Silicon Valley Loves Alex Karp and Elon Musk - Piazza Recruiting Data

Brand in the CS sense is still huge. For some reason students just seem to love working at companies that are famous in the tech circle.

Perks also have a disproportionate impact on students who are used to college life and also don't quite internalize costs. We'll take a salary cut to have silly fringe benefits like laundry.

Finally, I think two delusions play a huge role: (1) That big companies offer more "interesting" work, which I think is empirically false. You're far more likely to be fixing bugs in old code in one of these large/famous companies than inventing new algorithms. (2) That "interesting" work is desirable. I honestly don't understand why students especially think they're above working on a CRUD app. Sure, it sounds "cool" to be dealing with things at Google scale, but I'd personally rather have a tangible impact on a company's core product.

Personally, I don't buy into any of the hype and turn away all recruiters from brand name companies. I can make twice as much, and work reasonable hours, in building "uninteresting" code for random startups...

Myself included, it is easy to forget you have a lot of work to do at these places. I've heard these places described as "adult Disney land ", "just, better than the east coast " and "way better than Google " by recruiters.