Comment by svara
2 days ago
You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
I'm just talking about my experience as a former researcher.
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).