“I think the PhD system is an abomination.” – Freeman Dyson

“I think it's a gross distortion of the educational process. What happens when I'm responsible for a PhD student, the student is condemned to work on a single problem in order to write a thesis, for maybe two or three years. But my attention span is much shorter than that.”

This is nowhere near the problem with PhDs from what I’ve heard in my family.

‘Course he does as he was a brilliant young person who knew far more than the system is designed to teach. If you don’t need to learn and don’t wish to mentor there’s little point to or value in the system. Most of us, however, occupy regions far nearer the max of the bell curve and profit from the process.

Jansky had earned a BS, most of an MS when, 27 years old and working for Bell, he discovered radio signals that repeated on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes coming from the Milky Way.

"Jansky wanted to further investigate the Milky Way radio waves after 1935 (he called the radiation "Star Noise" in his 1936 Masters thesis of the same name); but he found little support from either astronomers, for whom it was completely foreign, or Bell Labs...." (Wikipedia)

Apart from Reber, noone followed up for 10 years. Sometimes more than a year will pay off a lot more.