Anons. A PhD is 5-6 years of your life getting zero hard skills (no employer cares about soft skills, as long as you're not a sperg and can talk you're good), not getting paid or being paid peanuts, and becoming increasingly isolated from your friends, families, and passions because of your deadlines. You're training to solely become an academic in an economy that's pumping out more graduate degrees than it can sustain and where there are only double digit TT jobs per year with 200+ applicants to them.
Once you get out you're financially hobbled for life paying off your loans and being 5-6 years behind your peers who have established their careers elsewhere. Academia is a fucking joke and only those who got in during the '60s-'80s have lived cushioned lives.
t. Anon who went into industry and actually making money after graduating and then watching their smart, ambitious STEM buddies slowly sink into depression in graduate school.
