Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.

If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:

- they cost much less

- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.

Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.

You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.

More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.

I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.

We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).

I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.

> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.

Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.

Even if you’re looking outside your field, the prestige of a PHD is offset by the fact that they assume (accurately) you’d rather be elsewhere.