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One of the things I love about being in CS is that there is much less pressure to go into management consulting or finance--straight out of college, tech compan
by tikhonj 15y ago
One of the things I love about being in CS is that there is much less pressure to go into management consulting or finance--straight out of college, tech companies offer similar stability and pay (perhaps more stability and less pay, but it's close) coupled with very nice working conditions and actual, nontrivial engineering problems.
For me and my EE/CS friends there are three options that come before finance (I don't think anybody even considers management consulting): grad school, FB/Google/MSFT...etc or a start up. I only know one person eager to enter finance, compared to many people interested in, and usually already working towards, either an academic path, a stable programming career or founding their own company.
That said, there is some very serious selection bias in my group of friends, so this is probably not indicative of my university at large. Particularly, almost everybody I know is in some sort of engineering, and the school I'm at is particularly strong in engineering (especially EE/CS). I suspect if I had more friends from the business school I would have a very different picture.
- Maro 15y agoThe point is, they can go into M/C/F, make 6-figure salaries at age 23, then go from there. They'll be making a whole lot more than the vast majority of engineers even at Google, without taking risks. By the time they're 35, they'll be very wealthy, about as wealthy as you'd be if you start a startup and sell at a $10M valuation (and keep $1-2M), but they don't have to take any risks. But you have to work very hard (all the way from High School), tread along a well defined path, and it'll work out. It's a standardized, reproducible variant of the American Dream of living a wealthy life.