Give me a call when you find a company that lets its employees work on whatever they want with minimal effort put into politicking&#x2F;explanation.<p>Plenty of excellent engineers take unpaid time off work between jobs for the opportunity to work on personal projects without interruption.<p>Point is, 30-40k&#x2F;yr ain&#x27;t bad pay for that sort of freedom.<p><i>EDIT: I&#x27;ve been in a PhD program. The reply to this comment DOES NOT describe a normal or healthy advisor&#x2F;advisee relationship.</i><p><i>Ultimately, there should be a point in every PhD where the student carves out a project and works on that project, and it should probably happen before the student is spending most of their time on research. The student shouldn&#x27;t have to play politics to convince people to allow him&#x2F;her to work on their own ideas, as long as those ideas have scientific value.</i><p><i>If you find yourself consistently working 80 hour weeks and answering 2am emails, switch advisors or switch programs.</i><p><i>If you&#x27;re just working on your advisor&#x27;s stuff without any autonomy and&#x2F;or don&#x27;t have any say in the direction of your or your lab&#x27;s research, switch advisors or switch programs.</i><p>A lot of the &quot;bad press&quot; PhD programs get aren&#x27;t indicative of a healthy PhD and are not as common as they&#x27;re made out to be. And never necessary. It&#x27;s usually a combination of an abusive professor and a niave student. Which, BTW, happens in industry as well (&quot;death marches&quot; etc)<p>A phd isn&#x27;t a 40 hour work week kinda gig, but it also shouldn&#x27;t be abusive. But in general, it&#x27;s really simple: don&#x27;t let people abuse you, and if you&#x27;re taking a pay cut in return for freedom, be damn sure you demand the freedom.