A PhD makes you a better researcher, all things being equal. Companies have research scientists and hiring a PhD holder to work as a research fellow is not a bad idea. Most of the world-renowned Computer scientists and AI researchers are Research Scientists in companies like Microsoft, Google, Baidu and So on.

hi Mohamed,

my opinio is that its waste to use Ph.D. for EE jobs. those jobs are practical and involve using tools. Ph.D.s should coordinate groups of EE and use methods and systems and not tools. Ph.D. are sometimes, forced to work underrated j0obs because there is not jobs awailable for them in industry, only in academic societies where is pay check much less

Any paying job is good use of your skills.

Not being paid at all is the waste.

It really depends on the particular job. How much research is needed? Many silicon valley startups, and Universities that have R+D efforts (MiT Haystack, for one) are on the bleeding edge of the state of art of what can be done with current methods in computation, for example distributed processing, extracting data from noise, vision, ai, optimization, etc. Not having a chief scientist (w/PhD) to guide software development would be a mistake - basically venture capitalists throwing money away on irrational optimism.

Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.