Agreed, but, I don't see what a PhD has to do with any of these. My snarky, probably very ignorant, reply would be something like, if you want intellectual freedom, get a subscription to a library. Renegotiate your lowly Bachelor of Sciences' contract to work fewer hours, that'll get you physical freedom.
Seriously. IMO someone reading through, say, the TAOCP, Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis, Horowitz & Hill's TAOE, or any selection of good, difficult books like these, will have acquired undoubtedly more intellectual freedom afterwards than any PhD graduate. For starters, it's self-directed study, which is orders of magnitude harder, and more important to self-growth, than study directed by an advisor, or any bit of structure. It's also faster. It doesn't sink you in any significant debt, which is a plus on the order of physical freedom. It's much more eclectic, which is incredibly important, both in terms of the monopoly power you'll bear, and the scientific value your unique analogies between concepts will create. Hopefully.
Sure, there's no paper afterwards to show. My take is that, credentials or not, you'll still have to show your competence to a potential employer or investor, your exposition tailored to the particular needs you suspect they have.
It depends on your subject. Libraries will only take you so far if you need access to a million-dollar microscope or a petaflop supercomputer to get your work done.
So be careful when you say "[reading these books will give you] more intellectual freedom afterwards than any PhD graduate." That's simply not true. And I'm not even touching on the benefits of having a good mentor...
> So be careful when you say "[reading these books will give you] more intellectual freedom afterwards than any PhD graduate." That's simply not true.
You do have a point, but the way I see true "intellectual freedom" (lolcraft may have meant somth similar) is that let's say you spend your late 20s-early 30s slaving away at a post-doc only to have a chance to access a "petaflop supercomputer" and then you suddenly decide that you actually are really interested in classical Persian poetry and you'd like to devote some time to learning Persian, only to realize you do not have time for that because hey, somebody needs to write those papers for the grant money to come in and your chances for tenure to remain intact.
Replace "Persian poetry" with the study of Mathematical logic, the reading of the pre-Socratics or trying to make sense of the early-medieval migration patterns, as things stand right now both the people following PhDs and those too immersed in industry are not "intellectual free" because they have no time for these sorts of intellectual pursuits. We do need to find that middle-ground between extreme-science and industry again, we do need universal people like Leonardo and Democritus back.
1) Most engineers do not work at Google, and
2) I have plenty of friends who do/did, and, guess what?: They still write code all day! Most of which does not do neat things like drive cars, but rather: increases AdWord click-through rates! Or: manages address book contacts. Fun!
I don't care how much free pizza and foosball you offer me, nothing can match the freedom of pursuing my own interests.
How many PhDs have $40,000 to their name, as opposed to $4.00?
How many MTV or NYC Google engineers have $400k to their name after 5 years, as opposed to $4,000 and a bunch of money torched on rent? Google pays well, but not as well as you seem to think.
I'd say that (2) wins, if only because someone who sticks with Google for 5 years is probably one who made Real Googler and now has a fair amount of freedom. Google is pretty nice once you're above the Real Googler Line.
I don't want to veer into minutiae, but I think you underestimate how much someone can save in the amount of time it takes to get a PhD. Say, 5 years on the PhD, at $50k savings/year, gets you to $250k by itself. Add in investment earnings from that, and you top $300k. ($400k was a bit optimistic.)
But that's aside from the actual point. It's not even about what the Googler does after they've done 5 years. That kind of money is enough to do whatever the hell you want to kind of money. You want to read papers all day? You can do it full time and pay yourself a graduate student's stipend for life, without having to worry about pleasing the dictates of your advisor, academic fads, TAing, and internal politics. Even the lucky students who become professors still have to apply for funding and teach students, on top of producing popular research to get tenure: with route 2), you never have to apply for funding, and you can choose how much time you want to devote to teaching and what kind of teaching you want to do.
It's fair to quibble with the actual numbers, but the point is that money buys you a hell of a lot. The fact that someone might not save, or pathologically continue slaving away at the corporate behemoth they hate once they've saved enough, doesn't change that possibility.
But his point, which I do want to reiterate, is that the vast majority of software engineers don't have that kind of saving/investing power. Sure, you might earn $80k/year out of college, but then you pay 1/3 of your income in taxes and another 20% in rent on a one-bedroom apartment and pretty soon you find you've got about $3300/month to pay all your bills, buy food, make student-loan payments, and basically live your life. In my experience, it came to a total saving power of a little less than half what you described.
Now admittedly, $20k/year is a hell of a lot to be able to save for normal Americans! But at the end of five years it leaves you with $100k of savings, not $250k. In the Boston area where I was, you couldn't even put a down-payment on a house with that little money. It was basically just lots and lots of beer money.
On the other hand, if you know a magical company in a magical land, perhaps adorned with pastel ponies, at which I can make enough money with a low enough cost of living to retire after five or ten years to become a self-funded gentleman scientist, I'll certainly take that over graduate school. I just don't think it actually exists, as you can probably tell by the sarcasm.
