Was a PhD necessary to solve outstanding math problems?

Good question. It's tough. Anyone who has 5+ years of experience and works at one of FAANG or Lyft, Uber, Square, Stripe, Airbnb, etc in NYC/SFBA/SEA is almost certainly earning $300k+, yes (probably closer to $400k now).

That being said if you are qualified to work for one of those companies and they're paying you for expertise in a specialty, you definitely have the technical skills needed to earn more as a solo consultant. For example, leading projects in distributed systems as an L6/E6 engineer at Google/Facebook would neatly set you up to start a boutique consultancy like Jepsen/Aphyr.

At that point whether or not you earn more becomes a question of your network, because you have everything else going for you. Very experienced security consultants can also make $500k+ at a 70% utilization rate by charging as much as the larger shops, doing better work and pocketing the spread on the weekly rate.

Speaking as a former consultant who earned more than a FAANG salary at equivalent years of experience: full time work trades off autonomy and uncertainty for lower but relatively guaranteed pay. You're never paid what you're actually worth at these companies, in the sense of value contributed. You're paid according to the cost of labor in your area.

Sorry to ramble, this is something I like chatting about.

Who does the article mean, by "robotics (invented by someone with no higher education)"? Wikipedia tells me that [in] 1948, Norbert Wiener formulated the principles of cybernetics, the basis of practical robotics [1], but Wiener had a PhD from Harvard [2] and certainly much education, at all levels.

The wikipedia article on robotics has a number of other names of people who contributed in various ways to robotics from ancient to modern times, but I'm not sure who fits the article's description. Did Heron of Alexandria have a "higher education", sensu stricto?

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

The reason I ask is because it’s starting to appear, to not be worthwhile anymore. Yes, some people want the autonomy and independence. But it seems securing the gig itself is tough.

For large companies, with millions of dollars budgeted for a project, they seem to want an off-the-shelf system from a vendor, for a technology qualification selection, with another large company behind it. Because that customer “feels” safer that the larger vendor will not go out of business. It’s the old adage: “No one ever got fired for selecting IBM/Microsoft”.

So, it seems unlikely that a company will hire an expensive consultant, to do something, when they can hire cheaper senior level programmers, and put them on the clock full time.

Granted, some companies do operate at that level, where they try to bring in a specialist to work on something, and get rid of them after a few months. But, they tend to hire these specialists via a contracting agency, where the specialist is deemed an employee of that agency. Hence, the specialist here is not really a consultant, but an employee of a 3rd party. And instead of getting consulting rates, that employee just gets a normal hourly salary.

Also, this allows the customer company, to not have a full time staff, and allows them to easily get rid of people, without violating any lay-off laws. Or having to make some embarrassing lay-off announcement publicly. They just silently kill their staff. Although I heard some states like California, is trying to crack down on this, with new laws, but I’m sure companies will find some ways around it.

Although now, it seems the most expensive hired guns, are the new experts in some deep learning library, or someone pawning off knowledge in some AI or Machine Learning solution.

This appears to be the new valuable gold rush. So if you’ve kept up on this, then it’s time to sell shovels to the desperate prospectors.