23 ms·

The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting

305 points by wdesilvestro 6y ago

pmoriarty 6y ago
I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. 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.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Because they have control of the money. How do we cut them out?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Legislation and regulation.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Meh, I absolutely don't believe that's the way. That's how we get the market to halt. I was thinking more of teaching business and management skills to engineers.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        So “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
      - tolbish 6y ago
        That is called the MBA.
- config_yml 6y ago
  As Steve Blank said, in 5 years, having FB on your resume will be like Enron. I hope he’s right.
  - samfisher83 6y ago
    I think most people did ok. Enron had a lot of really smart people. Morally bankrupt, but very smart. No different than any of these big tech companies. People like money, smart people will be attracted to it. Companies like smart people so I don't think they will have a hard time getting another job.
    - ryanmarsh 6y ago
      As with many corrupt organizations Enron was full of good people who had no power and never did anything morally wrong. 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.
      - dasil003 6y ago
        Of course we can't paint all employees of any company with one brush, but I don't think we should let the majority of Enron employees off the hook so easily. That kind of systemic fraud requires cooperation or at least a large number of individuals to look the other way. I realize some innocent people's reputation will be hurt, but there needs to be some social pressure for whistle blowers otherwise the risk reward is always such that "a few bad apples" will take the risk enabled by the silent majority "just doing their jobs".
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I've interviewed several smart people from Palantir and naturally I did not hire them. They might as well wear a scarlet letter.
      - shostack 6y ago
        So you made a biased decision about a candidate based on where they worked rather than evaluate them on their ability to perform in the role relative to other candidates?
- notacoward 6y ago
  > I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. 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.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  In my social group, working for Facebook in particular is definitely shunned.
whimsicalism 6y ago
Much of this blog post speaks to my experience (probably because we went to the same school at pretty much the same time). 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.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  It's definitely easier for large, profitable companies to take on the risk and training cost of interns and new grads.
- chrisgd 6y ago
  Stock options in an already public company carries a lot of weight relative to a company that it doesn’t seem they are in a hurry to go public.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    What do you think about a place like Databricks then?
- treis 6y ago
  >Google > Stripe is not because Stripe is not prestigious (it obviously is, and plenty of super talented students go there). 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.
notacoward 6y ago
I find two things to disagree with in this article. First is the premise that equally high compensation is offered elsewhere in each industry. I don't know about finance or consulting, but at least for FAANG it doesn't seem to be true. Second is the overlooked explanation that it's headroom - not prestige - that accounts for the difference. 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.
- centimeter 6y ago
  I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Even if they managed to perfectly select for the cream of the crop (they don't), that still has to be like 10-20% of all programmers/engineers in the US. Being top 20% isn't that impressive, and in reality they're probably mostly hiring from the top 30-40%.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Top 20% of one of the most intellectually challenging jobs in America, also if you exclude Amazon it is not 20%.
amb23 6y ago
The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways. 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?
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  This isn’t a problem we as Americans need to fix. It fixes itself. For instance, the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate. 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?”
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate. 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.
    - sgerenser 6y ago
bla3 6y ago
> For the majority of Ivy Leaguers, the most impressive thing they've accomplished is achieving admission to their university. 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.
- throwaway98797 6y ago
  Is that view that common in Europe? Seems awfully self-serving to be the broad consensus.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    In central Europe, public universities that are free for all are the norm, sometimes even for foreigners (other EU citizens are not even considered foreigners). For-profit schools are often of questionable quality, serving those who couldn't pass the bar of the easiest of the free public schools, or are unable to make the minimal commitment to pass them, but still want the diploma. It doesn't help that these for-profit schools try to fake prestige very hard (as opposed to the 1000-year old public universities that indeniably are prestigious, in a different way). Overall yes, schools known only for their claims of prestige, as opposed to their academical merit, are looked down upon.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Harvard is private, yes, but it's not for-profit. Those schools are likewise considered low-quality in the states. Harvard is a non-public non-profit, and is cheaper than the comparable public university for 90% of Americans after aid.
      - rytor718 6y ago
        This needs a hard disclaimer, as in the USA "non-profit" is simply a term used to define a tax bracket. The spirit of the term is grossly violated when Red Cross can be in any category with Harvard or the like--schools that expressly serve the rich (and allow the poor). 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.
fullshark 6y ago
Try getting a new job without a prestigious job on your resume and then learn what the real trap is.
- thebradbain 6y ago
  I have had absolutely no issue with this, personally. I have gotten multiple FAANG offers and have turned them down every time, and I still don't have any on my resume. What's the rush? They're always hiring -- niche, smaller, lesser-known, earlier-stage companies are not.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    > What's the rush? 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.
    - TrackerFF 6y ago
      Even YCombinator advocates on flashing (team) prestige when pitching you startup. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8d-how-to-build-a-great-series-a-pitch-and-deck https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8d-how-to-build-a-great-... Section: Team
    - thebradbain 6y ago
      I have yet to meet a funded startup (YC or otherwise) that wouldn’t match the cash component of salary to within $20k of a FAANG salary+RSU schedule, so long as you have said offer in hand when negotiating (and thus, the equity becomes much more of potential bonus than lottery ticket you depend on ). Maybe pre-seed-stage startups pay much less, but I really haven’t run into any issues around feeling like I’m missing out on significant salary benefits, so FIRE seems to still hold. 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.
tmsh 6y ago
The reason people who drop out of prestigious schools to pursue projects become the most successful is because they are 0% concerned about credentialism for themselves. 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.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > use Harvard or wherever for great learning, 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.
  - tmsh 6y ago
    Yeah totally. 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.
rconti 6y ago
I've always found prestige to be so strange. I suppose it helps that I went to smaller Jesuit school rather than some big top-tier Ivy or similar. 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.
- pram 6y ago
  I've worked at plenty of big name companies you've heard of, and I have not experienced what you describe. Oracle, for example, was pretty much about showing up at work every day. 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.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Big isn't the relevant word here. The right word is growing, and wealthy. I don't have any personal insight into Oracle, but if I were to fathom a guess, I'd say it's probably bureaucratically entrenched and a fiercely competitive internal culture.
alexashka 6y ago
> Prestige can take the ambitious far, but it can't bring them excellence. 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 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 :)
dasudasu 6y ago
>In reality, they have it backward—prestige follows excellence. Exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy. 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.
sna1l 6y ago
I would say just because you work at a FAANG company doesn't necessarily imply all you care about is prestige. Most of the people that I worked with at those companies didn't seem interested in the prestige of the role at all. They were passionate about growing as engineers and continuing to master their craft. When they left they often left to take on larger roles at much smaller companies. You could argue that they worked at X company to get it on their resume, but working with these people, it really didn't feel that way. It seemed more like they were learning how things were done at established "premium" companies, to then go take on similar work at a foundational level at a smaller company. 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.
karmakaze 6y ago
There is some truth to what's being said, though leaves out several other factors mentioned in these comments. > 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.
chrisgd 6y ago
Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan have all moved down market and lead most IPOs these days. Everyone else is fighting for 30% or less of the fees. As a CEO, you can’t lose your job if they mess up your IPO. But if you choose Jefferies and they blow it, you can get fired. There is a term for this that is escaping me right now. There is also a potentially easier path to get an intro as the Goldman brand name carries a lot of weight. All this to say though, there is significant competition within there but if you work there for 3 years you probably work as hard as you would on your own company, but probability weighted income is higher and you have more exit opportunities. I think it makes sense to go work there if you can.
- namdnay 6y ago
  That argument was originally used for IBM I think?
  - kazen44 6y ago
    it used to be true for cisco in the telecom/ISP world aswell. (atleast from early 90's to mid 2000's). Sadly, Cisco decided the stop making proper networking equipment and ditch proper support via TAC.
  - chrisgd 6y ago
    That same thing was said in reference to those banks and IBM 15 years ago too
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thr0waway2 6y ago
>Ambitious students seek out prestige thinking it is the missing ingredient to achieving their own excellence. In reality, they have it backward—prestige follows excellence. 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.
- thr0waway2 6y ago
  To elaborate a bit more: vast majority of jobs where you can seek such excellence that you're able to say at some point "I am top 100 in my field, I enjoy it and am getting paid for it" are taught in an apprenticeship manner. Where you have to make the life of a bigger expert easier while stealing as much knowledge as possible from them. The knowledge that's worth learning is not publicised as if it was publicly accessible it would lose its value. It would become industry standard or competitors would learn how to counteract it or whatever. And if a top expert has hundreds of CVs to chose from for their apprentice, having "Harvard" and "Goldman Sachs" mentioned there is a good way of skewing odds in your favour to even get an interview.
darawk 6y ago
This article briefly touches the real explanation: > 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.
- drewmate 6y ago
  This is a fantastic insight! I had never considered the Sharpe ratio of my career choices before, but I think subconsciously, I have been all along. 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.
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abcxyz02 6y ago
My life is the living playbook of pursuing prestige. Went to Harvard, then consulting, then big tech. Initial pride quickly gave way to disillusionment at every step of the way. 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-20-years-of https://productlessons.substack.com/p/unlearning-the-first-2...
xivzgrev 6y ago
Harvard students are primarily interested in companies with reputable names? What a shocker. 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.
- Technically 6y ago
  Describing a school like "Harvard" as selective is trivially equating "arbitrary and biased" with some kind of semantic merit. Realistically, if you get into harvard you are lucky, wealthy, or usable for marketing. They have no desire to convince you otherwise by simply increasing their allowed student number, especially to compete internationally—by numbers, they are mostly effective via attracting people, not through education.
mips_avatar 6y ago
I think students internally identify the prestige trap. They are aware that they studied in the hollow pursuit of an “A” rather than for the sake of mastering the topic. They know that they traded excellence for prestige. They gained a signaling currency, and they aren’t confident that they have the excellence needed to gain more.
Gunax 6y ago
I don't think a lot of people know what they want. There is just as much guessing as to which job to take as employers have choosing who to hire. 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.
- seppin 6y ago
  Exactly, everyone acts like there is some grand plan/design to all decision making. Everyone is just winging it.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I felt that way about my own life. Still so sometimes. Though far, far less than I used to, and feeling noticeably less anxiety about it previously. A Relevant bit of reading, I think, I hope: https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/ https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
    - thrav 6y ago
      Yeah, this is a popular saying, but couldn’t be further from the truth for the most successful people. 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)
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Yeah, this is a popular saying, but couldn’t be further from the truth for the most successful people. 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 ;)
Tomminn 6y ago
This essay is weakened significantly by one glaring clanger. If this person had equal levels of talent and yet wasn’t from the place they are, they would never make the foolish statement: “exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy”. 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.
- ivanamies 6y ago
  >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. Excellent insight
bliss 6y ago
I work for a well known media company where I live, a brand, our grad scheme is really good (disclaimer I'm a small part of that) and attracts the best of the best out of colleges, people like having my company on their CV, it doesn't do any harm, our allumni typically go on to have good careers, or stay for the long haul. We love it when our people take the skills we've honed into, for example, Amazon, JP Morgan and amazingly often return to the fold and are welcomed back with open arms. There isn't a prestige trap really, but maybe we just think we're the best of the best and going anywhere else is just for rounding out experience.
UMetaGOMS 6y ago
I am definitely guilty of chasing some fusion of prestige and money, with no greater goal. It has recently become a concern to me that I really can't pick out anything more worthwhile than my current FAANG role as a "thing to do with my life"... and yet observing from the inside has shown how underwhelming and borderline dysfunctional these companies can be.
jyu 6y ago
Curious why he would need to move to a more prestigious position? Most people realize by their 30s that prestige is a sucker's game; it's a way of inducing people to do things that aren't much fun and they wouldn't really want to do on their own, by lauding them with accolades from people they don't really care about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833832
- zug_zug 6y ago
  To double down on this -- I think there was an era 10 years ago, when working for google or facebook actually impressed the average person. 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.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    In general, many people (not in tech) still find it prestigious. Since 2016, that has taken a hit because the news media bang the drum of how terrible these companies are.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Some people really need the validation that prestige gives.
Technically 6y ago
Honestly, I have no clue what prestige buys you. The people prestige attracts are vapid garbage. The rest is a matter of negotiating price. The networking power buys you is merely a means to lower your price and get in to opportunities sooner. To seek these as ends themselves reeks of sociopathy.
gnicholas 6y ago
It’s about having options. There’s not much downside to taking a job with the most elite/selective/prestigious company in a field you want to work in because you’ll be well-paid and you can jump to pretty much any other company later. 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.
akhilcacharya 6y ago
What a cloistered view. At my undergrad a total of 3 people joined FAANG companies (of which 2 were Amazon), none joined consulting firms more selective than Accenture, and nobody joined big finance. How much ink needs to be spilled about Harvard undergrads anyway? Aren’t there other groups of people that deserve respect and attention?
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Are they doing anything noteworthy ?
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    No, are you?
dinglefairy 6y ago
power 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.
finolex1 6y ago
> but I've never heard of a Harvard CS major wanting to work for Stripe. 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.
motohagiography 6y ago
Prestige is a euphemism for "not worth it," as it's what they offer instead of paying you. Ask yourself, "do I admire these people and do I want to be like them?" If the answer is not an enthusiastic hell yes, they're time vampires, get the hell out. 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.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  >If it's already prestigious, it's mostly played out. That's going in my book of quotes.
hintymad 6y ago
It may be a prestige to be in a big firm in many places, but in the valley it is a prestige to be in a successful company. And luckily for techies in the valley, there are quite many great blow-out companies of much smaller size. In fact, I would cringe if a company's goal is to grow from 300 engineers to thousands in a year, as Uber's CTO used to boast. I would not join a big tech either because well, where is the 10X return? 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.
neilv 6y ago
I've sometimes wished that a couple of the FAANGs had less prestige, since I would've gone to one of them years ago. 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.
kyawzazaw 6y ago
> Why are Google and Facebook so attractive to prospective engineers while Stripe and Nvidia are never brought up? 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.
Aunche 6y ago
> Why are Google and Facebook so attractive to prospective engineers while Stripe and Nvidia are never brought up? 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.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Also depends on who you ask. I know lots of people who consider stripe more attractive than Google.
goldwind1111 6y ago
ugh/ I appreciate the article, but I could not have gone to Harvard and could have told you that. It ain't that hard.
spot5010 6y ago
Question to HN folks: how valuable is it to have FAANG on your resume?
- username90 6y ago
  Quite a lot in salary negotiations. FAANG tend to down-level people from less prestigious companies. 5 years at a FAANG will usually land you a senior engineer position at other FAANG's, 5 year at non prestigious will land you one step lower. The difference is about $50-$100k a year.
throwaway713 6y ago
The author doesn’t consider Stripe prestigious? I work at one of the companies he lists as prestigious, and I think most of my co-workers consider Stripe to be a top company to work at and very competitive to get into. A lot have in fact left to go work for them, because they have a reputation for having good career growth and great engineers. If I decided to go somewhere else, that’s actually where I would send my resume first.
framecowbird 6y ago
This article really resonated with me. I got into a very prestigious university, and then developed an anxiety at each career stage that my next move would less prestigious than my last. It took me a long time to realise this was how I was thinking about the world, and even then the 'prestige anxiety' drove my decision-making. In the end I finally managed to take a job at a small environmental startup, and then an NGO, and am much happier.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Prestige is not what you make or where you work..but who you know and what they will do for you when you ask for a favour. Even better..who will approach you for a favour.
jpochtar 6y ago
Prestige is also "legible" in the sense introduced by "Seeing Like a State". It's valuable in eg. socially, if someone sees Harvard/Goldman, they can instantly bucket you in a particular social class, even if they're in a wildly different field and couldn't assess your actual merit. Whether you want to be perceived as a member of that particular social class is a mixed bag which I wont waste space on here, as if you're interested in reading more about it, I'd direct you to literally any issue of The New Yorker.
eganp 6y ago
This is a nice essay but I think it misses 3 key points: 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.
niceguy1 6y ago
The author's examples of places that aren't considered prestigious throughout, such as Stripe and Nvidia, are ridiculous. The article basically takes companies that are considered prestigious to a smaller subset of harvard undergrads and claims that since a larger subset of the population doesn't find them prestigious they are somehow "underrated" and need to be looked at more. 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.
- ffggvv 6y ago
  yeah anyone within tech or fang finds stripe prestigious. even if some random person on the street hasn’t heard of it. same with HFT. some would even consider them more prestigious than fang. Fang is the backup for harvard grads who can’t work at a unicorn
  - niceguy1 6y ago
    Agreed. At this point even companies like stripe have been referred to as underrated so many times that they’re bordering on overrated
spullara 6y ago
I had been programming since I was 10, but had decided that I had learned all their was to know (typical adolescent ego) so I decided to go in physics as it was what I thought would be the most challenging thing to do. Did well in undergrad, graduating in 3 years and got a fellowship at a good grad school. Studied theoretical high-energy particle physics. In the background of all this I was programming the whole way, worked in the computer lab, etc. Ultimately I decided to drop out of the Ph.D. program with my M.S. and dive into software engineering, my real love. Haven't really looked back since the choice to drop out. Still program everyday as a VC. Having your favorite hobby as your job I still think is as good as it gets. Even better if it grew up with you and is now lucrative and as exciting as ever.
- physicles 6y ago
  I have a similar story, except I never made it past physics undergrad and joined a big tech firm right after graduation. That was my dream job since I was 10, prestigious or not, and I loved the first five years there. 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.
ericye16 6y ago
I think one point the author misses is that a lot of college grads see these prestigious companies, rightly or wrongly, as being the best places to learn to hone their craft. Yes, there may be some self-selecting and self-perpetuating cycle here where the most ambitious seek out the best, but I do think that there's a higher chance you'll find great or even best-in-the-world [software engineers|investment bankers|consultants] to learn from at these prestigious firms than smaller boutique companies.
jwmoz 6y ago
I prefer to sum it up more succinctly with "there's more to life than work".
swyx 6y ago
OP, this was a remarkably self aware essay and I quite enjoyed it. I went to Wharton and remember EXACTLY how the prestige trap feels. 10 years later I can tell you that it is exactly as pointless and empty as you think. you're very fortunate to realize this at your age. I wish you all the best and hope you keep writing insightful stuff like this.
szundi 6y ago
You should not underestimate one’s need for prestige/place in the informal hierarchy of people. We have the same biochemic mechanism for this as crabs (!!). Good luck avoiding this.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I work at McKinsey, straight out of a master program. I find this article obtuse. Does McKinsey feel prestigious to me? Sure. That has nothing to do with James McKinsey inventing managerial accounting (in fact, internally, James McKinsey is rarely mentioned in discussions of company history). It's because as a 20-something guy I can have discussions with fortune 100 CEOs about what I think they need to do. I think that's pretty cool. A smaller boutique firm probably wouldn't allow that. It's not a huge deal at the end of the day though. Prestige is a loaded word that sounds snobby. If there's any reason to seek prestige, its because having a prestigious experience tends to qualify you for more lucrative opportunities down the line via automatic respect and helpful connections. 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.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Lol consultants are most often ignored post their assignments and so are their recommendations.

305 points by wdesilvestro 6y ago

I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. 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.

emteycz 6y ago
Because they have control of the money. How do we cut them out?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Legislation and regulation.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Meh, I absolutely don't believe that's the way. That's how we get the market to halt. I was thinking more of teaching business and management skills to engineers.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      So “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
    - tolbish 6y ago
      That is called the MBA.
config_yml 6y ago
As Steve Blank said, in 5 years, having FB on your resume will be like Enron. I hope he’s right.
- samfisher83 6y ago
  I think most people did ok. Enron had a lot of really smart people. Morally bankrupt, but very smart. No different than any of these big tech companies. People like money, smart people will be attracted to it. Companies like smart people so I don't think they will have a hard time getting another job.
  - ryanmarsh 6y ago
    As with many corrupt organizations Enron was full of good people who had no power and never did anything morally wrong. 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.
    - dasil003 6y ago
      Of course we can't paint all employees of any company with one brush, but I don't think we should let the majority of Enron employees off the hook so easily. That kind of systemic fraud requires cooperation or at least a large number of individuals to look the other way. I realize some innocent people's reputation will be hurt, but there needs to be some social pressure for whistle blowers otherwise the risk reward is always such that "a few bad apples" will take the risk enabled by the silent majority "just doing their jobs".
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    I've interviewed several smart people from Palantir and naturally I did not hire them. They might as well wear a scarlet letter.
    - shostack 6y ago
      So you made a biased decision about a candidate based on where they worked rather than evaluate them on their ability to perform in the role relative to other candidates?
notacoward 6y ago
> I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. 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.
jnwatson 6y ago
In my social group, working for Facebook in particular is definitely shunned.

whimsicalism 6y ago

Much of this blog post speaks to my experience (probably because we went to the same school at pretty much the same time). 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.

dehrmann 6y ago
It's definitely easier for large, profitable companies to take on the risk and training cost of interns and new grads.
chrisgd 6y ago
Stock options in an already public company carries a lot of weight relative to a company that it doesn’t seem they are in a hurry to go public.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  What do you think about a place like Databricks then?
treis 6y ago
>Google > Stripe is not because Stripe is not prestigious (it obviously is, and plenty of super talented students go there). 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.

notacoward 6y ago

I find two things to disagree with in this article. First is the premise that equally high compensation is offered elsewhere in each industry. I don't know about finance or consulting, but at least for FAANG it doesn't seem to be true. Second is the overlooked explanation that it's headroom - not prestige - that accounts for the difference. 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.

centimeter 6y ago
I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Even if they managed to perfectly select for the cream of the crop (they don't), that still has to be like 10-20% of all programmers/engineers in the US. Being top 20% isn't that impressive, and in reality they're probably mostly hiring from the top 30-40%.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Top 20% of one of the most intellectually challenging jobs in America, also if you exclude Amazon it is not 20%.

amb23 6y ago

The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways. 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?

andrewmcwatters 6y ago
This isn’t a problem we as Americans need to fix. It fixes itself. For instance, the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate. 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?”
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate. 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.
  - sgerenser 6y ago

bla3 6y ago

> For the majority of Ivy Leaguers, the most impressive thing they've accomplished is achieving admission to their university. 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.

throwaway98797 6y ago
Is that view that common in Europe? Seems awfully self-serving to be the broad consensus.
- emteycz 6y ago
  In central Europe, public universities that are free for all are the norm, sometimes even for foreigners (other EU citizens are not even considered foreigners). For-profit schools are often of questionable quality, serving those who couldn't pass the bar of the easiest of the free public schools, or are unable to make the minimal commitment to pass them, but still want the diploma. It doesn't help that these for-profit schools try to fake prestige very hard (as opposed to the 1000-year old public universities that indeniably are prestigious, in a different way). Overall yes, schools known only for their claims of prestige, as opposed to their academical merit, are looked down upon.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Harvard is private, yes, but it's not for-profit. Those schools are likewise considered low-quality in the states. Harvard is a non-public non-profit, and is cheaper than the comparable public university for 90% of Americans after aid.
    - rytor718 6y ago
      This needs a hard disclaimer, as in the USA "non-profit" is simply a term used to define a tax bracket. The spirit of the term is grossly violated when Red Cross can be in any category with Harvard or the like--schools that expressly serve the rich (and allow the poor). 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.

fullshark 6y ago

Try getting a new job without a prestigious job on your resume and then learn what the real trap is.

thebradbain 6y ago
I have had absolutely no issue with this, personally. I have gotten multiple FAANG offers and have turned them down every time, and I still don't have any on my resume. What's the rush? They're always hiring -- niche, smaller, lesser-known, earlier-stage companies are not.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  > What's the rush? 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.
  - TrackerFF 6y ago
    Even YCombinator advocates on flashing (team) prestige when pitching you startup. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8d-how-to-build-a-great-series-a-pitch-and-deck https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8d-how-to-build-a-great-... Section: Team
  - thebradbain 6y ago
    I have yet to meet a funded startup (YC or otherwise) that wouldn’t match the cash component of salary to within $20k of a FAANG salary+RSU schedule, so long as you have said offer in hand when negotiating (and thus, the equity becomes much more of potential bonus than lottery ticket you depend on ). Maybe pre-seed-stage startups pay much less, but I really haven’t run into any issues around feeling like I’m missing out on significant salary benefits, so FIRE seems to still hold. 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.

tmsh 6y ago

The reason people who drop out of prestigious schools to pursue projects become the most successful is because they are 0% concerned about credentialism for themselves. 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.

whimsicalism 6y ago
> use Harvard or wherever for great learning, 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.
- tmsh 6y ago
  Yeah totally. 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.

rconti 6y ago

I've always found prestige to be so strange. I suppose it helps that I went to smaller Jesuit school rather than some big top-tier Ivy or similar. 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.

pram 6y ago
I've worked at plenty of big name companies you've heard of, and I have not experienced what you describe. Oracle, for example, was pretty much about showing up at work every day. 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.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  Big isn't the relevant word here. The right word is growing, and wealthy. I don't have any personal insight into Oracle, but if I were to fathom a guess, I'd say it's probably bureaucratically entrenched and a fiercely competitive internal culture.

alexashka 6y ago

> Prestige can take the ambitious far, but it can't bring them excellence. 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 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 :)

dasudasu 6y ago

>In reality, they have it backward—prestige follows excellence. Exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy. 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.

sna1l 6y ago

I would say just because you work at a FAANG company doesn't necessarily imply all you care about is prestige. Most of the people that I worked with at those companies didn't seem interested in the prestige of the role at all. They were passionate about growing as engineers and continuing to master their craft. When they left they often left to take on larger roles at much smaller companies. You could argue that they worked at X company to get it on their resume, but working with these people, it really didn't feel that way. It seemed more like they were learning how things were done at established "premium" companies, to then go take on similar work at a foundational level at a smaller company. 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.

karmakaze 6y ago

There is some truth to what's being said, though leaves out several other factors mentioned in these comments. > 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.

chrisgd 6y ago

Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan have all moved down market and lead most IPOs these days. Everyone else is fighting for 30% or less of the fees. As a CEO, you can’t lose your job if they mess up your IPO. But if you choose Jefferies and they blow it, you can get fired. There is a term for this that is escaping me right now. There is also a potentially easier path to get an intro as the Goldman brand name carries a lot of weight. All this to say though, there is significant competition within there but if you work there for 3 years you probably work as hard as you would on your own company, but probability weighted income is higher and you have more exit opportunities. I think it makes sense to go work there if you can.

namdnay 6y ago
That argument was originally used for IBM I think?
- kazen44 6y ago
  it used to be true for cisco in the telecom/ISP world aswell. (atleast from early 90's to mid 2000's). Sadly, Cisco decided the stop making proper networking equipment and ditch proper support via TAC.
- chrisgd 6y ago
  That same thing was said in reference to those banks and IBM 15 years ago too

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thr0waway2 6y ago

>Ambitious students seek out prestige thinking it is the missing ingredient to achieving their own excellence. In reality, they have it backward—prestige follows excellence. 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.

thr0waway2 6y ago
To elaborate a bit more: vast majority of jobs where you can seek such excellence that you're able to say at some point "I am top 100 in my field, I enjoy it and am getting paid for it" are taught in an apprenticeship manner. Where you have to make the life of a bigger expert easier while stealing as much knowledge as possible from them. The knowledge that's worth learning is not publicised as if it was publicly accessible it would lose its value. It would become industry standard or competitors would learn how to counteract it or whatever. And if a top expert has hundreds of CVs to chose from for their apprentice, having "Harvard" and "Goldman Sachs" mentioned there is a good way of skewing odds in your favour to even get an interview.

darawk 6y ago

This article briefly touches the real explanation: > 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.

drewmate 6y ago
This is a fantastic insight! I had never considered the Sharpe ratio of my career choices before, but I think subconsciously, I have been all along. 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.

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abcxyz02 6y ago

My life is the living playbook of pursuing prestige. Went to Harvard, then consulting, then big tech. Initial pride quickly gave way to disillusionment at every step of the way. 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-20-years-of https://productlessons.substack.com/p/unlearning-the-first-2...

xivzgrev 6y ago

Harvard students are primarily interested in companies with reputable names? What a shocker. 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.

Technically 6y ago
Describing a school like "Harvard" as selective is trivially equating "arbitrary and biased" with some kind of semantic merit. Realistically, if you get into harvard you are lucky, wealthy, or usable for marketing. They have no desire to convince you otherwise by simply increasing their allowed student number, especially to compete internationally—by numbers, they are mostly effective via attracting people, not through education.

mips_avatar 6y ago

I think students internally identify the prestige trap. They are aware that they studied in the hollow pursuit of an “A” rather than for the sake of mastering the topic. They know that they traded excellence for prestige. They gained a signaling currency, and they aren’t confident that they have the excellence needed to gain more.

Gunax 6y ago

I don't think a lot of people know what they want. There is just as much guessing as to which job to take as employers have choosing who to hire. 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.

seppin 6y ago
Exactly, everyone acts like there is some grand plan/design to all decision making. Everyone is just winging it.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I felt that way about my own life. Still so sometimes. Though far, far less than I used to, and feeling noticeably less anxiety about it previously. A Relevant bit of reading, I think, I hope: https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/ https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
  - thrav 6y ago
    Yeah, this is a popular saying, but couldn’t be further from the truth for the most successful people. 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)
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Yeah, this is a popular saying, but couldn’t be further from the truth for the most successful people. 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 ;)

Tomminn 6y ago

This essay is weakened significantly by one glaring clanger. If this person had equal levels of talent and yet wasn’t from the place they are, they would never make the foolish statement: “exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy”. 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.

ivanamies 6y ago
>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. Excellent insight

bliss 6y ago

I work for a well known media company where I live, a brand, our grad scheme is really good (disclaimer I'm a small part of that) and attracts the best of the best out of colleges, people like having my company on their CV, it doesn't do any harm, our allumni typically go on to have good careers, or stay for the long haul. We love it when our people take the skills we've honed into, for example, Amazon, JP Morgan and amazingly often return to the fold and are welcomed back with open arms. There isn't a prestige trap really, but maybe we just think we're the best of the best and going anywhere else is just for rounding out experience.

UMetaGOMS 6y ago

I am definitely guilty of chasing some fusion of prestige and money, with no greater goal. It has recently become a concern to me that I really can't pick out anything more worthwhile than my current FAANG role as a "thing to do with my life"... and yet observing from the inside has shown how underwhelming and borderline dysfunctional these companies can be.

jyu 6y ago

Curious why he would need to move to a more prestigious position? Most people realize by their 30s that prestige is a sucker's game; it's a way of inducing people to do things that aren't much fun and they wouldn't really want to do on their own, by lauding them with accolades from people they don't really care about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833832

zug_zug 6y ago
To double down on this -- I think there was an era 10 years ago, when working for google or facebook actually impressed the average person. 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.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  In general, many people (not in tech) still find it prestigious. Since 2016, that has taken a hit because the news media bang the drum of how terrible these companies are.
xwdv 6y ago
Some people really need the validation that prestige gives.

Technically 6y ago

Honestly, I have no clue what prestige buys you. The people prestige attracts are vapid garbage. The rest is a matter of negotiating price. The networking power buys you is merely a means to lower your price and get in to opportunities sooner. To seek these as ends themselves reeks of sociopathy.

gnicholas 6y ago

It’s about having options. There’s not much downside to taking a job with the most elite/selective/prestigious company in a field you want to work in because you’ll be well-paid and you can jump to pretty much any other company later. 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.

akhilcacharya 6y ago

What a cloistered view. At my undergrad a total of 3 people joined FAANG companies (of which 2 were Amazon), none joined consulting firms more selective than Accenture, and nobody joined big finance. How much ink needs to be spilled about Harvard undergrads anyway? Aren’t there other groups of people that deserve respect and attention?

mav3rick 6y ago
Are they doing anything noteworthy ?
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  No, are you?

dinglefairy 6y ago

power 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.

finolex1 6y ago

> but I've never heard of a Harvard CS major wanting to work for Stripe. 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.

motohagiography 6y ago

Prestige is a euphemism for "not worth it," as it's what they offer instead of paying you. Ask yourself, "do I admire these people and do I want to be like them?" If the answer is not an enthusiastic hell yes, they're time vampires, get the hell out. 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.

lambdatronics 6y ago
>If it's already prestigious, it's mostly played out. That's going in my book of quotes.

hintymad 6y ago

It may be a prestige to be in a big firm in many places, but in the valley it is a prestige to be in a successful company. And luckily for techies in the valley, there are quite many great blow-out companies of much smaller size. In fact, I would cringe if a company's goal is to grow from 300 engineers to thousands in a year, as Uber's CTO used to boast. I would not join a big tech either because well, where is the 10X return? 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.

neilv 6y ago

I've sometimes wished that a couple of the FAANGs had less prestige, since I would've gone to one of them years ago. 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.

kyawzazaw 6y ago

> Why are Google and Facebook so attractive to prospective engineers while Stripe and Nvidia are never brought up? 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.

Aunche 6y ago

> Why are Google and Facebook so attractive to prospective engineers while Stripe and Nvidia are never brought up? 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.

joshuamorton 6y ago
Also depends on who you ask. I know lots of people who consider stripe more attractive than Google.

goldwind1111 6y ago

ugh/ I appreciate the article, but I could not have gone to Harvard and could have told you that. It ain't that hard.

spot5010 6y ago

Question to HN folks: how valuable is it to have FAANG on your resume?

username90 6y ago
Quite a lot in salary negotiations. FAANG tend to down-level people from less prestigious companies. 5 years at a FAANG will usually land you a senior engineer position at other FAANG's, 5 year at non prestigious will land you one step lower. The difference is about $50-$100k a year.

throwaway713 6y ago

The author doesn’t consider Stripe prestigious? I work at one of the companies he lists as prestigious, and I think most of my co-workers consider Stripe to be a top company to work at and very competitive to get into. A lot have in fact left to go work for them, because they have a reputation for having good career growth and great engineers. If I decided to go somewhere else, that’s actually where I would send my resume first.

framecowbird 6y ago

This article really resonated with me. I got into a very prestigious university, and then developed an anxiety at each career stage that my next move would less prestigious than my last. It took me a long time to realise this was how I was thinking about the world, and even then the 'prestige anxiety' drove my decision-making. In the end I finally managed to take a job at a small environmental startup, and then an NGO, and am much happier.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Prestige is not what you make or where you work..but who you know and what they will do for you when you ask for a favour. Even better..who will approach you for a favour.

jpochtar 6y ago

Prestige is also "legible" in the sense introduced by "Seeing Like a State". It's valuable in eg. socially, if someone sees Harvard/Goldman, they can instantly bucket you in a particular social class, even if they're in a wildly different field and couldn't assess your actual merit. Whether you want to be perceived as a member of that particular social class is a mixed bag which I wont waste space on here, as if you're interested in reading more about it, I'd direct you to literally any issue of The New Yorker.

eganp 6y ago

This is a nice essay but I think it misses 3 key points: 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.

niceguy1 6y ago

The author's examples of places that aren't considered prestigious throughout, such as Stripe and Nvidia, are ridiculous. The article basically takes companies that are considered prestigious to a smaller subset of harvard undergrads and claims that since a larger subset of the population doesn't find them prestigious they are somehow "underrated" and need to be looked at more. 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.

ffggvv 6y ago
yeah anyone within tech or fang finds stripe prestigious. even if some random person on the street hasn’t heard of it. same with HFT. some would even consider them more prestigious than fang. Fang is the backup for harvard grads who can’t work at a unicorn
- niceguy1 6y ago
  Agreed. At this point even companies like stripe have been referred to as underrated so many times that they’re bordering on overrated

spullara 6y ago

I had been programming since I was 10, but had decided that I had learned all their was to know (typical adolescent ego) so I decided to go in physics as it was what I thought would be the most challenging thing to do. Did well in undergrad, graduating in 3 years and got a fellowship at a good grad school. Studied theoretical high-energy particle physics. In the background of all this I was programming the whole way, worked in the computer lab, etc. Ultimately I decided to drop out of the Ph.D. program with my M.S. and dive into software engineering, my real love. Haven't really looked back since the choice to drop out. Still program everyday as a VC. Having your favorite hobby as your job I still think is as good as it gets. Even better if it grew up with you and is now lucrative and as exciting as ever.

physicles 6y ago
I have a similar story, except I never made it past physics undergrad and joined a big tech firm right after graduation. That was my dream job since I was 10, prestigious or not, and I loved the first five years there. 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.

ericye16 6y ago

I think one point the author misses is that a lot of college grads see these prestigious companies, rightly or wrongly, as being the best places to learn to hone their craft. Yes, there may be some self-selecting and self-perpetuating cycle here where the most ambitious seek out the best, but I do think that there's a higher chance you'll find great or even best-in-the-world [software engineers|investment bankers|consultants] to learn from at these prestigious firms than smaller boutique companies.

jwmoz 6y ago

I prefer to sum it up more succinctly with "there's more to life than work".

swyx 6y ago

OP, this was a remarkably self aware essay and I quite enjoyed it. I went to Wharton and remember EXACTLY how the prestige trap feels. 10 years later I can tell you that it is exactly as pointless and empty as you think. you're very fortunate to realize this at your age. I wish you all the best and hope you keep writing insightful stuff like this.

szundi 6y ago

You should not underestimate one’s need for prestige/place in the informal hierarchy of people. We have the same biochemic mechanism for this as crabs (!!). Good luck avoiding this.

klmadfejno 6y ago

I work at McKinsey, straight out of a master program. I find this article obtuse. Does McKinsey feel prestigious to me? Sure. That has nothing to do with James McKinsey inventing managerial accounting (in fact, internally, James McKinsey is rarely mentioned in discussions of company history). It's because as a 20-something guy I can have discussions with fortune 100 CEOs about what I think they need to do. I think that's pretty cool. A smaller boutique firm probably wouldn't allow that. It's not a huge deal at the end of the day though. Prestige is a loaded word that sounds snobby. If there's any reason to seek prestige, its because having a prestigious experience tends to qualify you for more lucrative opportunities down the line via automatic respect and helpful connections. 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.

mav3rick 6y ago
Lol consultants are most often ignored post their assignments and so are their recommendations.