The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
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The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
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Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#2I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious.
They are shameful.
It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#3I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. They are shameful. It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
Because they have control of the money. How do we cut them out?
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#4I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. They are shameful. It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
As Steve Blank said, in 5 years, having FB on your resume will be like Enron. I hope he’s right.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#5Much of this blog post speaks to my experience (probably because we went to the same school at pretty much the same time).
That said, I think the thesis is a bit overstated. The reason many more Harvard CS students talk about Google > Stripe is not because Stripe is not prestigious (it obviously is, and plenty of super talented students go there). It's because Google hires a ton of Harvard CS grads, whereas many late-stage startups do not hire as many new grads, nor do they have as large of hiring pools. They're going to have an obviously larger impact on the sorts of jobs people discuss.
The same thing with GS, Jane Street, or Citadel, because they actively recruit at Harvard through on-campus recruiting and hire a comparatively large portion of Harvard graduates.
This is related to the other reason that companies like Google are talked about much more than mid-stage startups: the school on your diploma has much larger impact at these big, more calcified companies than it does on startups where individual hires could help make-or-break the company. And places like McKinsey or Bain basically hire many students so they can tell clients they have a team of Harvard grads working on the problem.
> they assume their intelligence insulates them from peer pressure.
If you come into Harvard with this notion, I can't really see how you stay with it after your first recruiting/punch season. And, honestly, Harvard undergrads aren't that smart.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#6I find two things to disagree with in this article. First is the premise that equally high compensation is offered elsewhere in each industry. I don't know about finance or consulting, but at least for FAANG it doesn't seem to be true. Second is the overlooked explanation that it's headroom - not prestige - that accounts for the difference.
I'll provide an example that illustrates both points: me. When I went from Red Hat to Facebook, my already-pretty-good total compensation jumped by almost 50% - more considering how each company's stock performed during the relevant vesting periods. I'm pretty sure there were others around me who had been promoted from fresh-out to my nominal level in a quarter to a half the time it had taken me to build my career. Some of them were quite likely making even more than me despite their narrow experience and resulting unsuitability for the same role anywhere else (a topic for another time).
If my salary curve was a race car, theirs was a rocket ship. The FAANG compensation premium to start fresh out of college might be smaller, but the potential growth over the next several years is much greater than elsewhere in tech ... and yes, recruiters do use that as a lure. Given the uncertainty (and compensation inequity) at startups, working at a FAANG is the most likely route to early wealth for most techies.
Of course, you can also get rich early if you get to put FAANG on your resume and parlay that into an early-employee job at a startup that later hits it big. That's prestige at work but, looking at the attrition/retention rates at FAANG, it seems to be the less common route and therefore I'd guess it's the less common motive.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#7I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. They are shameful. It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
As Steve Blank said, in 5 years, having FB on your resume will be like Enron. I hope he’s right.
I think most people did ok. Enron had a lot of really smart people. Morally bankrupt, but very smart. No different than any of these big tech companies. People like money, smart people will be attracted to it. Companies like smart people so I don't think they will have a hard time getting another job.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#8I find many of these companies the opposite of prestigious. They are shameful. It's a symptom of how screwed up this world is that people would actually want to work for them and consider it an honor to do so.
Because they have control of the money. How do we cut them out?
Legislation and regulation.
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#9The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways.
I think one of the problems around targeting prestige vs. targeting excellence is that we know what it takes to do something prestigious, but excellence is hard to define, and generally comes with much higher risk. Landing a fancy job at Facebook or Google means you tick the box on success without much risk. The criteria that defines success when you start a company, for instance, or work at a non-profit, is much less clear. That compounds the material risk of doing these ventures with a social risk of taking these jobs in the first place. So then what would would it take, in American society, to replace the prestige baiting with an emphasis on achieving actual excellence instead?
Re: The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting
#10I find two things to disagree with in this article. First is the premise that equally high compensation is offered elsewhere in each industry. I don't know about finance or consulting, but at least for FAANG it doesn't seem to be true. Second is the overlooked explanation that it's headroom - not prestige - that accounts for the difference. I'll provide an example that illustrates both points: me. When I went from Re…
I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Even if they managed to perfectly select for the cream of the crop (they don't), that still has to be like 10-20% of all programmers/engineers in the US. Being top 20% isn't that impressive, and in reality they're probably mostly hiring from the top 30-40%.