) years. Contrast this with industry, where you can leave an abusive job after a year or two and still have a very productive career.

Even in the worst case that an evil manager fires you from your first job, you can get another. You probably will. In academia, if your halo ever loses its shine you can never get it back. There are no do-overs or next-times when it comes to your scientific reputation.

Also, don't underestimate the importance of money. Materially speaking, the opportunity cost amounts to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in terms of psychology, only people who've done it know how much it sucks to still be making $25k/yr in your late 20's. It's worse than ever now that we have Facebook as a mirror to show us where we could have been if we'd chosen industry instead.

This is really just not true. Mostly because in a normal job you don't receive all of your pay in a lump sum at the end of 5+ years. The degree of lock in you see in a phd program creates this kind of strange indentured servitude situation where the phd candidates have basically no recourse in most situations. In a real job you can just quit when there is sexual harassment happening, you basically can't in a phd situation without losing everything. You generally can't even switch PIs without losing years of work.

Exactly. I knew someone working for a professor in the US under the Fulbright program. They were supposed to have limited hours of work so that they could also take classes. It was the professor's first year participating in the program. The professor had the same course load as normal but offloaded it all on the Fulbrighter.

The professor would yell and treat the Fulbrighter the same way an emotionally abusive parent would (I saw emails). It caused crippling anxiety. But the student thought there was nothing they could do, it was a prestigious program they had worked hard to get accepted into. It was a huge honor and everyone at home was proud.

It was a small school where the professor was the also the head of the department. The person could complain to some external HR or appeal to the Fulbright program to be reassigned or something, but that might not work out, might make things worse with the professor, and at best would set the person back a year to try again with someone else the next year; and what if that someone was also a sociopath?

No, it is nothing like getting a job or working in industry. A former boss, and a mentor of mine, who graduated top class w/a B.Sc. in physics from the University of West Indies at Mona, and a M.S./Ph.D. in CS in the USA from a top notch school, AND has 25+ years of hard core industry experience in addition to his educational background more or less reflects the sentiments of the first guy who commented (HarveyWi).... And walked away from all the b.s. mostly because he is a purist and idealist at heart, and believe it or not, he found it easier to manifest that in code than in his day to day dealings as a professor at the university he studied at, where you have degenerate Ph.D./tenured professors who barely earn their keeps and others who bust their ass and never see tenure because of something completely unrelated to the amount of papers they produce/collaborate on or courses they teach.... not to mention dealing with lazy graduate students who want a grade rather than want to learn.... and don't even wanna mention undergraduate, he just wouldn't deal with their crap - so he refused to teach any undergrad courses.

This man is one of the most accomplished engineers AND scientists I have ever known... with deep knowledge of computer science, and prior to it, physics, both theoretical and applied. A genius, to say the least.... (in my view).

And he bolted from academia and said, good riddance.

You have NO idea what you are talking about - and while your generalizations are nice and soothing to you, they are invalid, bogus and do a disservice to people who might actually be considering a Ph.D. and weighing the trade-offs before they embark on something so monumental as a Ph.D. program..... that will eat a huge chunk of their life.

I'd MUCH rather see responses like harveywi's rather than the rosy stuff these guys posted ... and if all the crap doesn't extinguish that last bit of desire to dig yourself into a whole from which you won't be able to get out of for quite a while, then by all means, go get your Ph.D.

My personal take on Ph.D. is, unless you want to teach or perhaps work in research at well-funded government labs or massive corporations that can afford to throw away money at research (i.e. Microsoft Research or IBM), there's truly no need for anything past a Masters degree....

I despise analogies and metaphors, generalizations - not because I don't use them in my day to day programming :), but mostly because they serve no purpose other than to tickle someone's ego or fancy.... present some kind of a twisted map into a territory that is completely unknown to the person embarking on it.

Unless one has a TRUE heart for teaching... for giving his or her life over to research... and by heart, I mean you've wanted to do this since you were 10.... short of this, doing a Ph.D. is only a symptom of a deeper psychological issue...a compensation for something that is lacking in the emotional makeup of a person... perhaps a desire to look good and a fear to admit vulnerability in front of others....or in front of authority.... or as in one case I've seen, in a moment of truth/epiphany/serenity/whatever you want to call it, a 5-tuple Ph.D. man admits to getting all of those degrees to prove to his daddy that he is smart...because his dad scolded him when he was 9 for not getting an equation with a single unknown right after the first or second time... ya know, because 9 year olds are supposed to get equations on the first try.

I am GLAD Harvey and the other guy who did the "check check check" on Harvey's response posted the kind of paint in the ass of an ordeal a Ph.D. is....

And nothing against you, but I'd appreciate if you or anyone else not make weak projections via analogies/metaphors/generalizations whatever logic your mind intuits while reading this or any other website, because your attempt at ameliorating the reality of what a Ph.D. means (even more grueling than medical school or getting a law degree/passing the bar) can seriously screw someone up.

It is, in my view, BEST to get first hand experience/testimony from people who have done it (or know someone who has, which is my case, as I know my friend for 15 years now), and you want to ask them not only about the benefits of the Ph.D. but also about the ginormous cost to the person's entire being.

Whomever is reading here, please take both the positive AND the negative or however you wish to paint the information, to HEART, before you commit to a Ph.D. And then commit, or not. Do ANYTHING but sit on the fence about this. The LAST thing you want is to piss away 5-10 years of your life and then wonder if you did the right thing. Anything or anyone that can successfully dissuade you from such a lofty goal, you should thank him or her for saving your life.

If you don't, you still might thank them 10 years later...

I am sure there are geniuses that have walked away from shit jobs in industry as well.

I suspect that the time investments for "getting a Ph.D." versus "getting a job in industry" don't quite match up.

In normal job, you can quit without forfeiting a few years of work, and needing to wait 0.5-1.5 year for another work opportunity. Plus, you can deal without recommendation from your previous boss. In academia, no matter how but it turns, you can't.

Power to say "I quit" at expense lesser that many years, is a great power you don't realize.