Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes.
I was impressed they gamed it so simply.
You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.
Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class.
So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners.
My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.
I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.
The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.
What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.
So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
Or, alternatively, seek other options? Maybe try to avoid the race somehow. Since most will be losers, it's probably best to consider alternatives anyway and ask if the prize is even worth winning.
What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.
That's where the in-person interview comes in. It's a lot harder to fake one's way through that.
It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over.
Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.
"I'm reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn't difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive."
The Gervais principle is a thing. The charismatic CEO is helped by the 90% mediocre employees, who like the system. The 10% productive employees are exploited and shouted down.
All that the 10% can do is change jobs or start a company.
He did something. Bad code is better than no code.
> Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know.
Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.
There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)
See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope.
While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy.
Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods.
However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house.
From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural.
Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing.
rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall
or
rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall
it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.
I don't see tech say getting worse than it was a decade ago in terms of school bias. If anything it is better thanks to hacker rank, triplebyte, etc.
Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life.
Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling?
The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability).
Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.
i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway.
leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out
Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).
A lot of folks I went to college with did nothing but party, drink, hang out. Education didn't matter to them at all. They were going to get a job at their family's firm, company, etc anyway. Didn't matter what their grades were.
Professors know who they can't fail.
The people marking the exams did not know whose exams they were marking.
It's possible that corrupt professors worked around this, but there was never any scandals related to this policy.
This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.