[alephnerd]

Statistically, you're correct. That said, the thing about statistics is that outliers exist.

Also, imo the "Ivy" advantage is moreso a "family background" advantage - traditionally high social prestige and high entry barrier vocations were gatekept by Ivy and Ivy-adjacent membership.

The rise of competitive salary and low barrier of entry vocations like Software and Accounting helped dampen the value of that "Ivy" premium.

[laidoffamazon]

I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)

[alephnerd]

> I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia

What "public school" did you attend?

I can assure you that if you did some form of STEM at a top/mid UC, UIUC, UWash, GT, UT Austin, UMich, UNC Chapel Hill, and other similar caliber public schools in 17-18 you would have had the exact same opportunities and earning potential as a Yalie or Harvard grad. Most CS/ECE departments offer salary data for you to look at, and at least for my HS peers who attended Cal and UCLA their outcomes were the exact same if not better than my HS classmates at Yale.

I understand layoffs can be traumatic, but I've noticed a persistent negative streak in your comments here on HN and this mindset isn't going to help you.

[laidoffamazon]

The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC

The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.

[alephnerd]

> The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC

So is UIUC, but UIUC CS/ECE placements are the same as Yale if not better.

> The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook

Most CS Yalies aren't getting hired at SpaceX, Broadcom, and FAANG. Heck, circa 10 years ago, CS@Yale was dependent on MIT, Harvard, and UConn's CS departments for classes and on-campus recruiting for CS roles.

---------

As such, my question is

1. Are you located in the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC? - if not, you need to find a way to end up working there even if you have to take a hellish commute.

2. How long has your career gap been? - if it's been more than 6 months you need to find a way to spin unemployment and the bad job market into an opportunity (eg. Worked on my own bootstrapped startup, active contributor to OSS projects, attended grad school - highly recommend GT's OMSCS because it's cheap and lets you transfer to on-campus if you so wish)

3. How do you present your career? - Resume and LinkedIn writing/designing is an art

4. Are you picky about salary? - any white collar job is a good job in a bad white collar job market. A bad white collar job is better than being structurally unemployed

[laidoffamazon]

For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.

-----

The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.

If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.

I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.

[alephnerd]

> work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi

You're making on par if not higher than most Ivy League grads.

> you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni

Look at their profiles. The overwhelming majority did the terminal Yale MSCS [0]. Back when Yale CS was in a tailspin a decade ago [1], they were admitting almost anyone with a pulse in the terminal MSCS to help rebuild the alumni network. Penn did something similar with Wharton SF 20 years ago when they missed the biotech train.

> If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29

Not really. They end up doing the same jobs as you. Yale has a similar amount of grads at Amazon.

Also, based on the hiring practices of portfolio companies and my friend's startups - the plum jobs end up going to CS/ECE/EECS alumni from Stanford/MIT/Cal/UCLA/UW/UIUC/UT Austin/CMU or regionally well connected programs like SJSU, CalPoly SLO, and mid-tier UCs.

It's the same way if you did decent in accounting or finance at StevensTech or Baruch, you can end up in high finance in a couple years.

> Broadcom

I am intimately aware of their hiring practices. I can safely tell you that Broadcom is not hiring new grads from Ivies (or the US at all). Broadcom is following a strict "fire-and-move-to-India" strategy and paying $90k-140k TCs in Hyderabad, or bringing talent on L1/2s.

[0] - https://engineering.yale.edu/academic-study/departments/comp...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-jo...