Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by trevormcneal 1521 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
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