[hnuser355]

One of the reasons I like the PhD in my case is I consider it to be “fuck you education”. I don’t expect it to give me any significant income advantages in software company, but I feel like it opens enough different areas of employment and gave me a big and strong enough skill set that I’m not intimidated by much.

I suppose it might not work out in such a way for all research though. I was lucky enough that my coursework left me with enough math and statistical skills to either learn or fake my way through most relevant math intensive computing stuff while my actual work was things like parallel optimization schemes for neural network training (and lots of programming in the big frameworks)