Hacker News Reader

Years ago, I was advising the "entrepreneur club" at a major university and I met with one of the students. He introduced himself as "president" and we chatted and talked out their Vision. A week later, I met with him and another member who introduced herself as "president"

Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes.

I was impressed they gamed it so simply.

In any other context, that'd be at least a little slimey. But here, with these budding grifters? It's downright admirable.

> Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go?

You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.

Not only that, the recall is high, even if the precision is low at these top universities.

Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class.

So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners.

My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.

> Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits).

I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.

The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.

What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.

So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.

Indeed. As many seek out this opportunity and as they all ramp up their efforts, the participants of the tournament will all look similar in skill and aptitude. Thus, the determining factors will increasingly become luck-based. Everyone that wishes to participate should be made aware that they are signing up for a stress-inducing rat race, and that they better double their effort because, at each step, their competitors get more and more capable.

Or, alternatively, seek other options? Maybe try to avoid the race somehow. Since most will be losers, it's probably best to consider alternatives anyway and ask if the prize is even worth winning.

You're not wrong. I am being rather blithe. However I'd point out that I'm not saying all masters students have no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades. I'm saying that a sigificant number of budding CS majors with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades get masters. There's a difference of A -> B versus B -> A.

i agree, it seems like a pretty insecure thing to say. he is currently an undergrad so he probably doesn't really realize masters programs can actually help someone's career.

The kid who returned user's passed hash -- he could have simply learned more about better programming practices no? You make it sound like it's a crime and he's inherently flawed. But all of us did dumb mistakes in school/college in our early programming days, and then most of us learned not to do them.

Yeah that was maybe not the best example. Although I did explain it to him a couple times and he still didn't get it. He also didn't do his share of work but of course took credit for the accomplishments of the group in his college applications.

What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.

> when really they didn't do much at all

That's where the in-person interview comes in. It's a lot harder to fake one's way through that.

The in person interview has little to no bearing on your application. It can provide a minor positive boost but no negative value. Besides, the interviewers I had were all nice enough people but definitely possible to trick or BS.

Even if one asks probing questions about the project the candidate lied about doing?

So, the technical interviewer says “no hire.” But the VP (who went to the candidate’s alma mater) says yes. And the Director who knows the candidate’s uncle from the country club says yes. And the candidate really laid it on thick for the hiring manager who has the final say. What did the tech nerd say, again?

It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over.

Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.

I feel palpable despair about this. For me it has tended to imply that the work itself is not valuable, for otherwise the incentive system would be corrected quickly.

What would be the corrective factor? The charismatic oligarchy has inserted itself between the productive people and the money.

The Gervais principle is a thing. The charismatic CEO is helped by the 90% mediocre employees, who like the system. The 10% productive employees are exploited and shouted down.

All that the 10% can do is change jobs or start a company.

I guess I long to work on teams where the outcome and the actual activity of working on the project are the primary motivators for the people involved, and not the associated status or credit gain. So when I said it seems to imply the work is not valuable, I meant in the view of the people working.

Scott Adams talks about this in one of his books (How To Fail At Everything). Generally, one's dress, tone, vocabulary choice, and grammar are indications of status that others read. The good news is once one is aware of it, one can fake that.

"I'm reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn't difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive."

Oh lemme clarify. I thought you were talking about college interviews. If we're talking about job interviews then certainly they can cut through someone's BS.

Working with these people in college was rather frustrating at times. I always did good work, started working on projects early and often. Because I knew programming a solution is sort of an unknown until you really dive in to it. Many students got better grades than they deserved because I was in their group. They were great people, just horrible team mates.

> This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT.

He did something. Bad code is better than no code.

> Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.

They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know.

Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".

When i was in hs, we started a new robotics club, in our first year we went to nationals, we had a kid who literally did nothing for the club but wanted some kind of title in the club (i didn't understand why at that time because i came from a type of household where my parents never cared enough to even see my report card), he was in no way exceptional except his parents pushed him to work hard so that he got good grades. I bet he wrote a college essay about his passion for robotics and how he had helped build this successful robotics teams that did fairly well at nationals. He went to Harvard. In high school, for every person i saw who valued learning for its own sake, i saw about 10 people who were obsessed with grades/ec's because their parents told them that going to prestigious university x was their only hope for a future (I don't necessarily blame the kids when it is mainly the parents driving the show). I think this kind of attitude towards college and education is pernicious because i believe a society which moves towards an excessive superficial emphasis on brand names (not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable lifestyles/professions) moves away from individuality into a collective type of society and i strongly believe revolutionary creativity which could advance society always come from individuals.

Maybe that kid who made the wrong website put more emphasis on things that places like MIT prioritize instead of reading about "useless" subjects like learning how to create secure websites? The issue is comparability. You can compare by SAT scores and grades far better than by a metric like "built a secure website". If places like MIT prioritized such things more, they'd become even more unfair. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather work with you on a team than with someone who cares only about their personal success above the team's success, and can't listen to input as to why their approach was wrong.

As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.

> People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true.

There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)

The economic pie is shrinking. Elites are spending more and more of their money sending their kids to the best prep schools and resume padding to ensure they don't slip through the growing cracks in the developed world (i.e. inequality that is well accepted at this point).

See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope.

While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy.

Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.

The economic pie isn't shrinking, it's not being allowed to grow.

Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods.

However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house.

From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural.

Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing.

rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall

or

rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall

it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.

This study is based on data from the college students of the early 1990s, and previous works in the field use data from 1980's college students. I think your claim might have been true 2 decades ago, but now? I highly doubt it....

Why not?

I don't see tech say getting worse than it was a decade ago in terms of school bias. If anything it is better thanks to hacker rank, triplebyte, etc.

It’s way better than this, to be honest. It’s okay and safe to be more optimistic. These organizations are not perfect but I personally have seen for myself that they do tend to support the best and brightest, and they are actively expanding free offerings rapidly to do this for anyone with internet. It’s becoming more accessible each year to get that quality education in tech and science and business in general, in a condensed quality format.

> obsessed with the same hamster wheel

Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life.

Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling?

The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability).

Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?

Yes! I wish more people realized all of this is unnecessary. Sit down to your keyboard and start typing! You will fail, that's correct - learn from that failure, don't take it personally and never stop!

So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.

If I owned a company I would refuse to hire graduates from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It's much more likely that you were good at lying than at studying if you went there, and I don't have time to teach the basics.

I'll accept the premise that it's possible to fake your way into a school like that. I think it would be much harder to fake your way to a diploma though. Am I wrong?

Admission is harder than graduation for sure. I only had an 80th percentile SAT but 99th percentile GPA

So getting in to Stanford is harder than graduating with a STEM degree? Doens't say much about the vaunted reputation of that school. I went to a midwest state university. Getting in was easy. Completing my CS degree took a lot of work. I cannot imagine any way I could have bullshitted my way through that.

Google the concept of the gentleman's B. if you show up, most teachers will take pity and not fail you even if you are subpar on your tests.

i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway.

leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out

Yes, this is the case for most of the top universities (and likely med school, law school, you name it).

Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).

It’s much easier to complete school than it is to get in.

Yes. You think Harvard is going to fail the son of a senator or legacy donor?

A lot of folks I went to college with did nothing but party, drink, hang out. Education didn't matter to them at all. They were going to get a job at their family's firm, company, etc anyway. Didn't matter what their grades were.

Professors know who they can't fail.

When I was at university, there was a "blind examination policy" in place.

The people marking the exams did not know whose exams they were marking.

It's possible that corrupt professors worked around this, but there was never any scandals related to this policy.

"Policies." I remember lots of policies. If you're rich enough, the policies don't apply to you. That's not a scandal, it's just how the world works.

Your comment begs the question: Have you ever personally worked with graduates from any of those schools?

Yes, and I have been unimpressed at best and disappointed at worse.