[elbigbad]

I run several software teams that all have ML engineers on them, and two ML-specific teams of all ML engineers. Perhaps 14 ML engineers in total across my teams. We pay FAMGAN market rate. Their experience ranges from senior ML (6-8 years exp) to three who I hired right out of undergrad/masters, and two of those were interns who got job offers after internships.

Only one out of all of those have a PhD, and it’s only pseudo related. You absolutely do not need to have a PhD for 80% of positions in the modern world of ML in my experience, and I’d go as far as saying unless you want something significantly more prestigious than “market rate ML job doing interesting work” then a PhD is probably a net negative in life as an ML person given the opportunity cost. I have definitely turned down prestigious academia PhD types who wanted to move to industry in strong favor of strong SWEs with practical ML experience, and have a strong preference for same.

This definitely isn’t the answer academia or most people who have sunk cost of their time into PhDs would agree with, or necessarily like, but from a practical perspective it’s my experience across much of industry.