[fastneutron]

Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should do a PhD tend to assume:

- The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some esoteric and unemployable domain, destined to run on the postdoctoral treadmill for decades.

- The PI is a control freak who only cares about publications, and considers students who leave for industry jobs after graduation to be failures.

These stereotypes can have an element of truth, but there are more enlightened PhD programs and PIs that understand the value of cross-cutting and commercializable research than you’d expect from the discourse. Not everyone is stuck working on a pinprick of knowledge, and if you choose your program and PI wisely, you can go much further and do many more things than you would never have access to with just an undergraduate background.

[hikingsimulator]

One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.

[Over2Chars]

An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5?

Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.

[InkCanon]

I never understood point 1. Your PhD thesis will almost definitely be on a very specific topic, you don't have the time or knowledge to cover multiple distinct fields.

[Over2Chars]

I'm not saying you're wrong but...

Elon Musk skipped his PhD program and did many more things than spending time in school would have allowed him to do. Of course, most people aren't Elon (probably a good thing).

Other than preparing you for a career in academia or some highly regulated environment where education is erected as a barrier to entry, it's hard for me to think of "many more things" that are open to a phd holder than to someone who is not.

[fastneutron]

Celebrity exceptions are exactly that; exceptions. Those people knew an opportunity when they had one, and were able to generalize their early successes into other domains by leveraging the financial, social, and intellectual capital they accumulated. People who fit this description aren’t the ones reading this thread.

In some fields all you need is a computer and an idea to be impactful, but in plenty of other fields you’d be hard pressed to make any credible, let alone meaningful impact without significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge. These things only come through experience, and for many people, the PhD program is that experience.