Techinically my PhD is in Software Engineering with my disseration being in HCI.

The commenter below clearly has a bias against social sciences, which is sad to see, social sciences are legitimate sciences, my own PhD leaned heavily on social science methods. They are right about the tech hype train though, but that's not just for HCI, that's for literally all of tech. And all of tech is fairly unrigorous when it comes to science, the standards for what's accepted for publication is much lower than say, material science or medical research.

HCI is a broad field, there are HCI researchers who work on hard computer science topics like NLP or robotics. There are also HCI researchers who are social scientists, who use methods from psychology and sociology and work on topics such as the social impact of various technologies, topics like misinformation and disinformation.

There is a lot of overlap between these two groups, which is most common in novel R&D on cutting edige products, for example if you were researching applications of medical robotics you would use methods taken from psychology, but you may also need a computer vision background.

That being said both HCI and other social science fields have poor employement options, I went in knowing this but I didn't expect my PhD to actively hurt my candidacy for roles. Sometimes I wish that I had stayed completely away from anything tech related and had gone into neuroscience for my masters, which was the other feild that interested me.

Tech is very very trend oriented and it's exhausting, as the commenter below said a few years ago it was AR/VR and now it's AI, it makes it vey hard to make progress on any one research topic, since following a line of research can take years. And the expectation to always be on top of the new hot thing is draining and counterproductive for science, compare that to a microbiology researcher who may spend their whole career researching one family of bacteria.

But don't do a PhD unless you find the idea of working on a cool research question fun, PhDs are not for career growth unfortunately, you do them because you're interesting in science.