You can get several interesting jobs that are not just doing CSS. As a quant, you can be doing ML to predict the stock market or hard core network coding to ma

You can get several interesting jobs that are not just doing CSS. As a quant, you can be doing ML to predict the stock market or hard core network coding to make placing orders faster. In a data scientist job you'd be doing data mining to gather insights about whatever area your company works in. At a company like Google or MS, you could be developing/implementing interesting algos for search, ad targeting, etc. This is not even to mention Google/FB research, and even more so, MSR where you could be doing even more researchy stuff. Now it's possible that the above jobs are much scarcer than the support function jobs but I mean most of the world does mundane jobs and earns way less than you. A PhD gives a much higher chance of getting a less mundane job.