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Comment by jakobnissen | Hacker News Reader

I'm a research scientist, and I think it's fine. Though it may vary with your country and time.

During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer.

But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.

The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.

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Industries that want PhDs are quite limited IME. Very few companies are running their own research labs. I guess pharma would but in CS? Not one company in my country.

I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare.

In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates because of overqualification. I know of a few cases where people actually officially removed their PhD from their education list.

YMMV, and I am glad it's working out for you but, at least in my country, the reality is very different.

CS is an outlier, as most software jobs require relatively little formal education. STEM in general is not as forgiving.

In many sciences, your primary job options are teaching and research. And if you are going to do research, employers generally expect a PhD. Physics is probably the most extreme case, as it's common to see physics departments award one PhD for every three bachelor's degrees.

When last I looked there were three physics faculty in the United States for every two PhD students. That's because there just aren't any industry jobs for physics PhDs. Assuming a 40-year career, that means one job every 13 years for those two PhDs (one graduating every 3 years) to compete for - so a 1 in 4 chance of getting any physics job! Which is completely insane it's a lucky thing there are trillions of computer science jobs for these unemployed physicists to take - and take them they sure do!

To do what, exactly? I was replying that there are very few research labs in industry. As stated, pharma is the potential outlier. What physics research is conducted? This is a real question, I would love to point this out to my PhD in physics friends, who are now in CS because of scarcity of jobs.

My point was that there are even fewer jobs for a physics BSc that require specifically a degree in physics. If you want to work in physics, your main options are teaching or getting a PhD.

> So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.

Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.

The original claim was that PhD in physics destroys your life more then drugs. Which is not a thing even if we talk about marihuanna rather then heroin.

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