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I just got an informal job offer from my friend's startup company here in Baltimore. It's almost exactly what I want to do (engineer soil microbes) and although it would only pay 60k, I have significant financial assistance from my parents to buy a house, and would come with significant equity in the company, which could have huge upside.
On one hand staying in Baltimore is hugely appealing. I have a ton of friends and community here, the crime problem in the city has gotten significantly better since I started my PhD, and I could actually afford a house, even without my parents' help. On the other hand, dating here has been total ass, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up the dream of academia just yet (although I think American universities are sinking ship for a variety of reasons), and while crime has gotten significantly more under control than when I moved here in 2020, there's still an anti-white racial animus here that I don't like. I'd also have to speed run the end of my PhD, but that again shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I guess I'd like your guys' thoughts: should I stay or should I go?
Taking inflation into account, that's only a little more than I was getting paid by my university just to work on my PhD. From an independent company who'd have you working on problems with more immediate benefit to them than "it makes the University stats look better" and/or "we could conscript him to teach if a prof gets sick or quits suddenly", it doesn't sound competitive at all until you consider the equity ... and equity in a startup is like a lottery ticket: even if the game isn't crooked, your ticket might make you fabulously wealthy but it's more likely to be worthless.
On the other hand, the job market does seem to be kind of awful right now. It might not be crazy to take something here to avoid resume gaps and build more experience while job hunting elsewhere, and if you're finishing up your PhD at the same time then maybe that's enough to prevent the typical "what was your last salary" question from making subsequent employers lowball you too.
On a side note that probably belongs in Culture War - the Baltimore homicide rate is now the lowest its been in nearly 50 years, after dropping more than 60% in 3 years! Wow! That still leaves a crazy high rate (my advice after my daughter's Johns Hopkins application and some crime map study: "you're not likely to get shot unless you go a mile south, or east, or southwest ... north looks nice ... I can see why they're medical specialists ...") but there's now like 500 fewer dead people than the 2015-2022 rate would have predicted, and that's pretty great.
I talked to some of my colleagues more about this (not my professors as they are completely unwilling to talk about not academia) and they said that I should definitely aim higher with my skillset, but that it could be a good temp job while I wait for the startup to get more funding/look for other positions. I'll get to do a lot more chromatography/protein work on stuff that hasn't been my specialty in the PhD which looks good on my resume. So not a don't take, but more of a don't sell yourself short and play hardball if necessary.
All of them??
I've definitely known many professors who reserve their highest respect for tenure-track professor jobs, but they'd all placed PhD students at government labs and in industry and been proud to do so. The long-term rate of academic PhDs creating new academic PhDs has to average to the population growth rate; this implies that either you're sending most of your grad students outside of academia deliberately or you're simply at the top of a pyramid scheme.
Even the ones who had zero intention of leaving academia themselves were proud of their networks outside academia. The obvious motive is that having former students and colleagues in industry gives you a constant source of blurbs to make research grant proposals sound more impressive; perhaps less obvious is that that increases their own BATNA when negotiating with their university or moving to another. One of my favorite Asimov quotes, about his conflicts as a chemistry prof and non-fiction writer versus his administration at BU:
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