[trevormcneal]

Came here just to weight in for each and every point. This is the best answer so far.

PhD is seem as a magical badge of super power, even if you can get a job without one, consider having it, is a 1.5x-2x salary multiplier.

[natalyarostova]

Definitely not my experience in big tech data science. 30-50% of data scientists I work with don’t have a PhD, and took the self-taught hacker path, and earn just as much as PhDs. I probably earned a total of a million bucks by time I was as old as the average PhD data scientist hire out of academia.

[f00b4r_]

I've only seen PhD's increase salary for machine learning researcher positions. For ML eng, ML ops, and analytics, I haven't seen any pay differential. YMMV