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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I... I just can't tell if that's sarcasm. I mean, don't want to sound harsh or overly preachy / guilting, but cracker on a stick, that looks like a profound lack of awareness and perspective.

What higher result and reward for a good interview do you expect than a job at one of the highest paying most respected companies in the software world?

I will spare all the stereotype of people who'd kill to get it; presumably you are talented, worked hard, and deserve it. Good on ya. Sad to see it go to someone who doesn't appreciate it though :-/

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To be clear, the answer is a company that requires the hard work I put in to get in. For most people out of college Amazon is their “safety” company because you can get an offer with 1 coding challenge. Unfortunately, because of this people assume I’m lazy and inherently unintelligent because I joined out of undergrad.

A company isn’t better just because their interview process has more coding. The “best” tech company depends on your goals, but if one of those goals is to have the opportunity to work with some pretty brilliant people and rapidly grow as an engineer, you can certainly accomplish that at Amazon.

It’s an interesting phenomenon how young people create pecking orders of which companies are the best to work at while at the same time having very little experience to make such conclusions.

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon.

I’m only a few years out of college, but this always seemed strange to me, on both sides. It’s more surreal on the employer side, because the real world is so different from the game the cohort you describe is playing.

In high school, I thought it was insane how some of the smartest people I knew pinned their entire future on getting into MIT or whatever. The ones that did get into “ivy leagues“ are working junior roles at consulting firms, which seems like a very predatory line of work to me, but whatever.

In college, I thought it was insane that second years were resume hacking and leetcoding, only to apply to FAANG companies. When they didn’t get in, they basically gave up it was FAANG or bust (!). Many of them graduated with no internship experiences to speak of, at companies big or small. Those that “got in” got a lot of street cred amongst friends, but seemingly have no idea what to do with their lives.

My hypothesis is that their houses are not free-standing. I think they genuinely do not know what they want out of their lives or careers, so they autopilot in to chasing after some vague sense of prestige. The longest line at the career fair must be the best, and I want to be the best, so there shall I go.

Some will say they want to work at Google, so that they can “work anywhere”. OK, then what? crickets, or something something change the world. I don’t know how you can structure your career or life around something so ephemeral, but maybe I’m the weird one.

If there are any ex members of this cult reading this, can you shed some light for me, on how this works out?

It sounds like the never ending prestige ladder climb in business, finance, or law, you first struggle to get admitted into a top tier university, then either a top tier business school or law school, then a prestigious firm. A career in medicine could potentially be like this as well. But not other types of engineering, as far as I know.

Maybe the path of all top-paying secure white collar professions start resembling each other at some point. Excess competition breeds people gaming the applications process and focusing on it for its own sake to get in, instead of figuring out what they want to do once they’re in- besides get paid high salaries, of course.

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