Indeed. I moved academia -> short industry adventure -> academia.
I like both. Industry is more pleasing because you work on products that are directly used and you are judged (at least in a small company) on tangible results. The downside is that work is mostly driven by the most urgent needs or cash flow, so there is far less time to explore certain things deeper.
In academia on the other times, you are judged on getting grants (which is definitely process that is to a large extend out of your hands, and tends to favor people who were already successful in getting grants). On the other hand, you have far more time to explore, try, fail, and try again (as long as you are not a professor).
One should also realize that graduate studies highly differ per country. E.g. I did my PhD in The Netherlands, and there are no tests, or anything alike. I basically got funding for four years to do research, a small amount of teaching and to write my thesis. There was only one serious sanity check after the first year to filter out PhD candidates who were very unlikely to complete a thesis in four years.
I think this is a point that deserves more emphasis. It's easy to forget the degree to which US education is uncommonly expensive, among other things that skew its ROI.
Makes me wonder if I could afford a CS education abroad (being self-taught), without taking loans.
You usually don't have to pay tuition for a phd, especially in the sciences. The USA also tends to have decent stipends, more than or competitive with Europe.
The U.S. stipend is competitive with a lot of European countries, but less so the rich northern European countries (excepting the UK, which is very US-like in its educational system). A typical CS PhD-student salary in the Netherlands is around $35-40k plus pension contribution, and in Denmark it's around $50k plus pension contribution. Partly because these two countries consider PhD students to be salaried MSc-qualified researchers on 3- or 4-year contracts, vaguely like a junior form of postdoc. US stipends are more often in the range of $20-25k with no pension contribution. Although you can also go directly to a PhD from a BSc in the US, whereas you need an MSc first in most of Europe, which complicates the comparison.
Indeed. And there are additional advantages to being an employee as opposed to getting a stipend. E.g. I now work in Germany as a researcher (roughly the equivalent of assistant professor) and my four years as a PhD are counted towards my working experience. My wife and some colleagues who were on a stipend did not get any PhD years counted towards working experience, since to the system 'stipend' means 'student' means 'no real working experience'.
So, income-wise it also gives you an advantage of four years.
Ah, I see. I don't even have an ungrad CS degree, so I haven't looked that closely at the grad numbers. It sounds like the financial part may have been a bad example, with things like life quality and workload being better ones. I'm eager for more cross-comparison data, though.
To put this more bluntly: You should not do a phd in the sciences (in the US) if you are not getting paid. Its indicative that either A) the department has insufficient resources (bad situation) or B) they really don't want you as a graduate student (another bad situation).
