> If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role wher

> If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning Prestige comes from past endeavor therefore prestige can end up depreciating fast. I'd argue that one should always focus on learning, or more generally, on growth. FAANG companies do give their employees prestige, yet prestige alone does not carry too much weight, especially during an interview. It is the combination of the growing success of a company and an employee's contribution to the success that gives the true prestige and handsome reward to the employee. Case in point, a Googler 18 years ago would automatically get tons of respect because Google launched a slew of groundbreaking products and popularized a slew of amazing technologies. GFS, Big Table, MapReduce framework, draggable and zoomable Google Maps by AJAX (even though XMLHttpRequest was invented by MS), 1GB of Gmail storage, amazing search infrastructure that goes way beyond the classic methods in the book Managing Gigabytes, large-scale machine learning for both universal search and semantic understanding of Google search, large-scale Google Ads, and the list goes on. FB employees 15 years ago would likely (likely as there will always be exceptions) got a lot more prestige than today because FB scaled its business to hundreds of millions of users, invented a novel architecture for social networking especially for serving feeds, scaled MySQL along the way, invented technologies like Tao, Haystack, React, HVM, Scruba, large-scale memcached, and the list can also go on. Netflix grew its subscribers from a few million back in 2008 to 70 millions about 7 years ago. Along the way, they showed the world how to be productive with merely a few hundred engineers by building tools. They popularized the concept of circuit-breaking by giving the world Hystrix (yes, I know the concept was quite well known to readers of Release It! and Netflix mentioned that they learned that concept from that very book). They built Asgard and later Spinnaker. They built predictive autoscaling service years before AWS built the same feature. They built discovery service and fast loggers and RxJava and Iceberg and a long list of other systems. Along the way, the Netflix in that era enjoyed prestige. I'm sure people can come up with equal number of negative examples, like the dude who was L6 in Google but spent the last two years solely coordinating teams to using his team's user embedding, and therefore wondered why other companies kept down leveling him after interviews. Of course, I made this example up but you get the idea. So, chase growth and therefore prestige in the near future, even in the downturn.