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Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are

Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. Meanwhile a student getting a few subpar grades, often for reasons beyond their control, should somehow be punished forever.

lotsofpulp 2mo ago
>Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. This might be news to many people. Or do you mean it’s not too difficult to get a new job at Walmart?
- geodel 2mo ago
  Building crud, bagging crud, greeting crud. All the same.
- boelboel 2mo ago
  If they had experience at good companies I think the odds are better than the student getting into a good university after fucking up some classes.
mrngld 2mo ago
I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants. Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open. All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
- nukethebay 2mo ago
  [dead]
- disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
  > I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants. As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections. This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
    - cindyllm 2mo ago
      [dead]
    - disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
      > I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections. Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system. When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League. Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well. Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system. I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
      - Aurornis 2mo ago
        I was responding to this part of your post: > rather than a symbol of educational attainment. Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment. In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
cactusplant7374 2mo ago
All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.
altairprime 2mo ago
HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance. While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness. I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.

lotsofpulp 2mo ago

>Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. This might be news to many people. Or do you mean it’s not too difficult to get a new job at Walmart?

geodel 2mo ago
Building crud, bagging crud, greeting crud. All the same.
boelboel 2mo ago
If they had experience at good companies I think the odds are better than the student getting into a good university after fucking up some classes.

mrngld 2mo ago

I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants. Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open. All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.

nukethebay 2mo ago
[dead]
disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants. As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections. This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
    > I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections. Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system. When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League. Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well. Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system. I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
    - Aurornis 2mo ago
      I was responding to this part of your post: > rather than a symbol of educational attainment. Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment. In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

cactusplant7374 2mo ago

All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.

altairprime 2mo ago

HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance. While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness. I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.