Comment by mountainofdeath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainofdeath | Hacker News Reader

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mountainofdeath

I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty.

History is a flat circle.

My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech?

It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.

If I remember correctly, there were 600 CS freshmen in 2000 at Virginia Tech, only ~60 of us were left by graduation, I think largely because of people evaluating their prospects after the crash (and computer science is hard).

That’s some bullshit. I applied for CS at tech and they butchered my admission and put me in general engineering. When I called to correct this obvious mistake they said the CS program was full.

I blamed it on Virginia tech’s football team making it to championships that year (1999). Oh well, still got to work with famous professors and got a very good head start on my career through my Alma mater

I was totally surprised how many people I had met in those first classes, who had no programming experience whatsoever and were surprised by the amount of math in the curriculum - they were for sure chasing a trend.

I think my class was the last to graduate from arts/sciences, the CS dept was moved into the engineering college.

> About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years

I'm always kind of curious about these folks. Do they not communicate amongst themselves? It would seem that 50% aspiring to be product managers could not be statistically possible.

I feel like if I walked into a service bay of a dealership and asked the mechanics working on vehicles, there is no way 1/2 of them would try and claim they expect to be service advisor in 2 years.

In finance most people aren't going to end up as an MD (Managing Director, not doctor) but that's probably a goal for most people entering investment banking. I don't think it's unreasonable to have becoming a PM a goal, maybe you'll fail but there's lots of things you can do to swing the odds more in your favor.

If you start as an analyst in Investment Banking at bulge bracket bank (the same hiring pool as for Google APM program and similar), you fall into one of two categories.

1. The coat-rider who sees everyone doing and how can the consensus be wrong. If you read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, the first few chapters document his experience at Princeton in the early 80s. It's just the fashionable thing to do.

2. The ones that hope to pivot somewhere in year 2-3 to Private Equity or the Hedge fund space. After a few more years, your hours and stress dramatically improve and you earn life-changing amounts of money (1M+ USD) on a yearly basis if you are good. Very few make it this far though. Many burn out and end up in other corporate finance roles.

Group 1 moved to tech and will slowly move back to high-finance.

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