What you should know before starting a doctorate...

irrelevant factors: [being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas

You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I feel) you need something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?

There are problems, though. There's a lot of pressure to do things that are either in the academic norm, or are part of the academic fashion. Unfortunately, such things tend to get popular after the first people start getting interested in it, who often cover so much ground that there's little to do. So you need to stay away from academic groupthink if you want to do good work there -- but otherwise, it's a good place.

So now academia has been reduced to an industry that produces mountains of useless, trifling research to justify the academics' own positions. The technocrats at the top of the system put unit prices on conference and journal papers, but they're not judged on quality, just the amount that can be eked out. To get more funding, you need to produce. I remember reading essentially the same paper 10 times from different conference proceedings, as the author managed to squeeze out one trivial variation on the same theme after another. Hell, my supervisor was a prime culprit (and I an accessory).

Any graduate student will tell you that the first (and most important) skill to learn is how to wade through all the bullshit papers and find things of value.

In some ways it's great that post-doctoral work (if you can get it) has become a middle class profession, spawning an industry that employs people, but the dilution of academic work has made research much more time consuming.

I never finished my PhD program, dumping my scholarship after a year for an engineering career in oil and gas. 7 years on, and I'm actually thinking of going back part-time. I like research... just at my own pace. Without being saddled with the constraints of money (which is every poor graduate student's dilemma), there's no pressure to produce. Now that's what I call the ideal research environment!

Meanwhile, try getting a plumber or a plasterer. The UK govt. has the objective of getting 50% of school leavers into university. Formal education beyond a certain point is suboptimal both for the individual and for society as a whole in probably most cases. The great irony is that this is a Labour government, you'd think if anyone realized the value of traditional trademen, it would be them...

Google, of course. Xerox. A bunch of big DoD contractors have R&D departments. Video game companies have been known to pick up graphics focused Phds. Pixar.

It's actually quite hard to move from industry back to academia as an engineering PhD. According to some academic friends, unless you've been publishing tons of papers while in industry, you're looking at an adjunct faculty position at best.