[peterhalburt33]

I’d push back slightly on the idea that a PhD isn’t an optimal route to industry careers.

Due to the variety of experiences and knowledge I acquired in grad school, I became conversant in a few different fields, which allowed me to cross disciplines to a very nicely compensated career path WITHOUT meeting many of the relevant criteria that new grads might be subject to.

So sure, maybe a PhD isn’t optimal if one values money and is certain that they are on a lucrative career path, however, it has opened doors for me to enter a career path where individual enrichment is a large focus since the prestige of the company is built upon the accomplishments of individual employees.

If nothing else, I got to spend five years enriching myself, studying what I love and getting paid (modestly) to do it. While there are certain aspects of academia that are off putting, grad students are mostly shielded from politics and get to spend time focused on learning their field and becoming experts with no serious expectation of a useful deliverable at the end. You might argue that the thesis is the deliverable, however, since one is working at the boundary of knowledge, there’s often very little oversight and one can justify chasing down exploratory research directions that turn out to be dead ends. My experience in industry is that it is more a zero sum game, where you have to carve out opportunities to enrich yourself and hours and productivity are tracked much more closely.