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Comment by peruvian | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing is how well accepted this is. Go on Reddit's /r/cscareerquestions (a popular forum for programming job help) and you'd get downvoted by people who prefer to have to "study" for the test.

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That subreddit seems to only care about getting hired by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. It's funny because there is so much interesting work being done at smaller startups. If you are a new grad and get hired by one of the above companies, you usually aren't going to be doing the most interesting work.

Source: I work for one of those companies.

In my experience with those kinda people ("high achieving" students), they just want to work at a big, prestigious company. What they do there isn't that important to them.

While there are definitely students pursuing the prestige, I think you're painting this with too wide a brush.

The career progression for me and a lot of my friends who were high achieving students was to start out at one of those companies. A lot of us didn't have much money saved up, and didn't come from much money. After building up some money, and realizing the little surface area to work with at one of these companies, we left.

Visa issues are also a very real problem that chain a lot of good talent to these corporate juggernauts.

Fair point—it just seems that way after spending a lot of time in that sub :-)

The fact of the matter is that your average employee who lasted a year at Google is probably significantly better than their startup counterpart. Having this stamp of approval on your resume gives you a lot of bargaining power in the job search process. The churn at these companies is very high.

From the perspective of a recent (sub 5-year) grad, if I was qualified to work at one of the big, prestigious companies I would, for no other reason than the long term career doors it would open.

Isn't it perfectly rational for a new grad to want to get some prestige on his or her CV? Especially as those companies probably pay better than the alternatives.

yes! I had to unsubscribe because I got sick of being downvoted for reminding people that career goals are not always about making the most money.

In a consequentialist sense, isn't "fuck you money" the sort of singularity beyond which you can have your career any way you like? So any path to "fuck you money" should theoretically be ranked above a path that doesn't lead to "fuck you money."

It's sort of the same argument people use for justifying ranking AI X-risk as the highest concern for Effective Altruism.

I don't think any job/career/being employed (99% of the time) is a right path to "fuck you money", it's mostly entrepreneurship

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