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> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience. Would y

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience. Would you mind telling us which technical field? And which country? I know several PhD students / recent grads that pursued this qualification primarily because of "academic inflation" - that in order to compete for top-paying jobs in the EU, the more qualified you are the better, and having "just a Masters degree" is no longer good enough. I should add, these are also ex-pats, who left their developing country in pursuit of greener pastures. But it seems to be the case that getting a PhD - as terrible as the experience might be - can also help with career prospects, purely because one has a PhD (irrespective of the details of their thesis topic). Whereas back home (in said developing country), it's the complete opposite. Qualifications hardly matter - or they certainly don't matter as much - only experience does. And given the thin supply of skilled labour, business owners have the mindset of "we'll take what we can get". So I do think the choice to pursue a PhD can be an indirectly strategic move depending on your job prospects - and less about the actual topic you plan to research. Just my 2 cents from a developing country that is experiencing excessive brain-drain! :)

ramraj07 6y ago
I also moved from India to the US to do a PhD in biomedical engineering! In the end I left the field and took up a tech job after my PhD because it became clear that this is the more sensible career choice. Given I put in 8 years of some of my most productive years into the PhD, I think I’d have been a much different place in tech if I had just made the jump earlier. The PhD helped but not nearly as much as the same number of years of actual experience in tech itself. Of course if you can’t or won’t program and want to be in a hard science a PhD might be necessary but it’s become generally annoyingly competitive and fruitlessly bureaucratic to be in the field and depend on it for long term guaranteed career growth. When I said tech I meant software-related: as long as you are interested or willing to be there it still seems the best place to make money without too much sweat and not need a PhD to do it. This also applies only if you’re good but not cream of the crop. If you’re doing a PhD under a superstar and have nature papers then you’re clearly set up well, but anything lower than that it’s not worth the competition and pain you need to put in to make a good career either in academia or industry.

ramraj07 6y ago

I also moved from India to the US to do a PhD in biomedical engineering! In the end I left the field and took up a tech job after my PhD because it became clear that this is the more sensible career choice. Given I put in 8 years of some of my most productive years into the PhD, I think I’d have been a much different place in tech if I had just made the jump earlier. The PhD helped but not nearly as much as the same number of years of actual experience in tech itself. Of course if you can’t or won’t program and want to be in a hard science a PhD might be necessary but it’s become generally annoyingly competitive and fruitlessly bureaucratic to be in the field and depend on it for long term guaranteed career growth. When I said tech I meant software-related: as long as you are interested or willing to be there it still seems the best place to make money without too much sweat and not need a PhD to do it. This also applies only if you’re good but not cream of the crop. If you’re doing a PhD under a superstar and have nature papers then you’re clearly set up well, but anything lower than that it’s not worth the competition and pain you need to put in to make a good career either in academia or industry.