I mean, I didn&#x27;t go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I&#x27;ll attest that he&#x27;s not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he&#x27;s expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you&#x27;d hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing it because<p>1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle.<p>2) I&#x27;m not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I&#x27;m from India that&#x27;s a huge difference).<p>3) My advisor let me study&#x2F;work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to &quot;finish up&quot; the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.