Computer Engineering PhD here. I’m seriously considering transitioning out of my program because I’ve reached a point where I’m just writing tons of code on a graduate student stipend and quite frankly, it seems doors are opening to me which I had previously thought would only be open with the PhD.

I feel like my experience would be very different if I had one full-time research engineer who was paid a respectable sum to just... help me write code. I like working with undergraduate students, but I can’t do expect them to commit to the task like I would, or a full-time employee. They just don’t have the time.

I’m doing my work extending / improving open-source CPU simulators and it’s just such a huge amount of code. I feel like my work would be so much more useful to others if I just had another pair of hands to work on docs, do ops work, go back and forth on decisions. My advisor doesn’t have the time for such things.

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On the topic of academic pay: as a PhD student in Boston, I get paid $2000 a month pre-tax. Studios and 1BR apartments renting for under $1500/mo in a 30-minute commute radius of my campus are basically non-existent, so roommates and/or long commutes are a must. I’m realizing now why so few US citizens participate in graduate CS/CE programs: if you aren’t looking for a path to citizenship, it just doesn’t seem like a great way to spend your mid-to-late 20s.