Comment by eksemplar
6 years ago
It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
Can't you offer them the job with starting date when they are scheduled to finish?
Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?
I think it’s easiest to explain like this.
You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.
That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.