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A PhD is a degree in doing R&D, with an emphasis on the R. A thesis is just a demonstration that this set of skills was acquired in a discipline.

Just like how people check out your GitHub repository to see if you are a capable coder, people check out your refereed publication record to determine if you can do research. It's possible to build up a record of publications without a PhD, but it is a hard skill to acquire on your own.

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Most PhDs are all R and no D. And you don’t necessarily need to build up a record of publications to do real world R&D outside of academia. In my experience having a PhD is just a crude filter for employers, because what else are you going to rely on? But unless the PhD thesis was in the exact same area as the real world R&D (quite rare), you can assume that a newly minted PhD will not be hitting the ground running.

Sure, but parent is talking specifically about heavy-R research labs (he mentions Intel labs, Amazon Lab126, etc), not more D-oriented data science or ML positions.

A lot of successful researchers lack phds, some of them are considered at the top of the ML field. It isn’t really hard to acquire on your own, you just have to spend time at it (the main advanatage of doing a PhD is time and mentorship).

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