Having worked in R&D at a big pharma for 17 years and in university HPC groups for 10, I echo these comments. I've found that corporate R&D is essentially inve

Having worked in R&D at a big pharma for 17 years and in university HPC groups for 10, I echo these comments. I've found that corporate R&D is essentially investigative (rather than production driven), and as an IC computational scientist (or data scientist) you will move from project to project over the years, usually working solo 95% of the time. You will have some opportunity to propose projects, especially in partnership with scientists (in pharma, those are chemists or biologists or work to improve manufacturing). But without a PhD, advancement along the technical track will be limited. If you're not embedded in a science R&D group, you will be lumped in with general IT staff where tech support, database management, or software development of products are prized by management, but tackling individual R&D questions is not (though it is tolerated by IT brass since they know investigation is critical to finding & improving drugs). I found the same limitations when I worked in R&D-based military contracting (or for US gov't FFRDCs for various agencies). There it's more important to develop a strong relationship with the gov't client, irrespective of the academic degree you have.