Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?
I&#x27;ve been thinking all morning how to answer this.  Rather than give advice, here&#x27;s some thoughts about what I&#x27;ve seen in the industry.  The quick answer is that, yes, a PhD should give you a more interesting life...but you might not want that.<p>I have a PhD in Chemical Physics. I got it about 15 years ago. The need to go deep into computation to solve chemistry problems is what gave me the computer skills that have served me well. That is, after I got my PhD, I haven&#x27;t done any work in in chemistry or physics at all, but have been a high-performance computing expert everywhere I go.  So, in my case, having the PhD really helps, but that&#x27;s because I work in a field that secondary to my PhD work.  I would wager, that&#x27;s probably true of any academic field. The actual PhD work is so esoteric that it&#x27;s not going to have any good application to reality (industry) in a reasonable time frame, but the underlying skills needed to get the PhD are going to be super useful.<p>Now, as for getting a job...I have had very bad luck (until recently) getting the FAANG-like companies to take me seriously: I&#x27;m expensive, I don&#x27;t want to sit around all day gluing APIs together, and I don&#x27;t have a public repository of code to point to.  They want folks who fit into their mold of whiteboard interview.  But now that I&#x27;m senior enough (15 years + PhD), I&#x27;m starting to get the target calls rather than the generic recruiter nonsense.<p>The point about not having the public repository of code is important: when you&#x27;re a PhD,  you job is to solve problems that _have never been solved before_.  That is, it&#x27;s not a rehash of the same problem in a new language, or a different architecture, or anything. It&#x27;s new! The world hasn&#x27;t seen it yet.  That means 1) you can&#x27;t go find an answer on stack overflow, and 2) your day-to-day work is HARD, and often demoralizing - at least I feel stupid every day until I find the solution, and then the dopamine hit keeps me coming back!.  Since work is very hard (now, I also don&#x27;t put tons of hours in, because the work is hard, so that&#x27;s good). I don&#x27;t have the mental energy for any side projects.  I&#x27;m ok with that, I love what I do! But there is no public ego stroking and thought-leadership and all of that other stuff you see with other semi-famous developers. I can&#x27;t point to a public project and say &quot;I did that&quot; or &quot;I helped build that&quot; because what I do is propitiatory.<p>Getting the PhD itself was a slog, and I didn&#x27;t really enjoy the grind. But it is good have that credential. I know SV is all about &quot;meritocracy&quot; and whatnot, but having the PhD is a good signal that a person knows how to think and problem solve with little to no supervision, especially when the problem space is ill-defined.  When hiring, I always count a PhD very high.  I know a bunch of companies do too.  So while the initial work of getting the PhD wasn&#x27;t terribly fun, I&#x27;ve always had an easy time finding a job or getting a promotion.<p>I think another commenter said something to the effect that a PhD is a good signal that you can (and have) owned a full project start-to-finish.  Don&#x27;t discount that. It shows you as a closer. That&#x27;s a good thing.<p>Sorry for the brain dump, but this was an interesting question you posed...tl;dr - I think a PhD can make you super valuable if you set it up in a way that the skills you learn while getting the degree are transferrable (now) to industry.  You will have a leg-up on everyone else entering the field.  Just don&#x27;t get caught in pure theory that will not have an application for another decade.  But you need to be ok with feeling stupid everyday because the problems you&#x27;re solving are hard and new.