its just one persons opinion based on his experiences, I do not share his views because my experience was completely different, for the sake of having a differe

its just one persons opinion based on his experiences, I do not share his views because my experience was completely different, for the sake of having a different perspective let me share how it went for me: I did my PhD (and an MSc before that) in EU, as a PhD I was paid an above average salary and it even provided me enough time to work as a consultant in parallel where I was able to get a few patents - which also look good from "academic perspective" my phd advisor didn't really care at all as long as I was producing papers that got accepted to conferences / journals and he was a co-author even though he literally never even talked to me about any of the topics of my research, so basically zero supervision as long as I produced "academic results" I finished my PhD in 3 years (normally it should have taken more) and went straight to running my startup would I have done it again? sure can it be done better? sure - science and all the institutions around it are just "processes" that the collective mankind came up with over last few centuries, there will always be outliers that do not fit in, I never did fit in myself, but i sucked it up and made the best out of it, and that is what i believe the greatest thing that phd thought me - persistence under extreme pressure, and i still do that to this day - the pressure is much higher than it was back then because the stakes are much higher, but phd was the first step - breaking the barriers showing that even I can push the boundaries of what is considered possible if money are an issue - just do a phd in EU, here I never heard of an unpaid phd position