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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, fair. On the other hand, an MIT or Stanford graduate is more likely to be immediately hired by Google, or NVidia, or Barclays, or something else top-notch, without having to make intermediate career steps.

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My perception is that the further you get from the time of graduation, the less it makes a difference where someone went to school. A year or two, I felt like where I got my degree might have made a difference in terms of my ability to find jobs, but coming up on a a decade since I graduated (which is a pretty small portion of what I expect will be a decades-long career), it might as well be entirely irrelevant. Amusingly, I said something similar to one of my colleagues recently when we were discussing the level of stress their teenager was having around their upcoming college applications, and they agreed, mentioning that no one cared that they didn't even have a degree, which was clearly true since I had absolutely no idea that was the case! It never came up in the past despite us chatting fairly regularly about our personal lives because it ultimately just didn't matter to either of us, and while it affected their initial attempts to break into the software industry, it pretty quickly stopped mattering even to their prospective employers compared to their actual work experience.

Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.

The difference is that if you have a prestigious degree you have good odds of dropping into a fast track starter role.

If you don't it may take you a decade of career time to "prove yourself" and network to the point where you could apply for something similar.

Or you might _never_ get the chance to do that because you are stuck in jobs at "normal" companies where you spend all your time on low impact stuff.

Tech might be the only high-paying (or, hell, reliably middle-class white-collar) field where this is true.

Not true tbh. Tech was the first place where that was the case, but increasingly high-paying professional jobs don't require an undergraduate degree, since its losing its value as an indicator of ability.

Postgrad degrees still have a lot of value, and open a lot of doors. There are things I learned in my Master's that I probably wouldn'tve been able to get at a deep level working in industry, and for that same reason I want to go for a PhD (even if it might be ill-advised in these times).

What fields? Or what regions? My experience is limited, of course, and this is all anecdotal. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

In California, I've met two people in the last two weeks who live comfortably on their income without a college degree. One of them was in medical sales consulting, the other worked at an art gallery managing the sale of works from the artists they represent to clients. The first started when they were in college and dropped out after their career began to take off, the second was promoted out of an internship.

I think sales in general may also be one of those fields where education is not that important.

That's a fair point: sales has always worked like that. I think there's sales and sales, though. Like, if you're going to be selling high-level stuff, to wealthy and/or sophisticated people, then your background (maybe not always, but generally including, education) really does matter. I don't know, though. I'm not part of that world.

DeepMind and top firms from the City of London have recruiters chasing Oxbridge students in CS, Math, and Statistics before graduation, sometimes even a year or two ahead. You hear more about MIT or Stanford because you are based in the US. Ranking or prestige-wise, in case that matters (I think it's just a lazy filter), they are indistinguishable: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025

My counterpoint is that those companies you listed do more harm than good anyhow. Advertising and data gathering, helping LLM companies train models that use more electricity than many countries, and charging outrageous interest and practicing usury.

Why would you want to work for those places?

Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.

The customers are using the energy. LLMs don't use energy, they just sit there.

Society does not exist in a vacuum. Your individual actions affect others. A corporation's actions do as well.

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