My advisor is a renowned computer systems researcher. Some of his students became professors in Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, etc. I’m pretty average and just became a software engineer after graduation. I have a feeling that my six years PhD time was wasted...Years of industry experience is ways more important than a PhD.
Does a PhD help you get a job? Yes, in certain research-heavy domains such as AI, distributed systems, quant dev, etc. Is six years industry experience > six years spent working on PhD? Yes. (Again, with a few domain-specific exception.) You need to play to your strength. Look for work that you can do better because of your PhD.
If you hold 6 patents from 6 years of PhD, then yes it’s well worth it.
You should have got a PhD from Janakiyammal university
Dude most high paid tech jobs say: PhD preferred so yes you are in a good place
Nope, it isn’t a waste of time. See all the top guys in great companies.