as someone who considered doing a phd but instead took the path of working for 4 years at Google, this was an interesting read :) software engineering and making a real world impact™ (plus money and perks) were fun for the first few years, but it's slowly gotten more monotonous and I've been missing thinking about / working on interesting problems. I told myself that in theory I should be able to just... do research on the side, but the 9 to 5 really gets you haha. certainly tradeoffs to taking the safe and economically rewarding path
