[lowiqengineer]

> but I caught myself sleuthing on your github and LinkedIn and feeling that familiar sense of envy

He works at AWS? Is that considered particularly impressive to be envious over? Sure he went to Hopkins but that's not atypical in the Princeton area.

I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS, they're probably all ML Engineers at FB or Google or Two Sigma, etc.

[bb611]

> I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS

I went to school at about the same time at the other high school in town (technically 2 towns, 1 combined school district), my family mostly still lives there. A job across the country in a well known tech company is reasonably top 25% of the class or so. Not standout, but nothing to be embarrassed about, and that's where plenty of us ended up.

[lowiqengineer]

If your parents don't talk about it (as mine don't, presumably because they're ashamed?) I don't know if it's "nothing to be embarrassed about".

What did the top 1% do? What did your valedictorian(s) do?

[bb611]

Hilariously enough, my class' Valedictorian is now an ML Engineer on Amazon Echo.

I wasn't answering the question of "what will their parents think", I was just pointing out the reaction of our peers because I grew up in the same community. Parental reaction is typically much more about them as people than any other particular factor.

[arolihas]

If you’re pathetic like me I guess. I only work at IBM on a bunch of Salesforce bullshit, so I find working on AI at AWS to be pretty impressive. Trust me I know there’s tiers to this stuff as someone who hasn’t passed interviews at Google and Citadel.

[lowiqengineer]

I see. I don't want to come off as harsh, I work at Amazon myself and know a lot of these people but didn't grow up in the peer group.

[arolihas]

I know you look down on yourself pretty harshly but you don’t have to shit on the rest of us in the process. Go to therapy