| > I didn’t even ever meet a Harvard grad when I was at Amazon - it’s hard to not meet one at Google or Jane Street (more so the later of course). I met two at Microsoft and none at Google. It mattered exactly zero to anyone. Do you, like, just ask everyone at work which college they went to? Because I don't know that info for most of my coworkers, and neither do I care. Pretty certain that most people I work with don't know where I went to school either. The only times I even remember it being brought up front and forward was when we hosted interns, because duh, they go to school somewhere and they mention it. > one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes a list of Googler-olympians) I personally don't know a single googler-olympian or know of one. I am sure they exist, as well as that list you are talking about, but this is literally something that no one cares about. 99.99% (probably even more) of googlers are not olympians and probably dont even know what that actually means. > famous friends or ski trips Famous friends - you assume they made those "famous friends" from working at a tech company as a regular engineer? And what even counts as "famous"? As for ski trips, my friends working across a bunch of companies (including amazon and noname companies) do it all the time. They just don't see the need to expose it all to everyone who isn't their actual irl friend. > I go on Twitter for 5 minutes and see a Yale grad with 15 mutual with Vivek Bro. Having twitter mutuals is not the same as being friends with someone. Also, I am pretty sure that bragging about being friends with Vivek (if you were one) is how one gets ostracised in a lot of circles. For a lot of people in tech, admitting to supporting him would be a social semi-suicide. > Ive been “lifting” for years with zero improvement [...]. I’ve been leetcoding for years with zero improvement. Get a personal trainer for at least a little bit, so that they can pinpoint what you might be doing wrong and teach you proper form and advise on nutrition. Something is going wrong somewhere, unless you suffer from one of the extremely rare diseases (e.g., some thyroid ones) or you figured out how to break the laws of physics or defy all that is currently known about human body. Get a tutor or someone to study with using leetcode. Just throwing time at "practicing" things is a waste of time. Practice has to be mindful, and focused on improving specific aspects. If you practice a piano piece, you don't just go from start to finish over and over. You break it into chunks, focus on the problematic ones, figure out why they are problematic, train yourself in those areas, get better, then glue it all together. Just running a piece from start to finish over and over is a waste of time. Having a teacher, at least at first, would net you massive benefits. It is a night and day in terms of trying to get all the basics right on your own vs. with someone who can save you the time and anquish by pinpointing how and where you can improve. > What’s even the point of working hard if I’ve never gotten anything for it? Working hard isn't enough, working smart is. |
I’ve considered a trainer but it doesn’t seem like it would be terribly effective if starving myself hasn’t worked. It really does kind of feel like I’m just a defective human if I’m so bad at everything.