[coldcode]

I wanted to get a PhD in CS at 40 but was convinced by a local professor of CS that it was a waste of everyone's time and there were no jobs to be had in the academic world anyway. Shortly thereafter Google started hiring them by the truckload. I wish I had ignored him.

I did have a 4 decade career as a programmer, but who knows what might have happened if I had taken the time mid-career to do the doctorate.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

Ironically, CS professors and teachers are, from last I heard, in extremely high demand now because so many CS PhD grads leave for industry (and 3 or 5x the pay of academics). I don't think that was just as adjuncts either. Some universities are willing to pay way more than adjunct salaries to get CS grads with real teaching ability. I doubt you'll ever see industry competitive salaries though.

[manholio]

This economic opportunity is only true for PhDs in CS or engineering and even there, only for hot research areas. Good luck getting 5x academic pay with a PhD in geology.

Generally speaking, the professor's advice from 25 years ago is still solid: don't get a PhD unless you are interested in an academic career, research, teaching etc. Due to the prestige of such a career, it tends to have an oversupply of applicants - the majority of which will not get a commensurate payback for the efforts required by a proper PhD thesis. So they will either flunk / present a low effort thesis, or worse still, they will invest a few years into a good thesis but never develop their career and skills gained into a full academic job.

So getting a PhD for the sake of it might not be a good investment of your time and effort career-wise; If you want to do it for the intelectual challenge on a topic you are very interested in, that's always a suficient motivation.

[dominotw]

> Shortly thereafter Google started hiring them by the truckload. I wish I had ignored him.

Google hires people without PHD by truckloads too, if anything they hire more ppl without phds.

[jeffbee]

And the people with PhDs are just as likely as the rest of them to be writing code that moves protobufs from one place to another.