Honest take: CS PhD vs going straight to industry I'm a 3rd year CS PhD student and I'm having a genuine crisis about whether to finish or leave for industry. I came in wanting to do ML research in academia but the landscape has changed SO much since I started. All the interesting ML work seems to be happening at companies with massive compute budgets that no university can match. My advisor is great, I like my research, but I keep seeing friends who went straight to industry after undergrad and they're making $250k+ while I'm on a $35k stipend. And honestly some of them are doing more interesting research than me because they have access to resources I can only dream of. I know the standard advice is "finish the PhD if you want to do research" but is that even true anymore in CS/ML? Genuinely asking.