Ask HN: Should I do a CS masters at Cambridge or start as a new grad at Amazon?

I'd choose Cambridge, as I am sure that it provides the opportunity to meet a lot of influential people that you might be glad to have in your contacts later on in life, as well as a masters from there will open a lot of doors alone.

I try not to hold strong opinions, and to be equinanimous, but—don’t let location be the guide. As an Old, let me assure you… 2-3 years is so much less time than it seems to you now. You can live anywhere for the duration of a Master’s program.

If you’re the sort of human who is weighing a choice between locations now (meaning, I assume, major cities; informed mainly by your personal preferences rather than, say, an obligation to stay close to family) then you’ll be able to choose between locations afterward too.

Your career will be fine. It will reinvent itself constantly over the years of your working life anyway.

Amazon’s barely as old as you are; your professors at Cambridge will—themselves, individually—have been thinking seriously for twice that long, about aspects of the human condition that have proven durable over orders of magnitude longer.

The best preparation to stay oriented through rapid change is a firm grounding in the unchanging. Your choice now will change who you are. And as wise as “The Amazon Way” may be, humanity’s collective experience offers a much more diverse intellectual toolkit than just that way of working.

So in terms of flexibility, Cambridge. Tons of companies will preferentially snatch up candidates with prestigious advanced degrees, and many of them will even pay you more. Heck, no one will care if you drop out of your advanced education halfway through. It's easier to go academia -> corporate than the reverse, unless you make a ton of money.

So in terms of long-term money, the question is the oldest one in economics: when is the next market crash? There's two conflicting narratives right now. One is that new AI technologies are going to take a handful of companies to the moon. The other is that these companies are engaged in an incestuous network of investments and the whole thing is about to come crashing down.

If the former is true, or even just a normal economy, the fastest way to make money long-term is to make a lot short-term while living like a monk and investing.

If the latter is true, all the stock you purchase/are granted in the next couple years will lose a big chunk of its value, and you will spend years just getting back to even, so you might as well wait a couple of years and jump in after the next crash.