Here is a possibly unpopular opinion. I have a Phd (got it when I was young). In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly. I suspect my PhD topic was useless about 4-10 years after I finished the thesis. Of course, I got a few hundred citations, and this suggests that perhaps more enduring work was done based on mine, but in any case, I don't buy the dent in the universe argument for some fast changing fields (e.g. Deep Learning today). My wife was reading the life story of Louis Pasteur to our 6 year old, and it was remarkable what a dent his contribution made. Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One person has an algorithm named after them but it is also a bit obsolete (e.g. happened to a lot of classical CV and NLU algorithms post DL).
I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though.
Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.
Whenever anyone asks about pursuing a PhD, I usually tell them it only makes sense if one of more of these hold true: (1) You want to pursue a career in academia or research where the credentialing will matter; (2) You want access to equipment or material that is otherwise difficult to obtain; (3) You want the freedom & flexibility to pursue random interests for another couple years; or (4) You have a deep affinity for a specific topic at the frontiers of human knowledge.
The PhD definitely isn't required if your goal is to maximize learning & earning, apply research to commercialization, or to make a huge dent on the world -- the latter is just exceedingly rare statistically speaking.
Unless you’re a super genius or are super lucky, you’re likely not going to make a dent in any field especially at a PhD level. Not in these days at least.
But the product of a PhD, according to me and many mentors I respect, is you. It’s your mind and experience (not even necessarily the knowledge). A good phd fundamentally transforms who you are as a person. I’d wager a PhD is probably the most reliable way to effect real change in your mind as an adult. I probably realistically lost millions I could have earned in my twenties because I spent 9 years on my higher education (which has nothing to do with what I do now). But I’d not have done most anything different about it!
Caveat being that it needs to be a good PhD with a good mentor - which is harder to find than a good job or even a good partner lol.
> I’d wager a PhD is probably the most reliable way to effect real change in your mind as an adult
Not sure how you define change, but I'm pretty sure one experience with psychedelics is going to effect more change in about 4 hours than a PhD in 4 years. Not the same type of change, granted.
I'm three years into a PhD and during that time have tried some very potent psychedelics (psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, DMT and mescaline). Fearless experimentation - nothing more than science, right? :)
The change I've experienced throughout my PhD (that is, becoming a confident researcher with at least some depth to his ideas) has probably been more intense and almost certainly more long-lasting than my psychedelic experiences. Nurturing an uncomfortable familiarity with the immense limits of my knowledge, as well as regularly pushing myself to exhaustion in order to overcome those limits - inch by milimiter by angstrom - has completely transformed me as a person.
If anything psychedelics had the effect of making me believe that I had become enlightened to various true-natures-of-everything whilst providing me very little concrete understanding as to why this was the case. Much of the personal change that followed my experiences were less due to the substances and more due to my own desire for those experiences to mean something in the long run. Psychs are great and I'd recommend it wholeheartedly for those who have the courage (note: that's not to say that the classical psychedelics are dangerous - they're only dangerous for people who are scared of them). It is my opinion that one should not start believing that these things anything more than chemicals that make you feel a certain way, or help you along the path to doing so.
At least according to Feynman many of his successful colleagues said psychedelics helped them with their imagination. But I’ve not heard of anyone doing great science (or great anything really) because they went on a trip. It looks more like the Lu just get happier about their life but nothing else.
> But I’ve not heard of anyone doing great science (or great anything really) because they went on a trip.
Kary Mullis claims to have come up with the idea for PCR while on an LSD trip, though he also said a lot of nonsense so I'm not sure you should be too much weight on that.
But he also mentioned in one of his popular books about his own experiments in this regard that he stopped playing with these things because he considered the health of his brain too valuable for that.
> A good phd fundamentally transforms who you are as a person.
Huh? I've heard this a lot and I just don't see it. What is supposed to happen to you? I got one in math, published my 3 papers like they wanted, and that was it. I don't think I changed me one bit, other than not enjoying education/academia anymore.
I’d argue that you didn’t do a good PhD then? Even it’s original intent was to be an understudy and learn how to do research and create new knowledge. This changes slightly between fields but my take away is that a good PhD teaches you to find, and respect your boundaries, while constantly trying to push it. It teaches you to plan years ahead and work towards goals that are simultaneously abstract but large as well, with concrete practical steps. It should make “learning” second nature to you, where you don’t need courses or classes any more: you learn whatever you need to accomplish the project at hand.
If you’re able to do all of those things even before a PhD then I suppose you’re born gifted.
Also it should never be about just the fucking papers. Either you get them or you don’t who cares. Not me at least.
I get what you are saying, I just thought all of those things were either present or absent in a person way before going to university even, let alone getting a PhD. If you are not a self learner, I don't see how you can even excel in university in the first place, at least not in a heavily technical subject. No professor is really going to explain how any of that stuff works, if anything they are going to keep it vague and try to weed you out. You have to be able to read texts and make sense of it on your own, maybe with the occasional question to your prof for a detail or two, but if you cannot do 98% of the learning, you are toast. At least in math which I did, there is no way a person can lean on faculty for their knowledge, it really is up to you.
You’re either talking from a place where you’re taking every skill for granted or have no clue at all. I didn’t say anyone will spoon feed how to learn, you just have to figure it out yourself. But the PhD is precisely the time to do that, with occasional nudging from your mentor. I didn’t even have a great mentor and he still spent hours advising me on what I need to improve. If you didn’t get anything like that from your mentors I feel sorry for you.
Unless you’re working next to Terrance Tao, I.e., at the top of whatever game you’re supposed to be in, you clearly haven’t pushed yourself to be better. Of course that’s a choice to begin with if you want to even do it. But given that you do, a PhD should have been the time when you got better at everything no matter where you started. If you already started with amazing skills then you should have become world class at it by now. If you did a good PhD that is. In your case, if the 3 papers you published were “pedestrian” by your standards, you and your mentors should both have pushed for more ambitious stuff.
> In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly
That's a very surprising statement. The number of advances in systems in the 21st century is.. embarrassingly low. It feels like a stale dead field. People keep pumping money into what is basically a dead body at this point.
> consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I
I don't think that this is good advice. Certainly I would never suggest it to my own students. It's hard to see what they would gain.
So you go to CVPR or NeurIPS, you see hundreds of posters per session and talk after talk. Maybe you stick around for workshops to interact with people. So what? This gives you zero information about what you will be doing as a PhD student or how useful your PhD will be.
The way to figure out if you want to do a PhD is simple: do research first. Spend a summer in a research lab related to some topic you like and figure out if you like it.
> I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD).
Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!
> Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!
I do not necessarily agree with the notion that many fields are dead --- they could just be "resting" until some paradigm-shifting idea comes along, at which point they may spring back to life --- but I do agree with your observation that many people with PhDs have to move out of science or research. There simply are too few jobs available in research, so many people with PhDs eventually transition to non-scientific or non-research roles as their opportunities to continue doing research diminish. It's just economics. I do have to agree that it is frustrating how slow progress can be while conducting research, but I think people leave science more often due to the lack of job opportunities than the lack of progress in their research.
As an undergrad, I asked if I should take a control theory class, and was told it was a dead field.
It has become pretty important, since: all the quad copter controllers run it, and it is in network flow management protocols. I would have used it, unlike most of what I did study.
I think your idea about how this dent is supposed to work is a misconception.
If you made some nontrivial insights that were only temporarily useful but other people used it to make their own insights without having to go through the manyears of doing your work, and then the process repeats, there is something permanent there that would not have happened without your work.
Of course someone else might have done your work in your stead, but the same is true for literally all the other scientific greats we can think off, it's extremely unlikely that we would just end up at a standstill with nobody figuring out what's going on if certain people never existed.
Counterpoint: I wrote my Master Thesis on Value Networks in 2004. While I got a perfect grade on it it was largely unnoticed. Now with Social+ and Crypto getting together, it becomes really useful for my work almost two decades later. So I am saying, give it time.
You are missing the point. I had a lovely 20 years where my work didn't connect to my Master Thesis much. Pick an area where you want to work in because you like the area.
Which GP did not claim it was. Also: besides being pedantic this comment mostly seems to be to put the writer down in some way, so applying the principle of charity here, what did you want to achieve with your comment?
There are outstanding master thesis, which introduced quite revolutionary concepts or algorithms. E.g., John Canny developed the canny edge detector within his master thesis. There are of course other examples...
One outstanding example is not much in the way of a proof.
A masters thesis is a few month's work from an untrained student going through an idea that's already being explored by the school's research group. A PhD typically involves far more deep independent work that's deemed relevant by at least one research institution.
I don't know what you need to be huffing to consider a master student at the final stages "untrained". A master is basically the highest form of schooling there is.
... except for a PhD. A master's is typically an admission requirement to a PhD - at least, around here.
In my experience, a master student's final project typically constitute their first foray into / encounter with academic research. So yes, untrained in that sense.
Around here, a training and education plan is required. Some institutions have a requirement on ECTS or another form of "study points" a PhD student must have gathered before defence.
The fact that you are paid doesn't preclude it being a traineeship.
> PhD is not schooling. It's a research job. You get paid to do a PhD.
No not really. A PhD student at most receives a scholarship, and currently at least in Europe has to undergo a curricular part comprised of a dozen or so courses. How does that not count as schooling?
If I'm not mistaken the only exception to the schooling requirement is if a student is able to publish a few research papers on a topic that are coherent and related to a concrete research topic that could support their thesis.
This is not the way it is in the Netherlands. You get a full salary and don't have any courses. You after all already did all relevant courses during your masters.
>>I don't know what you need to be huffing to consider a master student at the final stages "untrained".
I don't know what could possibly lead you to believe that someone just starting off his master's thesis has any experience whatsoever in research, and has any contact with any academic topic beyond the standard curriculum that every single one has to go through to get a degree.
No, not experienced. But a master degree generally includes research as part of the curriculum. There is a world of difference between trained and experienced.
While technically correct how does that relate to the dialogue above? A PhD is even deeper work in a niche topic than a masters, right however that doesn't contradict that the niche know how may become useful later.
Louis Pasteur is one of my most favorite scientists. That being said, he won't have been able to do it all on his own. Variolation was practised in Africa, India and China long back[1].
The record shows that [...] Edward Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox.[...]” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox[1].
That knowledge (regardless of the accuracy of the specific story of the dairymaid) helped Jenner to develop the smallpox vaccine, and that in turn helped Pasteur in coming up with his array of vaccines and other innovations.
So, I would argue that every person who contributes to research is making a dent in the universe. Your published paper may have been the impetus for someone else to make a "visible dent". Publishng papers of failures would have been ideal, but until that happens, every person who contributes to research is contributing to the progress of humanity in the long run.
>Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier).
One could argue that research in general is a probabilistic, distributed gradient descent search and you are fulfilling a certain voluntary social duty even if you are not successful.
Unfortunately that doesn't apply to many pursuits because of various perverse incentives in modern academia...
I started my PhD in software engineering at 51 after decades of work in IT.
The point is that if you value money over knowledge and unique experiences, then by all means keep doing what you love the most.
Some of use are prepared to build up our savings and then live frugally on less than ramen noodles stipend whist pursuing making a tiny dent in the universe of knowledge in a specialized field.
At my university there were dozens of mature age PhD students doing research in a broad spectrum of fields. None of whom I met were rich in materialistic terms.
In Australia, all Group 8 universities (most are in the World Top 100 rankings) will accept mature age students. It's not your age, it is your research proposal that earns a place. Typically you need a prior research Masters in a related field and bring a substantial amount of industry experience and connections. Universities are encouraged to increase their collaborations with industry.
In order to prepare a successful proposal you need to read 20-100 recent papers in the field and cite at least 10 of them. Going to conferences is good for social networking, but you will only get a briefest summary of the research being conducted. The purpose of a presentation at a conference is to raise sufficient interest for some of the attendees to read the presenter's paper(s).
I'm a mature student returning this year. I'd say a lot of universities in Ontario are very open to mature students, and they've really made the process easy. I can't speak to other places, but I've been very pleasantly surprised.
The Open University of the Netherlands is, generally speaking, open to the idea of part-time mature PhD students who have a regular job and pursue the PhD 1-2 days a week. We also have regular full-time positions (when the funding deities have smiled upon us); the latter are funded, the former typically not.
And as a follow up to this, are there any that are open to nontraditional students with an interest in research? Stopping everything you are doing for a minimum of 4 years is a complete nonstarter for the majority of working people, some of which would be great at research.
After hiring many industry researchers at MSc and PhD level, I think the ones with PhDs are better researchers. The knowledge they gained of their niche subject is not that important but their ability to do research is very important.
If you need to do complex multi year research projects (e.g. developing new machine learning algorithms), a PhD is useful. It teaches you how to plan research, break through research blockages and communicate with others to a degree very difficult to gain in any other way.
Very odd to me to see these two stories (late PhD and 'ed') next to each other in HN. Last night I discovered my great aunt's old notebook from her schooldays and posted it on Insta.
She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)
It’s never too late if it’s something you want to do :)
Hell, I have a friend who’s 20 years into his DPhil taking it at a snails pace, but gives him accommodation when he’s in town for the pub.
People talking about how much of a dent you’ll make within your PhDs field… almost definitely zero! Your thesis will probably be read by you, your supervisor, and viva board. You’re still a student and it’s a course on how to do research. It could be fun to dig deep into a subject and that’s a totally awesome reason to do one, making a significant change to your field is very very very unlikely.
The funny thing is that while it is possible to get a PhD at an advanced age, it is probably impossible to land a scientific job at that age.
Sometimes I think when the kids are grown up and I've saved enough for retirement, I'd like to go into science again. Just for fun. I would probably be happy to move to some crazy place and get an intern's salary if the project was interesting and meaningful. Alas, that doesn't seem possible in the academic system.
This bizare notion that university exists for the purpose of getting jobs is fairly recent throughout most of the world, and should be stomped.
Outside of a few specialised fields (medicine, law, etc), the purpose of university was to learn, challenge and grow. This crazy concept that everyone should go there to get a degree for their career is just degrading the institutions and fleecing students of their money.
Actually it gets harder and harder to pursue an academic 'career' if you actually obtain your PhD inside the traditional system later than the age of 30 (e.g. in Germany), if you are not willing to change the academic system to circumvent recent rules of 'academic age' associated with a lot of newly created tenure positions. Funnily it will actually be quite easy to get a professorship at one of our universities of applied sciences if you come from industry with a track record and have a PhD (even obtained at 60). At the same time salary of a professor (at least for his work at the uni) will be more comparable to junior staff in other parts of the industry/world. The academic job market is very strange. General recommendation: don't do your PhD if you care mostly about this part and do not want to take a huge risk.
If your goal is actually “pursue scientific advances” rather than “put food on the table”, “make sure I get a job when I graduate” or “make my PI look good”, then doing it at 61 makes perfect sense.
My aunt did her PhD after she retired. Through working for decades in her field she had developed a hunch and a personal theory about the best way to do a thing, and she basically just wanted to see if she was right.
As much as PhD students are often "funded" by their university, they're only really surviving at best. I'd like to do a PhD more than almost anything. However, at 41 and well into a career with each job paying higher than the last, the opportunity cost is becoming more and more prohibitive. Stepping back from earning (and saving!) for five years seems like a kiss of death to me and a virtual guarantee that I won't be able to retire comfortably. These kinds of articles, while well meaning, really irk me. They come across as completely tone death and inadvertently cast a fair bit of light on the author's personal financial situation (or perhaps their lack of awareness of it).
Doing a PhD later in my life is also my bucket list and I suspect I probably won’t be able to cross it off unless I really prioritise it or get lucky. That being said I think you are being a bit unfair to the author. They do acknowledge that you need to have an opportunity.
> My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it
Also, you are 41 and I would definitely agree that doing one when you are in your 40s would be almost impossible due to things like career, kids and mortgages etc. But the author around 60! I don’t think it’s “tone deaf” to suggest that one may be able to find some freedom to squeeze in a phd while working part time after working till 60.
Edit: I will acknowledge that having a good job and being able to comfortably retire or cut income around 60 is a privilege that many people unfortunately won’t have. But I don’t think its unachievable though.
If you can free up one day per week from your regular job, you can pursue a PhD in part-time. It would likely be unfunded, take a little longer, and there may be expenses involved, but still, the option is there.
Moreover, this dramatically lowers the opportunity cost.
At least here in Sweden it is not uncommon for employers to help sponsor employees getting their PhD. The basic deal is you split your time 50/50 between work and study and your research has to be something directly relevant and useful to to company and what you do there. Often you will be directly applying the research you do at the university to a project you have at work, and your work project will be the 'platform' on which your research is tested and evaluated.
In exchange the company will pay you 50% of your salary plus a stipend so that your total take home salary doesn't drop off too much. Does such a thing exist where you live?
Yea, it's called "Industridoktorand" and many of the larger engineering/tech companies (say 1k+ employees) I've been involved with had 1 or 2 people doing it.
I'm wondering if you would define a higher than median US salary to be "surviving at best", as most CS PhD programs are at that amount plus health insurance. But certainly far from a FAANG salary, and I agree that there are disciplines usually with smaller programs that are "surviving at best."
That's not the correct comparison. Household income often includes two incomes, which is going to bring the value up. Your same link says the median earnings for a male individual is $61,417. Not significantly less, but this distinction is often important.
Median personal income is around $36k. [0] Annualized median earnings of the full-time employed are around $52k. [1] Households often have more multiple income earners.
Wikipedia notes, "The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019 with a base year of 2019 for all people over 15 years old.[3] The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round."
Of course there is also cost of living, and, quoting the AVETH survival guide (2012): "It is common in many departments to
reduce the amount of payment from 100 percent to 80 percent or 60 percent.
However, you are still expected to work full time. Make sure you know what
you are about to sign."
> Still, being a part-time graduate student while running a business wasn’t easy. I forgot the meaning of ‘spare time’ for a while, and my company took a financial hit because I could not work as much as I had before, and had to turn down clients.
It's somewhat different if you can get a PhD part-time and have the income of a business to support you. By all means, get a PhD on the side if you can make it work.
I got my phd in communication. Some times when I feel restless at my current job I think about a career change but I would never get another phd. Go to school and take some classes? Sure. I've thought about that a lot. But go through the pressure of preparing a dissertation and defending it again? No thanks.
This is so awesome! I like to think it’s our life experiences that really bring a lot to science. So much of it is interdisciplinary these days and there’s so much opportunity to explore and be creative.
I think there are actually many advantages to doing a PhD at an older age. Especially after having a fairly long work experience and if you can bring that to another field say Biology.
I am going to go back to school and get either a chemical or electrical engineering b.s., and then maybe go on to phd, at 51. then we will see about graduate level.
I know lots of people still working at 75, so 20 - 30 year for my final career is longer than I spent at any previous career so far.
Reading articles like this makes me wish I'd pursued a degree. Simply because without a degree, there is no path to a PhD or any postgrad research. Not that those are currently on my radar, but maybe when I'm in my 50s I'll regret not having the option.
you can always start now by doing an undergrad. :)
I've had students aged above 50 years old in my undergrad degree, and I plan on going back to school myself for another undergrad in an unrelated field in my 30s.
It's about the journey, not the destination. The inspirational thing with this story is the combination of insight, skill, and hard work. The degree is the reward for that.
Because the "why" is always going to be personal. A PhD in CS is never going to be a sane financial choice, and it has heavy risks if you find yourself with a bad advisor. Anyone who has thought about doing a PhD critically knows that there is no reason to tell someone else to do one, and that their reasons for doing one likely only apply to them.
It depends on the area of CS. Eg: a PhD from a good group in NLP/CV or ML generally can get you a fantastic well-paying position in industry that would be out of reach without the PhD. Same for, e.g., cryptography.
I learned a lot in my PhD that I wouldn't have learned in my subsequent engineering job: Public speaking with confidence, how to be proactive in your job, how to apply for public funding, teaching experience. How to present results, and how to write. I had exposure to what (at that time) were rare computing resources, which is useful now with in the cloud era. And I learned a ton about my specific field of course - which is probably not monetarily useful, but was a lot of fun and you can't learn it in such depth anywhere else.
As someone with a CS PhD and 7 years in industry, I can tell you that they will teach you different stuff. Unsurprisingly. Hard to compare the "amount of knowledge" though. Even if your only goal is becoming a good engineer it is not obvious to me what the best path is. Yes, you learn a lot in industry the first couple of years, but those things you will also learn when you enter industry after the PhD. So 4 years after a master you are definitely a better engineer if you went straight into industry. But 10 years after a master, comparing 10 years in industry vs 4 year PhD vs 6 year industry it's not as clear cut anymore.
Okay, do it. Indeed I've seen it happen, but... it requires a "certain kind of person" to pull it off. And I certainly wouldn't bet on it as a probability.
It's very easy for newly minted engineers to get sucked into the grind. Most entry level engineering work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, and attending meetings. It's easy to become so busy with those things that you forget your math & theory (or whatever fundamentals you learned in your field). Many engineers are happy to operate the machines (CAD, IDE, etc.) all day long, and get paid a lot.
To learn more in those 3 years requires some combination of potential, motivation, and luck. You might be someone who refused to join the grind, and were strong enough to get away with, or found a great mentor. You might be capable of grinding for 8 hours, then going home and immersing yourself in a fructifying side project.
Granted, a PhD doesn't guarantee any of those things either. It also requires potential, motivation, and luck. There's massive attrition in PhD programs, and they will let you render yourself unemployable. There's no filter at the start of the PhD program that weeds out people who will struggle with the soft skills required for success in higher level jobs.
Depends pretty much if the company is doing real engineering, the one accepted by the Engineering Order, and not putting an "engineer" label on coders out of boot camps.
They teach entirely different things. My first 3 years working taught me a lot about the real world practicalities of writing useful software, as a team, that you can charge money for. It taught me very little about doing research or the cutting edge of my field. I suspect a PhD would be the exact opposite.
Although the article is about getting a PhD later in life, many of the comments here have been about the merits of getting a PhD (or a Masters then a PhD) right after finishing undergraduate school.
The usual points against are the very low probability of having a successful academic career due to the difficulty of getting a tenured position and the very low chance of actually making a major research contribution to your field, and when you then give up an an academic career and get a job in programming or finance the opportunity cost of the say 6 years you spent not doing that job.
It is true that the longer you delay starting that programming or finance career, the farther the gap in income and wealth between you and your fellow undergraduates who went straight into programming or finance.
It's like a rocket race in a Newtonian universe. If we have identical rockets capable of constant 1/10 g acceleration and have lifelong race but you get a 6 year head start, the farther we get into the race the bigger the distance between us.
In that rocket race after 5 years you'd be 0.4 parsec farther along than me, and you'd be moving away at 0.52 c.
After 10 years, you'd be 1.3 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.64 c faster than me.
After 15, the gap is 2.3 parsecs, and you are going 0.65 c faster than me.
At 30 years, you are 5.1 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.68 c faster than me.
At 50 years, you are 8.9 parsecs ahead of me, and going 0.72 c faster than me.
But in terms of time at 10 years you are 6 years ahead of me. And at year 50 you are still 6 years ahead of me. Anyplace you reach I reach 6 years later.
Both of us are going to make so much money that unless we have unusually expensive tastes and hobbies we are both going to be quite well off when we retire even if we retire at the same age, able to continue to live our preferred lifestyles. That 6 year head start of yours largely just means you'll leave a bigger estate when you die.
I think this takes a lot of the force out of the opportunity cost argument.
On the pro-PhD side on the other hand, at least for STEM PhDs, is that it is ~6 years where are getting paid to learn and research something of great interest to you. And if you turn out to be one of the rare people who actually can have a successful academic career this is the only way you are going to find that out.
And don't forget the regret cost in not doing it. I didn't seriously consider graduate school because I was sure I would end up programming anyway. But I didn't lose my interest in math and physics. Many a PBS Space Time episode makes me wish I had a much deeper understanding of physics than I do now. It is possible to learn much of that on your own, but it is a lot harder and slower than it would have been had if I had went to grad school for it.
I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though.
Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.