I agree, a PhD doesn't mean anything in itself. I don't think that they are entirely worthless as a process though.
In a PhD you potentially have vast intellectual freedom to learn what you want whilst earning a (small) income, rather than being molded by a company.
I say potentially because whilst I've had a lot of freedom over the past 3.5 years, I can't say that this would be true of all institutions and all supervisors. If you get treated and worked like cheap disposable labour then maybe you won't get as much out of it.
Personally I think I have gained a lot of skills that are useful outside of academia (largely implemented in Python). This happened because I knew that I didn't want to pigeon hole myself into academia and made choices correspondingly (e.g. Python instead of matlab or idl).
In a PhD you potentially have vast intellectual freedom to learn what you want whilst earning a (small) income, rather than being molded by a company.
I say potentially because whilst I've had a lot of freedom over the past 3.5 years, I can't say that this would be true of all institutions and all supervisors. If you get treated and worked like cheap disposable labour then maybe you won't get as much out of it.
Personally I think I have gained a lot of skills that are useful outside of academia (largely implemented in Python). This happened because I knew that I didn't want to pigeon hole myself into academia and made choices correspondingly (e.g. Python instead of matlab or idl).