Fuck yes. This is the kind of informative wisdom I missed about reddit. Thank you for sharing your knowledge here!

This all sounds so weird coming from germany since here you do you bachelors degree, then your masters degree and then optionally your PhD. While the usefullness of the PhD and its duration vary between subjects (in IT it takes 3-5 years and is not really worth it money-wise if you go in the industry afterwards, while in medicine it can be done in a year or even less and is basically necessary). Also while you do your PhD you are usually employed by the government (since universities are public institutions) and paid well. A PhD earns you social prestige and prestige in the industry since - besides in medicine - nearly no one has one.

I spent most of a decade in industry doing what is generally thought of as a PhD's job. In order to fill in some gaps, I took a ton of graduate classes on the companies dime and looked at doing a fully funded PhD. I didn't end up doing it.

Why?

1. The industry paid better than academia. So the brain drain was real. The informal training I had from PhD's in the company was vastly superior to the graduate level training at the university. Anyone who was any good at the applied side was not in academia. The ones left in academia were a very odd group with zero applied knowledge.

2. Most PhD hires failed miserably in the field. 9 out of 10 of them could not make the transition to the practical application of knowledge.

3. I saw a trend where smaller companies where hiring mostly industry experienced people for the positions (like I was).

So for me the time and investment was not worth it.

One of my friends made it halfway through his PhD. He then got sick of the politics and drama and noped out.

I'm a retired programmer and the only time I faced a situation where a PhD (or Master's) would have made any difference was when I worked for a company that was involved with defense contractors. In this situation we had a pay scale where the hourly rate at which we were billable to the client was based on our degree, something like $110/hr for a bachelor's, $140/hr for a Master's and $185/hr for a PhD. The fun part was that it didn't matter at all what field the advanced degree was in, so if I'd finished my Anthropology PhD way back when it would have meant I was billable at a much higher rate and correspondingly worth a much higher salary to my employer, despite its complete irrelevance to the actual tasks I faced.

We had a number of absolutely useless employees with PhDs who nevertheless brought in a lot more revenue than I did. It turned out later that some of the PhDs were made up - they had just put it on their resumes and nobody ever checks that shit. FWIW we also had a bunch of retired Air Force colonels on staff and nobody expected them to even show up to work on a regular basis. The corruption in that sector of the economy is just massive.

What if I don't want to sell my soul?

I want to pivot from tech/engineering to finance, any advice for me? Been thinking of doing an MBA but don't want to go back to school

oh my sweet summer child

They will, for the simple reason that the average person won't be able to tell the difference in the short term. AI isn't about "replacing" people in the entirety from cause to result. It's about providing a plausible facsimile of any role such that company X makes money while relegating the actual role to a niche.

Been looking for work for almost two years