In many fields, that's actually not far from the truth, though. Yes, PhDs in computer science, engineering, and natural sciences can find jobs in industry, but it's not like anyone getting a PhD in 19th century German literature can easily find a job using that other than in academia.
However, computer science is also one of the fields with the largest need for professors partially because of the competition with industry jobs. My experience from a Canadian perspective was that computer science PhDs also tend to be better funded than those in the social sciences so the overall risk is much lower.
The risk may be lower but the forgone income is a lot greater. The median admit to a CS Ph.D. programme, even the worst ones in the US, can probably get a job at Google and can definitely get a job programming for a living if they have the right to live in the US. If they’re from a less developed country a Ph.D. stipend and the possibility of staying afterwards probably looks pretty great.
For real? Because people have been hired directly from Lambda School and App Academy to Google and one would get the impression that https://elementsofprogramminginterviews.com/ and leetcode would do, which is maybe six month’s work from a standing start.
Well I know a lot of people with PhDs who couldn't pass a Google interview. Of course it's harder to tell how many can pass a Google interview but can't pass a PhD, because people don't tend to simply 'fail' a PhD except in extreme circumstances, and people who drop out of a PhD weren't necessarily going to fail.
I have a PhD and I don't think I could pass the famous Google interview! I'm just not that good.
This is very true about income. Although I think it's safe to say that the lifetime earnings of a PhD graduate in CS are likely to be well above average across the whole population even if significantly lower than those who skipped the PhD.
Agreed. CS PhDs don't typically identify themselves with a Dr prefix, so our population (I have one, I don't use a Dr prefix) is rather hidden. People don't know how many of us there are. When I was at Google, about 25% of googlers had PhDs.
It's certainly true that there are reasons for getting a PhD other than becoming a professor, but it's also true that in many fields having a PhD is also completely unnecessary. And yet in many fields there seems to a qualification arms race where, due to the glut of PhDs and lack of jobs where PhDs are truly required, jobs for which a PhD is not necessary or beneficial are starting to become expected. I've definitely begun to see this in the fields of machine learning and data science. I'm sure other fields are similar.
I think the characterization is a side effect when students ask "What do I do next?" After about four years pursuing a non-vocational degree, a lot of students have job prospects inconsistent with a meritocratic opportunity worldview. But not just students, their professors also recognize that barista is a median outcome for many new graduates without connections...the people who most depend on meritocracy to provide access to good jobs.
The Phd as a route to professorship is a way of maintaining the idea of meritocratic access to stable and fulfilling careers. The belief meets everyone's need to believe that people will just give money to the deserving intellect.
A Ph.D. is professional training for being a professor, or at a push, a researcher. If you don’t get yours from a top programme your chances of getting a professor job are quite low in the US, though other countries vary.
A Ph.D. will at absolute minimum take three years on top of a Bachelor’s in the UK. In the US it’s common for it to take six years including a two year Master’s portion. Many fields have large numbers of people taking nine years, like literature or anthropology. Even three years is a huge cost in forgone income never mind six or nine. Then in many fields there’s a post doc before you can get a shot at a professor job and then you spend six years trying for tenure, which you often won’t get. That’s fine if you’re willing to live like a monk because you love what you do for most of your twenties and if you could be guaranteed a job at the end of ten years plenty of people would take that offer but many very talented people spend close to a decade, or more, in training for a job they never get.
A Ph.D. for fun, for consumption purposes is fine if you come from money or are supported by a working spouse with a real job but for a great many people they end up with nothing after enormous effort.
Unfortunately, there are also not a huge plethora of jobs for researchers in industry either. At least, it's hard to find posted job openings. It may be that a lot of the people in industry who are doing researchy work started out as clerks and worked their way into their positions over time.
And yet the system is set up for a time when every Ph.D. who wanted a job as a professor would get one. That ended in the 70s. Now you have people doing three post docs before giving up to go into industry as they could have straight after the Ph.D. which many would never have done if they’d known where they’d end up. And you have humanities Ph.D.s doing jobs that in no way require the training and social science Ph.D.s doing jobs they could have ended up in if they’d never gone to graduate school though it’s not quite as bad because at least they often end up getting jobs that require the six or so years of experience they spent in grad school, earning a lot less money.
Industrial research positions are collapsing. Even in CS, what is left outside of ML? MSR is declining. Fujistu labs and IBM research aren't doing much.
I wouldn't agree with that - I think industrial research is flourishing it's just moved from separate labs into the mainstream parts of companies. For just one example the V8 team at Google at a product group but they're doing research - they have PhDs, they publish top-tier papers, they have students. They happen to ship their research, that's all. Seems like a good thing, really?
I'm a researcher at Shopify. I don't work in a formal lab, but I'm doing research, writing papers, reviewing papers.
Here we go again - this weird idea that the only purpose for doing a PhD is to become a professor.