I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech, and a lot of this resonated with me, especially the importance of finding the right advisor - and how random that process is

I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech, and a lot of this resonated with me, especially the importance of finding the right advisor - and how random that process is. As the author says, your advisor has a lot of power over you and your career, and you really don't know in advance whether they will be a good fit. I was lucky; while my first advisor wasn't a good fit, I was able to switch to someone really great. OTOH, some aspects of this post are crazy to me. We get paid $36k/year, way more than the $16k/year he mentioned. Also, our insurance is decent: mental health visits are 100% covered, and visits to other specialists (for example, a dermatologist) are just a $15 copay/visit. I think the insurance costs us just a few hundred dollars per term - annual costs are definitely less than $1k/year. Job prospects are very good - at least 15-20% of our PhD students eventually land a faculty job, often at top 20 institutions. Also, industry jobs pay well; my friends who did ML now make $300k/year straight out of their PhD. Finally, working 80 hours per week is definitely the exception. Most students I know have much more reasonable hours - in fact I think it's possible to do a decent PhD while putting in only 40 hours per week (on average; weeks before conference deadlines are intense!). People often write about how painful the PhD process is. While it certainly can be awful, I think CS PhD programs at top schools provide much better living conditions and ROI than the humanities programs he describes.