A lot of these analyses seem to wish away the agency of graduate students. These people seem to think that we're all being tricked into joining graduate program

A lot of these analyses seem to wish away the agency of graduate students. These people seem to think that we're all being tricked into joining graduate programs by professors making us false promises of unattainable faculty positions. In my case, both my masters thesis advisor and my phd advisor were open about the fact that academic jobs are hard to come by and are not even too much fun in the current funding scenario. I chose to do a phd knowing full well that it was not the right choice in terms of maximizing my earning potential. Certainly it wasn't a guarantee of a better job because I already had a job in a group where about half my colleagues were phds from more or less the same set of universities I was applying to. For me, the phd has been a mind-opening experience. It has let me learn things and think about things in an environment that simply doesn't exist outside of academia. An environment where there's no pressure to deliver something useful right now. It's possible I'm misreading him, but I've certainly run into a fair number of John-types. These guys are ridiculously smart and have faced almost no failure at all. Years and years of a positive feedback loop involving success and self-esteem seems to leave these people with a vastly inflated opinion of their own abilities. And this seems to affect in two ways: (a) their ego leaves them vulnerable to misreading cautious statements about the future (b) they can't seem to reconcile themselves to the fact that they might just be mediocre and not extraordinary. For example, if a professor says, "the market for academic jobs is very competitive but one should be attainable if your thesis has a significant impact on the field." I read it as, "you have to be among the top 10 or so among all the CS phds in the entire world graduating that year. In other words, I don't have a chance in hell unless I get very very lucky." A John-type will think they have a good chance. It's not surprising at all to me that so many of them end up so bitter.