The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
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I think one of the problems around targeting prestige vs. targeting excellence is that we know what it takes to do something prestigious, but excellence is hard to define, and generally comes with much higher risk. Landing a fancy job at Facebook or Google means you tick the box on success without much risk. The criteria that defines success when you start a company, for instance, or work at a non-profit, is much less clear. That compounds the material risk of doing these ventures with a social risk of taking these jobs in the first place. So then what would would it take, in American society, to replace the prestige baiting with an emphasis on achieving actual excellence instead?
It’s difficult to replicate either the social or monetary prestige these days, as monetary rewards flow to VC and known consumer experiences are crowded.
Monarchs and aristocrats and the like
My cousin grew up in a nice northern jersey suburb. Circa 2003, everyone in her circle was trying to get into the same 6 schools to be a doctor or investment banker.
It was weird but rational path to achieve a similar lifestyle. Of course my uncle was an accountant and my aunt a social worker... they bought into suburbia in the 80s when you did not need to be a doctor!
I think part of the issue here is that people may be talking about optimizing different risks. For example, minimizing financial risk may lead to wholly different decisions than, say, minimizing the risk that you will have a fulfilling careers. At times, they may even be orthogonal.
I don't actually think "excellence" is that hard to define. It basically boils down to effectiveness at solving organizational problems (and those may not always be technical in nature). The difficulty is when the problems the individual values doesn't align with what society values. If you can build excellence at a problem highly valued by society, you might be able to have high-status as well. Jonas Salk comes to mind, even though he didn't necessary get financial success.
I personally think the "high prestige" path is followed because there is a clearer template. I couldn't find the excerpt from William Deresiewicz's book, but I remember a quote from a student who was relaying why some from elite colleges struggle upon graduation. The gist was that from kindergarten to college graduation to accepting their first post-graduation job, there was a relatively clear cut template of moving from scholastic excellence, strong extra-curriculars, elite internships, etc. But after graduating and accepting a job at one of the few "prestigious" fields like law, finance, medicine, or consulting. there was no longer a well-defined template and many struggle to know what to do next.
At the moment, that standing is achieved by participating in institutions that serve the oligarchy (BigLaw, BigTech, etc.)
This is a trivial problem to solve. Just create excellence-based communities, like the Linux kernel development community.
The principal obstacle is that working folks don't have the spare resources to create financial stability for high achievers in these communities. We need the approval from the oligarchy, manifested through corporate sponsorship.
It would be nice if Satoshi would come out of the woodwork and bankroll alternatives, the way Signal has been bankrolled.
By the time you’re making even low 6 figures, the idea of interacting with an Stanford grad who has done nothing of note with their education and makes something comparable to you is quaint.
Generally speaking, distribution of US income as a proxy for social standing gets you pretty far.
At the end of the day, being associated with prestige is cute (working for a big name) and perhaps what many people desire, but holding it yourself manifests itself in different ways at the individual level. Those who really have any modicum of power don’t care about baseless associations.
“Yeah you worked for a FAANG, great, but what have you accomplished?”
I'm pretty sure that's not true. I doubt there's much of an actual value-add in going to an elite school, but the average incomes of graduates of them are substantially higher than that of random public school graduates.
> What they found was that two students with similar backgrounds, grades and test scores who applied to the same mix of selective and nonselective schools earned about the same later on, even if the first attended a selective school and the second didn’t. The choice of schools applied to was indicative of ambition which, they argue, is a more powerful driver of success than the school they attend. “The return to college selectivity [is] indistinguishable from zero,” they wrote in 2011.
However, researchers noted that for certain students, going to a more elite school did generate greater returns.
> focusing only on the benefits to the wealthy may miss the full picture. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger found that African-American and Hispanic students, and those whose parents didn’t go to college, actually did enjoy an income boost from a selective college, perhaps, the researchers said, owing to networking opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
Who would have thought?
Everyone in the advisors' office bought into this public-school-to-public-university pipeline. My dream in junior high was to go to MIT. When I mentioned this to my guidance counselor, they said, basically, "Don't bother, you'll never get in." Self-fulfilling prophecy.
The 90th percentile earner from the Harvard class of 2010 didn’t come from some random high school in Missouri with an 1000 median SAT score.
Guidance counselors suck every where. Mine was a national guard major, 18% of my class joined the military.
Sorry, what? The average Ivy League graduate makes substantially more than your average non-Ivy graduate.
I don't even understand what your second sentence is trying to say.
If you look at the degrees themselves as a form of capital investment, Ivy League schools don’t translate into “paying off,” as it were.
Not only is that not true, but Harvard new grads make substantially more than the average BA holder, including people who are 2 decades into their career.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-Unive...
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?240444-University-of...
Edit: Actually the third state school I looked up is not far off! https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?236948-University-of...
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?142115-Boise-State-U...
What’s a benchmark?
Taking the most prestigious or most compensation is the safest bet, given that you don't really know what you want to do other than 'I like coding and interesting problems'.
Partly I think that Harvard students have been adapted to seek prestige (else they probably wouldn't be there), but I also think the author is missing that it isn't so much a drive for prestige, but just a lack of other goals for which to substitute.
> Just a lack of other goals for which to substitute.
Ding ding.
I've mentored students/grads from aforementioned prestigious Universities and most of them just genuinely don't know what they want
After a few drinks, many have voiced a fear of there being so many options in life and not knowing which would be more fulfilling for them.
Many reach a goal (graduation~), don't know what's really next, look around at nearby peers/family, and simply emulate what they see.
I never worked on anything related to what I mainly studied and am thankfully programming now (not in Fortran though) and know that this is what I wanted all along.
Consulting, Finance, and Bigtech offer a combination of rapid salary growth, low career risk, and a resume item that almost ensures that you pass the CV stage at every future interview. If you’re unsure about your path it is a great way to ensure you have many doors to choose from once you do.
I think that risk-aversion is part of what keeps people from choosing what they really want to do.
[1] https://academyedstudies.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/jonesro...
They better get used to it, because that is life :)
A Relevant bit of reading, I think, I hope: https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
Generally, they begin with an end in mind. It’s a lot easier to get where you’re going if you know where that is.
Or, as the Cheshire Cat says to Alice, “Which way should I go?” “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t much care.” “Then it doesn’t really matter.” (Abridged)
1. Estimate $X: how much $$$ investment do I need in order for my family to live off interest for Y years so I never work again? For me right now, $X is 5M and Y is 40 years.
2. What do I need to do right now in order to get closer to $X? Maybe it's "study computer engineering". Maybe it's "get a job in tech". Maybe it's "apply for a FAANG company". Maybe it's "Go for promo". Maybe it's "Add more to my retirement savings". Maybe it's even "Change my entire fucking career, I'm at a dead end." Whatever it is will be different for whatever stage of life I'm at.
3. If not at $X, GOTO 1.
4. Retire and do whatever I really want to do with my life.
That's pretty much it for my state machine. I wish I figured this out in my 20s--if I did, I'd be much closer to step 4 than I am now in my 40s.
At some level I think everyone is pushing some part of ‘what I really want to do’ to the future. I know I do. At the same time I think it’s important to remember to enjoy the years leading up to step 4, even if that makes the overall path less efficient.
1: the monk and the riddle
You don’t have to live off interest to retire. 4% withdrawal is good enough [1]. You might be lot closer to retirement than you think.
Do you know what that is? I suspect most people don't, especially after spending 20+ years in various jobs.
Probably. What about the rest of us who aren't really looking to those people for any kind of framework? Part of the whole "thinking there's a grand narrative" that caused me anxiety was trying to model after all of these "successful" people, what they were doing, and realizing I wasn't any happier for it.
Lately, what's brought me a lot of calm wasn't the chase of an "end state" (so to speak) but more optimizing my path. That, personally, and only speaking personally has been INFINITELY more rewarding.
If that's the "it" factor, then so be it ;)
Sergey and Larry tried to sell Google for 1 million dollars, and failed. Zuck thought Facebook would never be profitable. The idea that "successful people" have plan all along is fiction.
They might have a vision and are pursuing said vision, but things rarely turn out anywhere near the way they are intended.
From what I understand, after all the hullabaloos in interviewing, most programmers at these companies are assigned menial, boring maintenance code tasks all day.
Also it’s entirely possible to land in a good team as a new-grad. Be a little picky during team selection.
Couldn't agree more. "Prestige" and the insecurity of people who seek it is the root of why people run the rat race. It is of course a race because we're pushing all our might in an effort to win.
Now I'm not against competitiveness, but if were talking 40+ hour weeks of 30+ years of grinding for this abstract concept of prestige, then it's pointless, and those people accruing checkboxes on their resume are running like lemmings off a cliff. It doesn't help that the chimp mind is wired to feel the pain of low status in the pecking order. But, living life to avoid that pain, through decades of work is just throwing your life away, the only life one gets to live, 90 mph off the cliff. This is why working too much is one of the biggest regrets of people on their deathbeds.
The people working for prestige, titles, paychecks, and status attainment without a larger idea of accomplishing something either for themselves or for the world really don't do anything, accrue far more security than needed, and waste away their time(decades of it) in insecurity, without actually doing anything, except maybe move forward the company agenda (talk about lack of identity, what was the definition of "cog in the wheel"?). No wonder they regret not living their life at 80. Because they haven't.
I would go further: I think a lot of people don't know what they want.
not think(many({
knowswhattheywant(p)
for p in people
}))
!=
think(many({
not knowswhattheywant(p)
for p in people
}))"I don't think a lot of people know what they want." -> I believe it is a rare trait in a person to know what they want.
"I think a lot of people don't know what they want." -> I believe it is a common trait for a person not to know what they want.
These things are not mutually exclusive nor mutually inclusive.
Lots of similar sounding statements are subtly different like this in English. "I am not happy" and "I am unhappy" have slightly different meanings as well.
I'll provide an example that illustrates both points: me. When I went from Red Hat to Facebook, my already-pretty-good total compensation jumped by almost 50% - more considering how each company's stock performed during the relevant vesting periods. I'm pretty sure there were others around me who had been promoted from fresh-out to my nominal level in a quarter to a half the time it had taken me to build my career. Some of them were quite likely making even more than me despite their narrow experience and resulting unsuitability for the same role anywhere else (a topic for another time).
If my salary curve was a race car, theirs was a rocket ship. The FAANG compensation premium to start fresh out of college might be smaller, but the potential growth over the next several years is much greater than elsewhere in tech ... and yes, recruiters do use that as a lure. Given the uncertainty (and compensation inequity) at startups, working at a FAANG is the most likely route to early wealth for most techies.
Of course, you can also get rich early if you get to put FAANG on your resume and parlay that into an early-employee job at a startup that later hits it big. That's prestige at work but, looking at the attrition/retention rates at FAANG, it seems to be the less common route and therefore I'd guess it's the less common motive.
I think there was a golden era of startups capturing value from the old guard, but that era is largely over IMO. All of those tech darlings are hiring consultants to help build corporate functions and product strategy — turns out there is significant value in knowing how to manage a company of 30,000+ employees and revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Even a fraction of a percent gain in efficiency translates to enormous sums, which the consultants capture some percentage of in fees. As the unicorns continue to evolve into mature enterprises, more of that value will shift into the consulting / finance realm.
If I were graduating in 2020, I would not go into tech as an engineer if my goal was to get wealthy. It’s still a great career and you’ll be able to live a very comfortable life regardless, but if building wealth is your goal you need to follow the prestige (aka political power).
> It’s not uncommon for people in consulting to be making $500k-$1m annually by the age of 40
This is not "uncommon" in FANG either (just take a look at the salary charts), and if anything can be reached earlier.
> there was a golden era of startups capturing value from the old guard, but that era is largely over IMO
If I could take a bet against this, I would. That value capture is only going to increase.
Consulting and tech have similar starting salaries, but consider finance/hedge fund engineer starting tc is about 3-4x tech for top 3 grads rn.
Based on what? This is not true in my experience, unless you're comparing finance tech to FANG tech, in which case it is true. Moreover, at Harvard, some segment of those who go into finance are "connected" with higher paying finance jobs due to their parents/etc.
Consulting salaries are lower (sometimes substantially) than tech starting salaries.
If you do something like conditioning on a CS degree, finance probably mops the floor w/ tech.
Can't you, by starting or (much less favorably) joining a startup?
Obviously there are other components as well (how much you travel, being on call...), but that already captures a lot of what's commonly missing in salary discussions.
That's the point, you don't know whether there will be any. So they are definitely not "as good as cash". Just because they aren't lottery tickets doesn't mean they are equivalent to cash.
Edit: Just to clarify, $300k as a senior engineer is without any stock appreciation at all. I made $250k as one step below senior without any stock appreciation at all. My point about significant stock changes is for significant stock changes downwards, meaning if the Google stock somehow lost 50% of their value or something like that.
Not like interest rates can get lower or search could get less competitive.
If your firm is operating on leverage of 20:1, sure you can make $2-20M annually. But, realistically, what are your odds on the margin of making partner 25 years down the road?
People would rather work at FAANG than Stripe because FAANG will get you a lot more pay and connections. And people know that, so they will value people from FAANG for it. But it comes from the root fact that FAANG makes a ton of net income per employee, same as some finance/consulting firms, and that net income is more attributable to you specifically, rather than say someone at General Mills.
A better pick for “non prestigious but good company “ might be Khan Academy, which has an amazing service with great engineers but as far as I know doesn’t make or pay a ton.
Khan Academy is sought after in the cs student community as well. although won't be first choice for many.
Facebook has a quarter of the worlds population active on it.
Google has most of the search and is responsible for Android, which is the most popular mobile OS in the world.
Amazon broad cloud computing mainstream and now controls a huge chunk of the world compute because of it.
Apple effectively defined the smartphone era.
Netflix is like 60% of all of the Internet traffic and made legitimate streaming a thing.
Stripe... is an easier to use PayPal?
It is less mainstream so exclusivity increases the demand factor.
Amazon's work culture is not very positively seen. Facebook's product is often seen negatively upon although not that much. Google is seen positively.
Some of it is tied into recruiting as well. Apple has a very opaque intern and new grad recruiting process. Netflix simply doesn't hire SWE interns and newgrads.
For Stripe, Presumed High caliber engineering colleagues (party due to size and growth), especially because there is a lot of hype for Stripe and its documentation and process among tech professionals.
High potential for stocks rising at IPO, like Snowflake (although there seems to a value cap) so kids are not as excited about it as Databricks.
Also wondering, why?
A 2.6+% merchant fee payment processor?
High potential for stocks rising at IPO, like Snowflake (although there seems to a value cap) so kids are not as excited about it as Databricks.
Pshh what? You work at FANG and think this?
But generally I think the OP is correct: working for FAANG has made many, many people far more money over the past decade than they would have otherwise made on average in a startup.
I suspect that eventually the tide will turn, as it always does. The companies will get middle-manager bloat, MBAs and accountants start pinching pennies, systems get dragged down in technical debt, and more nimble competitors eventually outcompete. But we're not there yet.
furthermore before they were fang companies, google was the top tier startup and IBM was the equivalent to FANG.
WeWork and Airbnb want a word.
A word about what? Their salaries are certainly competitive with, if not higher paying than, Google and Stripe's are objectively higher.
Generally people only seek at prestigious firms like Goldman early in their career and switch over to more obscure but lucrative opportunities: prop firms, pe, hf, etc.
If you're later in your career, you should have enough contacts and know enough people to get in the door at a small firm. If you don't know their name, you'll have a hard time getting in. These kinds of places don't post job openings on indeed. You kind of have to know someone.
In this vein, the tech industry screws its employees as far as their share of revenue-per-employee goes. Apple makes 10x per employee what Jane St. does, and I doubt the small firms achieve the difference.
$190,000 vs. $2,000,000. Netflix is even higher: $2.4MM. What numbers do you have?
I can't even begin to count the number of people I've met at Stanford whose parents own "X," where X is a little publicized, privately held business with >$10M in revenues.
Absolutely. I worked at ten, with employee numbers from single digits up to about fifty. As we all know, most startups fail. Even among those that succeed, few employees avoid all of the traps that founders and VCs create for them (e.g. dilution and special share classes) to get more than a modest payout at the exit. For most, even that "big payout" might not match the year-after-year premium they could have gotten by working and climbing the ladder at one of the already-big tech companies.
As one point of evidence, my two semi-successful exits did help me retire earlier and in more comfort than I otherwise might have. I'm grateful for that. OTOH, my three and a half undistinguished years at Facebook helped more.
Depends what you want. I had a guy work for us at my first startup: he was employee #6 and once we got to about 13 or 15 he decided it was time to move on. I was surprised, but he felt the business was just too big for him. And indeed I've looked at his career over the ensuing years and he's worked for some amazing companies...always just for a year or so and always when they were very tiny. Sometimes I noticed he'd worked with the same people, so he wasn't leaving because he was a poor performer (we missed him) but simply because that's what he liked.
Also, 200,000 sounds way too high for total number of technical positions at these companies. There are a very large number of people working non-technical jobs there as well.
Top 5% among paid professionals is your low bar of proficiency?
Source: work at Amazon
I find it somewhat astonishing that you would be extremely insulted by the exclusion of your employer from some arbitrary acronym.
It's well known that Amazon hiring standards are the lowest of FAANG, just like G's hiring standards are lower than N (as a whole). That doesn't mean that everyone who is an SDE1 at Amazon is less talented than everyone who is an L3 at Google, it's just different means.
The "20% comment" was the one above me, I was just responding to it.
The average Amazon engineer is less talented than the average Google engineer. That is what I was saying. I wasn't making any claim about how talented you are or aren't!
> When we listen to prestige, we're often opting for a path of certainty, while foregoing whatever promising thing was just around the corner.
But it doesn't quite dwell on it as the important component of the answer that it truly is. Prestige and credentialism certainly have to do with peer pressure, but they also have a lot to do with risk reduction. And this is true on both sides of the equation.
If your job is to obtain a top 0.01% quality engineer, should you just hire from a top tier university? Probably not. That's not to say that a top 0.01% engineer wouldn't go to a top tier university. They well might. But it's not a very strong filter for that level of quality. What it is, however, is a very strong filter for say, top 30% quality.
When you hire from a top tier university, you aren't getting the very best. What you are getting is a very strong guarantee that someone is at least a certain level of quality. A Harvard or Stanford degree most certainly does not guarantee excellence. But it does guarantee a minimum standard of competence and work ethic. When you hire from one of these places, you can be reasonably certain that you are not hiring the human equivalent of a lemon.
The same is true on the flip side for an employee seeking jobs. If you go work at FAANG, one of the big three consulting firms, or Goldman, you are almost certainly not choosing the absolute best possible career path at that moment for yourself. What you are doing is selecting a career path that will be very good, with very high certainty.
In finance terms, these choices are optimal, because they maximize the Sharpe ratio of your career/hiring process. That is, they maximize the risk-adjusted return of your decisions. People who go to top tier universities have already demonstrated a preference for a lower risk path in life.
As someone without a prestigious university reputation (or accompanying network) backing me, I think I've really prioritized stability and low risk (but pretty good) move for my career.
That said, I think the thesis is a bit overstated. The reason many more Harvard CS students talk about Google > Stripe is not because Stripe is not prestigious (it obviously is, and plenty of super talented students go there). It's because Google hires a ton of Harvard CS grads, whereas many late-stage startups do not hire as many new grads, nor do they have as large of hiring pools. They're going to have an obviously larger impact on the sorts of jobs people discuss.
The same thing with GS, Jane Street, or Citadel, because they actively recruit at Harvard through on-campus recruiting and hire a comparatively large portion of Harvard graduates.
This is related to the other reason that companies like Google are talked about much more than mid-stage startups: the school on your diploma has much larger impact at these big, more calcified companies than it does on startups where individual hires could help make-or-break the company. And places like McKinsey or Bain basically hire many students so they can tell clients they have a team of Harvard grads working on the problem.
> they assume their intelligence insulates them from peer pressure.
If you come into Harvard with this notion, I can't really see how you stay with it after your first recruiting/punch season. And, honestly, Harvard undergrads aren't that smart.
Google and Facebook hired almost exclusively from Ivy League and equivalents during their "make or break" phase.
I don't think this is inconsistent with what I'm saying.
I think Google is a pretty clear step above Stripe. They have legitimately changed the world and billions of people use their products. Stripe is a payment processing firm. A very successful one, but ultimately a pretty boring b2b business. Im not sure anyone would really miss it if it were gone.
- an ex-Googler with friends at Stripe
I seriously think many people view their bank's software team as evil! Incompetent maybe, but not evil.
Stripe isn't a monopoly like Visa.
That said, I've kind of gone the opposite direction. I've always worked in tech companies, in production environments, for companies you may-or-may-not have heard of. I never understood why engineers from Big Name companies were considered so much 'better'.
Now I work at a big tech company you've heard of (but definitely not a FAANG), and I understand now. The professionalism, the thoughtfulness, ownership, and output they expect.. it really is another level from just showing up at work every day. I'm not saying 60 hour weeks, I'm just saying the caliber of work and collaboration. The job titles really are "worth" more than at the average company.
Personally I think they churn out 'better' engineers simply because you are afforded more opportunities to work on things that can be of enormous scale, specificity, and complexity.
Apart from that I think they’ve got some of the causality the wrong way around. Consulting and finance are not buying excellence, they’re buying prestige. If you become excellent, no-one in top tier FTC will care, except maybe the T strand of that. F and C never wanted your excellence, they wanted to use your prestige as a cover for extracting large fees from high net worth individuals and companies respectively. The T strand is interesting, because the value of your prestige here isn’t to the company as a whole, but rather this is just another high net worth company you as an individual can target to extract high fees from using prestige as your weapon.
So if you’re an Ivy league grad, generally your most valuable asset is your prestige, not your skill. You can make an entire career based on being prestigious, so long as you’re careful not to dilute it. And this is why T is grouped with F and C: if you take a career inside top tier FTC, you maintain your prestige, outside it you dilute your prestige, and therefore dilute your most valuable asset.
The point that he’s missing is that Ivy league grads are not the top students. They are the most prestigious students. The top students in terms of excellence are scattered around the country/world and most come from universities you’ve never heard of. And will hopefully succeed by sheer excellence. And companies that hire these students will rise, and companies that hire prestigious students over the excellent students will fall (unless their business model is based on the projection of prestige).
So he doesn’t need to worry about the future. The future is fine. Him and his classmates were never the future, except for the future of extracting large fees from high net worth individuals and companies.
All that said, it’s nothing but great if he’s deciding to start playing the excellence game and stop playing the prestige game. I just think he’ll be surprised at how close to zero he’s located at within that game if he starts playing it in earnest.
Excellent insight
You could argue that by valuing prestige, you end up devaluing perfectly good candidates, but at the end of the day you need to have _some_ heuristic to help filter the amount of resumes/candidates you consider. Companies like triplebyte, interviewing.io, etc are trying to change this by trying to determine your actual skills vs your resume, but currently I haven't heard of many better alternatives.
Yes, there are people who genuinely enjoy these positions. But they are truly few and far between. The more in demand a position is, the less pressure the employer has to actually make it a fulfilling experience.
To be fulfilled, we often have to unlearn conventional lessons: https://productlessons.substack.com/p/unlearning-the-first-2...
They are shameful.
It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
I agree, but perhaps not for the reasons you'd think. The "moral stain" of having worked for these companies only matters if hiring managers elsewhere make it matter. They don't. Throughout the industry, they're looking at potential return on investment and little else. Having worked at Facebook might matter if you want to go work for the White House or New York Times, but not for another tech company.
The reason I think working at those companies is anti-prestigious is that they're such unique self-contained worlds. If I see that somebody only has experience at FAANG since college, I know that they've become accustomed to having a vast array of systems and libraries and experts and other kinds of support available to them that aren't so available anywhere else. Maybe they'll learn to adjust to how computing is in the rest of the world. Maybe they'll be absolutely helpless, functioning at a one- or two-year level despite five or seven years among "the best engineers in the world" or whatever they're saying nowadays. I don't attach a premium to that experience. I attach a discount.
If a candidate told me they got fired for intentionally sabotaging Palantir's production operations, that would neutralize the issue. So far haven't met that person.
A select few held the power or agency to act selfishly and did so.
It didn’t become apparent to many employees that something was amiss until shortly before the FBI raided them.
I was thinking more of teaching business and management skills to engineers.
Now (that it's privacy killing adtech) it's vaguely slimy, maybe not as slimy as being a lawyer, but I don't see it impressing people other than recruiters. Which is probably a good thing, honestly.
Since 2016, that has taken a hit because the news media bang the drum of how terrible these companies are.
Some people just want high social status, they really don't give a shit about 'excellence', unless excellence is absolutely necessary to achieve high social status and it isn't - going to the right school and working at the right job at the right company is enough.
If you know anyone with immigrant parents who value 'education', you already know what they actually value is high social status regardless of everything else, including the child's happiness.
What you spent a whole lot of words describing is a narrow case of a more general human phenomena that has a name - tragedy of the commons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
There isn't a cure, because most people don't want a cure - that's why it's a tragedy :)
Reasons why I think I made a good choice:
* Comp was pretty good. Consulting isn't like ridiculous $200k+ salaries for new grads like FAANG, but its more than I need.
* Growth is very fast. In most companies, you need someone above you to leave or a new need to open up to get promoted. Consulting, as well as rapidly growing companies, don't have this. You can advance as quickly as you are capable. I don't know if that holds for finance (I think not?), but it probably holds for a decent while for big tech.
* The company has a vested interest in you doing well long term. When one wants to leave, they get a few weeks of paid time to do no work and find a new job, often with the help and support of senior colleagues with good connections. That is a wonderful benefit. If I want to leave, I have far more options available to me than if I had worked at most other orgs.
* I don't do any work I perceive to be unethical, and am encouraged to decline serving clients I don't want to serve without needing to justify it or fill out a form.
I'm happy with my job. I really don't need people applying values judgments over why I would have made these choices. Job culture, especially in America IMO, is generally unhealthy. If you can legit say you're happy with your job and it pays your bills, just stop the dialogue there, you've won, that's great; pay no heed to those competing possible pasts that may have been better.
Sadly, Cisco decided the stop making proper networking equipment and ditch proper support via TAC.
At the end of the day, prestige comes with money, full stop. In CS, prestige at first might start out as just FAANG, and then later on also include well off start ups like Stripe or various HFT firms / hedge funds since more people start to realize their compensation is equal or higher.
I'm not sure I agree. I've been seeking out jobs at less prestigious firms for ages but I started getting interviews only once I had Goldman on my resume. I've never would've had a seat at the table where I can try to achieve excellence if it wasn't for Goldman. I guess the author's argument makes sense for IT where barriers for entry are low, but almost every other industry worth getting into has high barriers for entry.
Is this a common view in the US? In central Europe, the view is that ivy leagues are for people who need external validation so much that they are willing to pay through the nose for it. This view explains the rest of the article too.
For instance Harvard automatically gives a full scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes less than $65,000 per year. For Stanford, the cutoff is $125,000.
There are other private schools that are as you describe, though.
This is not strictly true, although it is mostly true.
source: attended Harvard with family income less than $65k
What I've generally found is the "common view" in the US is that people get upset/snide at the mention of the school. It seems like this is also an int'l phenomenon if your comment is any guide.
Overall yes, schools known only for their claims of prestige, as opposed to their academical merit, are looked down upon.
Harvard is a non-public non-profit, and is cheaper than the comparable public university for 90% of Americans after aid.
In no meaningful way can a school who charges $100k+ for tuition--which is required in addition to "endowments" and other such huge checks they receive to help pay their wealthy administrators--be considered an actual non-profit organization. It is a tax ruse.
To put it even simpler: if the wealth of my parents is a metric for how much they'll charge me to attend, clearly "profit" is important, and specifically scarcity, a prime driver of profit in capitalist society. It sounds like the definition of "non-profit" in EU is different than here in the USA.
This understates the importance of the distinction - non-profits don't have shareholders, don't return profit to owners, etc. They are very different.
That does not mean that you can't create a non-profit for any terrible goal. You could form a non-profit for directing funds to Nazi organizations globally. But a non-profit is not aiming to make money for some owners and in an educational context, that is important.
> if the wealth of my parents is a metric for how much they'll charge me to attend, clearly "profit" is important, and specifically scarcity
This is facile. Is medicaid for-profit? If your family makes too much, you will be booted off and have to pay for your own healthcare.
Indeed, any means-tested governmental program falls under your definition of operated for "profit" which is nonsense when those programs are redistributive (although perhaps not redistributive enough).
Now that they're institutionalized go-to career steps/destinations for so many people, there's so much interview prep and ritual to go through.
Investing hundreds of hours in Leetcode prepping and then interviewing is justifiable if your main goal is simply to get hired at one of the prestigious companies, and that's just the next in a line of required steps of things that you don't want to do but that will get you that prestigious job.
But having to drill Leetcode is discouraging or prohibitive, if you already have significant skills and credentials more relevant to the job, and your main goal is to do good work, in a good environment, on good things.
The minute you start hiding behind / pursuing opportunities because of social status is the minute you start your descent into laziness and lack of useful impact.
Everything is a balance. I relate to how pursuing prestige in schools can lead to pursuing promos. But in general use Harvard or wherever for great learning, and with promo projects pursue actual meaningful work. It’s really the most sustainable way.
Source: it’s a lot more satisfying to pursue a promo project that helps everyone on your team (e.g., engineering excellence etc).
And yeah obviously students rarely have a correct idea about the real world (just haven’t seen enough of it yet). Interesting hypotheses though.
There is literally 0 need for this. Use Harvard for:
a. the name on your resume
b. access to smart peers (even at Harvard, this takes searching, but if you're in the right classes is easy)
c. access to professors
That's pretty much it. You can learn the content just as well online.
The best talk I ever heard related to YC was from Adam d’Angelo at a startup school (#2?) - where he spent most of his time quietly just saying to people: use your connections. And for 5% of the audience I’m sure it went in one ear and out the other.
There’s a lot to be said for being forced to slow down and learn the content around smart peers and professors tho.
Agreed possible online just requires more drive and focus and the number of people who can / have the time / interest / motivation to do that starts to trail off (but the world is large).
The other big thing schools like this do to you is inject a healthy dose of competitiveness for the rest of your life since you know there are a lot of things that aren’t special about the people there but are about their results.
Students who go to a selective school, often want to go to selective companies and continue to build their “brand” to maximize their success (or at least optionality).
It’s usually later on when people figure out what’s important to them and are confident enough to stray for the default path. For example, my current company is a well known one, but isn’t FANG. I chose there because I use / care about the product, and the culture is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. It’s growing, I’m paid well, and I’m relatively happy. I don’t feel the urge anymore to work for the hottest companies or what not.
Know who is attracted to prestige? People who don't have something that comes free with success. They make up the long tail of the distribution, and they're not first movers, risk takers, or leaders. If it's already prestigious, it's mostly played out.
That's going in my book of quotes.
This seems to run very contrary to my experience. The most sought after tech companies among CS majors at my top school were not Google or Facebook, but hot late stage startups like Robinhood, Stripe, Coinbase or Samsara. These companies have all the upside (in terms of pay, security) as G/F, in addition to being seen as "off the beaten path" or slightly more adventurous.
In the end I finally managed to take a job at a small environmental startup, and then an NGO, and am much happier.
Exposure to "prestige" and by proxy exposure to ambition-driven individuals that are also "excellent" enough to be accepted into the "in-group" is a big factor into how you unlock your own potential. The author seems to hold the view that being excellent is just an innate quality that follows you around no matter what. If you join some organization where nobody cares, nobody pushes you to be excellent, or can't even recognize excellency when it exists, then no, you won't become a superstar out of nowhere and have the world at your feet. Even founding a startup nowadays would be considered a "high prestige" move, because few people can really afford to stop a menial job to pursue that.
Compare that to starting off at a company that is less well-known in the general sector or less selective — you may be able to jump later to a more selective company, but you’ll have more of an uphill climb.
1. FTC returns are predictable. The returns to taking an unbeaten path is anything but. Further, how will your peers and the world view you as CEO of New Idea Inc vs. L4 at Google? 2. Prestige is a cheap correlate, and thus substitute, for aptitude. Outside of Tech, verifying aptitude and fit is like trying to pay with physical gold whereas prestige is like paying with Amex Platinum. 3. Consulting and Finance offer exposure to a swath of otherwise opaque industries and opportunities. This appears to be especially true in industries driven by culture fit and trust. Why do many e.g. biotech companies eschew an MD/PhD CEO for an ex-MBB 'professional CEO'? Because the CEO exists raise money and that requires immense trust and penetrating opaque networks.
Perhaps returns to prestige are overrated, but I'll take the prestige 10/10. In my experience, the previously closed doors suddenly open themselves for you.
This has nothing to do with prestige and everything to do with Google and Facebook having 100 times the headcount. From my experience, unicorns actual tend to be more selective than FAANGs (except maybe Netflix) even if they don't pay any better.
Don't get me wrong, though. All I'm saying is that techies in the valley have a lot of amazing choices. Some people are definitely great at navigating big tech's dynamics, and they should join big techs and enjoy phenomenal success. It's just for even more people, joining a small company has a better chance of becoming successful, at least in terms of money and job satisfaction.
But the prestige trap is real. My last career move was a big step down in prestige, but a huge step up in job satisfaction. I wish I didn’t, but I do miss working at a company that everyone knows.
For me I think the key has been that my friends have a random assortment of cool jobs and don’t care much about working somewhere prestigious. I just don’t click with people who do. Because as much fun as it would be to play the comparison game, I just couldn’t shake that existential angst that none of that stuff fucking matters, and the only thing that matters is to be happy and do good to those around you.
> Prestige, like the social status it serves as a proxy for
This illustrates to me that it's not really about prestige--merely a correlation. Having a FAANG on your resume is not a proxy for social status. It clearly indicates that you got into a competitive technical position. It's like getting an otherwise useless degree that indicates that you can stick with something and come out on top.
This is certainly not true. Students are in high pursuit of a startup like Stripe(+ those on the breakoutlist) and Nvidia is viewed very positively. Visit /r/csmajors for a datapoint.
Even better..who will approach you for a favour.
FIRE is one reason. External validation is one reason. Life after school nonclarity is one reason (this ticks a box). Even if you have ideas to start a new company or venture, there is the brand value(e.g you will see many article like "Ex-FAANG employee quit their XXX,XXX 6-figure job to pursue Y)
Lots of PR value there. Many new startups literally use the fact that their current employees previously worked at a FAANG company as part of their recruiting info, about-page, pitch.
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8d-how-to-build-a-great-...
Section: Team
External validation and PR — eh. My own experience differs, in tech and outside of tech. Personally, way back when, I turned down multiple Ivies to attend a small liberal arts college relatively few have heard about and have absolutely no regrets — people who have actually affected my life have heard of it, and I think it’s gotten me to where I am much faster and easier than going the conventional route.
> people who have actually affected my life have heard of it
I mean that is probably true and will be true for many. This also means that you are in a social network of people who are sort of knowledgable and somewhat well off.
I am sure the undergrad education at Grinnell or Haverford is on average pretty much the same at Harvard or Princeton. More so with computer science, nobody is learning more exclusive algorithms at these more name brand schools.
But clearly, you can't deny the name brand factor that positively influences many other ventures.
money is power. or, capital is power. social capital seems to be our driving force these days. money is cheap, followers are harder to come by [en masse].
socialism becomes this monolithic vacuum which eventually devours it's participants. mostly for the reasons you're pointing out; prestige, or the pursuit of power.
as you point out, even a high level of financial and social capital is not enough. we've created a vacuum of unrealistic perception.
i think this is where media comes into play... the opiate for the masses. your 15 minutes of prestige is not even near good enough to compete with the monolithic personas we've allowed to vacuum up all the power. gates, jobs, Trump, rockefellers, even the house of windsor [how do you even complete with the outside of a monarchy?].
power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely. chasing prestige is very quickly becoming a pipe dream. a race to the bottom if you will. eventually, the only way to gain prestige will be to topple these monoliths. else we wait/fight/plot/etc for the next monolith.
... which will be a space miner ceo, ai breakthrough ceo, fusion power ceo, or quantum programmer ceo.
How much ink needs to be spilled about Harvard undergrads anyway? Aren’t there other groups of people that deserve respect and attention?