> there is also prestige associated to big names

I hate that this has happened. The Bay Area used to be a place where working for the big, shiny company that makes your parents happy wasn't prestigious. It was safe. But taking a risk and starting something new was admired. The present state of affairs reminds me of Wall Street.

What happened was that VCs started sucking up all the equity and it became not worth it from a risk-reward perspective for most people to work at a startup. This, coupled with companies staying private longer meant that in the lat 5 years, you were better off working at G/FB than a small or mid-sized startup.

e.g https://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state-of-49390473/29-29Becau...

While VCs certainly played into this, I'd say founders merit the bulk of the blame. VCs are generally more amenable than founders to larger equity pools for employees. They're also much more enthusiastic about IPOs than founders, since they want liquidity events for their investments.

Thank you both. VCs and founders together have sucked up all the potential value of working for a startup, leaving only risk and below-market pay to employees. Until this changes, big name companies are not just safer but higher expected value.

It was a little different when you could afford to buy a house in the Bay Area without $2m in the bank.

Yes, so much this. There is a very real opportunity cost to forgoing high salaries (and this opportunity cost is front-loaded as well since home prices keep appreciating).

There was always a level of prestige associated with certain companies even in the 80s and 90s, no?

The tech industry, despite its shortcomings, is vastly superior to Wall Street in that regard. It's still a meritocracy above all else.

Plenty of smart people break into tech after doing something else for a few years. If you want to go into investment banking, you better come from a consulting or have already been working in finance. Your only last bastion of hope is to get an MBA and then join the rat race.

I think that prestige only exists in the minds of some people who work there or have worked there. If I had a nickel for every time someone started a sentence with "well when I was at Google" for a scenario that is nothing like Google... Facebook's move-fast-and-break-things culture is fortunately a little less envied, in my experience.

The prestige most definitely exists and is especially relevant for people who dont have a strong public portfolio to show off their talent. An average developer from Google/FB etc. has an easier time getting access to opportunities than even an outstanding developer at a no-name company. Companies/Hiring managers go through an implicit thought process along the lines of "if she/he go through google she/he must be good" which opens doors and helps in salary negotiations.

Working at Google confers prestige among lay people as well, in my experience.

What other big companies are associated with similar prestige?

In the SV tech community, Dropbox, Uber, Snapchat, Spotify, AirBnB, Lyft, Netflix, Pinterest, Robinhood to name several.

Outside the tech community, probably Amazon, Microsoft, and Instagram (most people don't know Facebook owns Instagram).

Why is there a difference between inside and outside the tech community?

The economic success, brand awareness, and hipness of a company with the general public is only somewhat correlated with average level of engineering talent at a company. Different successful companies take different approaches to hiring - some focus on hiring a lot of reasonably competent engineers, while others focus on only hiring the best (and generally pay them a lot).

> some focus on hiring a lot of reasonably competent engineers, while others focus on only hiring the best (and generally pay them a lot).

Are you saying the latter two don't do that?