I would like to seek advice on whether or not to take a PhD offer from a good university.

My only concern is the PhD will take at least 4 year's commitment. During the period I won't have good monetary income.

I am also concerned whether the PhD will help my future career development. My career goal is software engineering only.

Some of the PhD info:

The PhD is CS related. The research area is Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Nature Language Processing. More specifically, the research topic is Deep Web search.

Some of backgrounds:

I worked in Oracle for 3 years in database development after obtained a CS degree from some good university.

In last year I received an email telling an interesting project from a professor and thereafter I was lured into his research team. The team consists of 4 PhD students; those students have little or no industry experiences and their coding skills are really really bad. By saying bad I mean they do not know some common patterns and they do not know pitfalls of the programming languages as well as idioms for doing things right.

I guess a at least 4 year commitment is worth of serious consideration. I am 27 at this moment. If I take the offer, that implies I will be 31+ upon graduation. Wah... becoming.. what to say, no longer young.

Hence, here I am seeking advice on whether it is good or not to take the PhD offer, and whether a CS PhD is good for my future career growth as a software engineer?

I do not intent to go for academia.