| I was not at a FAANG but I did attempt the same thing as you. I left with a Masters for a variety of reasons but my thoughts are that it’s less the financial opportunity cost that’s the problem. It’s the mental health toll that will really get you. A PhD is for you if you really enjoy academic style work. If you thrived in high school/college, are innately mathematical, and care a lot about pushing the boundaries of knowledge. You need to be ok with _not_ focusing on building things but instead focusing purely on understanding things. For me that last part was almost impossible. You need to be ok with rejection and failure. You’ll try a lot of things and fail and get nothing for the effort. You’ll also have to constantly keep dealing with getting rejected for things like fellowships, journal papers, grants, conferences, awards and such. You also need to be someone who is OK without a traditional social life and be ok to put in insane hours. Plan on 70-100 hour weeks up until you get tenure. Having a relationship with someone who is not in the system is going to be tough. You absolutely will lose touch with some friends and some family faster than the regular process. There will be no system to help you. It wasn’t my case but I will warn you that there are many awful advisors. Unlike in the industry there are zero checks and balances and basically no incentives for advisors to keep their students mental health in mind. Your graduate advisor may care but probably won’t. And once you’re about 3-4 years in you can’t get out and I know tons of folks who were basically stuck in sand and spinning their tires. You will see people who are your peers moving up traditional career ladders. You will see people starting companies. You will see people doing cooler things. On the other end of all this a lucky 1% or so of people I know who entered the system ended up in a tenured faculty position doing research. If you do decide to go ahead my suggestion is to find a good advisor who has funding. That is almost impossible to do but that’s all that matters. |