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

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.