There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently.
It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke.
Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper.
My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler.
All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.
Right. People who go to the world's top universities are in the position where they don't HAVE to work for a big company. I went to one of the listed "second-tier universities" and work at FANG (and to be clear, not Amazon), and I don't think I have a single coworker from Harvard or Stanford. I have one coworker from Oxford who considers himself the "failure" of his graduating class because he only works at a big tech company.
Big tech companies are sweat shops, offering just enough pay to have the TOP end of an upper-middle class lifestyle (after sufficient robbery by the tax man, since you're not quite rich enough for any of the Trump-esque tax loopholes to apply), in exchange for the expected 60-80 hour weeks. You still have to work for a living, and you're competing in Stack Ranking with the majority of employees who are visa workers (hiring visa workers is a PLUS for these companies) that will happily sacrifice their family life and weekends to avoid deportation by being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired). Sure, it's a local optimum for a lot of people (work insanely hard and sacrifice your health to drive a Porsche/Tesla and own a house/luxury condo in a top-tier city), but make no mistake, it is a second-tier lifestyle.
On the other hand, people from Harvard and Yale are UPPER class -- not upper-MIDDLE class. This means they have last names like Bush or Clinton, get ushered into upper management or C-level at their father's companies, go "work" for cushy jobs at rentseekers like PE/VC/real estate with corporate credit cards, run for office, repeatedly start failed companies, or go indefinitely "exploring" or "finding the next thing to do" (courtesy of their trust fund).
Meanwhile, the vast majority of my graduating class is slaving away as entry-level rat racers at FANG, investment banks, legal, Big 4, medical residencies, etc.
> being slotted into the "bottom 10%" during the bi-annual performance review (which means you get fired)
Jeez - that is awful. Since you're anonymous, will you say which FANG this was? I don't always hear great things about FANGs but sacking the bottom 10% of employees every 6 months does raise some eyebrows.
The only FANG that doesn't do this is Google (annual review only, no Stack Ranking, Needs Improvement rating is only for 1-4% of the company). Also, Google is the only one without an "up or out" policy limiting your maximum time between promotions to four years (i.e. you get canned for not meeting your expectations for career growth). This forced attrition policy is why FANG companies are always rapidly hiring (even during COVID-19), have tons of open positions, and the average tenure for software engineers is only 2.5 years. The mentality is that these companies hire the best of the best, pay the best, and as a result, expect your very best performance in return.
Okay that's shitty. I've only ever worked Google (outside of retail + occasional side work) so I completely lack perspective on the wider tech industry. Generally I get the feeling I can balance work life pretty well here, though maybe at cost to career since there's always going to be people who don't, but I don't feel immediate pressure beyond that.
Smaller companies generally can't "pretend to be FANG" because the very best people don't want to work there, they want to work at FANG where they can get paid 90th percentile compensation (you already know this; check levels.fyi -- it's pretty staggering how high senior engineers get paid in all-cash liquid total compensation at these companies). If you are a top software engineer, why would you sacrifice 60-80 hours per week of your time and not get duly compensated for it?
Why?That is rampant and naive credentialism.And in the wider world (even in in the tech world) a run of the mill grunt worker bee at Amazon is the same than her peers at Google et al.If the company gives the prestige to YOU and not the opposite, then either you are not that good or your drank the whole Kool Aid jar.
It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke.
Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper.
My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler.
All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.