Your brain doesn't last forever. A PhD will make it harder to succeed because your brain will have deteriorated somewhat by the time you finish it.
Try comparing programmers at ages 20 vs 30.
Try comparing programmers at ages 20 vs 30.
Or, say, Ritchie & Thompson: famously young, but they didn't do anything of note younger than 25, and their big burst of output was around age 30 (when they wrote the first "real" version of Unix in C).
Most people, when given the choice between "fun" and "fun and money", will take the fun and money. After all, I know very few people who will turn down a chance at free money.
Look at it like professional athletes. Many guys just like to play basketball. But, I'm going to bet guys who were close to playing in the NBA and just didn't make it, are probably at least kinda depressed about it, whether or not they still like playing pickup games.
I'm sure occasionally some of them wondered about what it would've been like to found Intel or AMD or Apple, but for the most part they seem to have been happy to have a job where the business side was someone else's job, and they got paid to just work on interesting technical problems all day. I don't get the feeling that someone like Ken Thompson ever was particularly regretful that he spent his career at Bell Labs rather than founding a startup, because he was doing exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps the technical freedom some of those research labs offered is part of it? I can imagine there being more regret if you missed money-making opportunities and didn't have a great deal of freedom to choose your own technical problems.
You reach your peak in your 20s sometime but you don't really have any serious decline until much later.
There basically was no point.
one source amongst many, note the # of achievements peaks around 40 not 20
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
". In some cases (e.g., bisection), performance differences between the older participants and students nearly 50 years younger used in other studies were negligible."
and so on and so forth, this is by no means a well solved problem that says, young people are smarter derp
See:http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Tea...
Seriously, if you need a kick in the ass to get moving every now and then (like me), then google Timothy Salthouse's research on cognitive aging. It's a depressing reminder that time waits for no one.
I would say that now, at 31, I may not be able to think as fast as when I was 20, but I also don't need to, because my thought processes converge on useful/correct solutions much faster.
I may not be able to quickly analytically evaluate five different solutions like I used to, but I don't need to, because I know from wisdom/experience what the best solution is.
Well, I'm just a BSc and only 28, but I can certainly say that I'm a better programmer now than I have been at 20. I would account the same to any programmer I have known over the years.
I'm not implying there are no good 20yo programmers. I'm saying if they keep studying, they will be better when they reach 30.
Plus, HN just recently featured an article stating the human brain does not deteriorate at all if you keep using it.
The bulk of the jobs out there are neither exciting nor challenging after the first hump and most people out there get disillusioned after they realize the Pareto principle seems universal when applied to themselves since they become so efficient now that they can generally do the most worthwile things at their jobs in 20% of the time.
The trick is to start applying that big brain of yours to other things rather than the problems that your pointy-haired boss tells you to. Like learning a new skill, or picking up a new hobby to keep your brain going.
However, there are many other advantages that come with years of experience and learning that I suggest would outweigh such deterioration.
Startup success may perhaps correlate inversely with age increase from 20 to 30 (although I doubt it), but I would be surprised if "brain deterioration" was the cause.
I often compare programmers. I haven't seen the evidence you see.