[tjr]

An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product.

Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been offered an opportunity at such a place could have value. Even if one never intended to follow through.

Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...

[chrisseaton]

In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.

[elemeno]

Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects.

If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!

[arethuza]

Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm

[NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]

[chrisseaton]

I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.

[segmondy]

Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"

[HelloMcFly]

Unlike employment, there's very little to stop this probably-currently-useful tactic from being rendered valueless by fakers.

[mcguire]

Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.

[skj]

That's a very interesting perspective on working for Google. That is, that it's a waste of time. In my experience, working at Google is a blast both in terms of compensation and exciting projects.

[mcguire]

Depending on what you want, what you can do, and from a certain perspective, any job is a "waste of time". For one thing, you will almost certainly spend the majority of your time working on someone else's grand idea. (By necessity, most of the people working at Google are doing the same kind of things that everyone is doing everywhere. The environment may be better, but it's the same stuff.)

As one of my favorite supervisors said, repeatedly, "It's not supposed to be fun. That's why they call it a 'job'. Now get back to work."

[timburus]

If you were luckier than others it doesn't necesserily make you an example to be followed.

[yetanotherphd]

I wouldn't call it luck. Google is consistently ranked as one of the top workplaces. Out of a large number of my co-workers at Google, almost all of them seem to enjoy their work. Very few people are unhappy or seeking to leave. The main difficulty is getting in.

[8_hours_ago]

Idea: Apply before you plan your vacation, then extend you stay when they fly you out to interview. Free flights!

[latj]

The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.

[blahedo]

> ...racking up debt

This is FUD. While there is arguably opportunity cost involved, it is not at all difficult to avoid "racking up debt" in grad school, at least if you're at the PhD level and in a STEM field. It is standard in such programs to get tuition waived (so, no cost) and to receive stipends for assistantship or fellowship (so, you get paid).

To get into specifics: I got my PhD in CS from Brown ten years ago, and my stipend was around $20K (I think about $22 or $23K my final year). During my time there the students clamoured for, and received, a healthcare benefit (free for the student, and they could pay extra if they had spouse and/or dependents). Because I was lucky enough to be debt-free going in, I actually finished grad school with about $15K in savings, but even my friends who had debt from ugrad were not accruing additional debt (and at the time were able to defer payment interest-free, although I gather that's no longer true). I was not exactly living the high life but was able to afford a decent apartment, ate out fairly regularly, and kept myself supplied with geeky tools and toys (laptop, wifi, etc).

So no, "racking up debt" is not a worry here.

[pinhead]

How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).

[latj]

Google pays a decent salary- not the highest, but fair when considering the cost of buying a home and living in a city near a Google office. I have never heard of a Grad student getting a stipend in the amount someone who studied CS for 6-8 years should be able to get outside of academia.

I'm not saying doing a CS Phd program is not worthwhile- it still is. But, if you have an existing offer at Google or YCombinator its like going to the NBA straight out of high school. Certainly there are good reasons to go to college. But at the end of the day, if the NBA is where you're trying to get to- you take the chance when the opportunity presents itself. Grad school will always be there.

[palvaro]

so you are saying that the only reason to do research in CS is to land a job at google? huh. strange.

also, won't google always be there?

[flyrain]

Get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance? Most Ph.D student got less than $2000/month before tax, even less than $1500/month and should pay for health insurance by themselves. OK, decent, how to define decent.

[pinhead]

The NSF GRFP provides ~3k/month plus tuition and health insurance are covered. If you do a 3-month internship each summer on top of that you can get an extra $20k-30k easy. I am not saying you'll have the same lifestyle as a Google employee but I think it's hard to argue that you will go into debt. Maybe I live a more modest lifestyle than others. Also all the schools I got into when I applied to grad school would pay health care/tuition, that's standard.

[ryuu]

If I may, I found the NSF GRFP process unsatisfactory. For example, I was rejected for two reasons: 1) because I did not publish prior to applying, and 2) because the reviewers thought that my research, although it had intellectual merit, did not have broader impacts (i.e., "the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes").

I proposed research on how to improve upon string searching, which according to the reviewers, did not benefit society (??).

The reviewers all have PhDs, I believe. But somehow, I do not feel they are qualified to review the applications. They are looking for specific things cross the check-boxes.

The second point is that stipends are taxed. So, $3k looks like a lot, but post-taxes, it's trimmed. Also, if you look at the OP's posting, $300k for ~5 years for a student. That does not mean the student receives $60k/year for living.

The third point is that someone immediately out of undergrad at 20 might find PhD / below poverty level stipends enticing, but once you make 150k+, you really don't want to hand control of your life over to your advisor's whims.

The fourth point (which is a corollary to the third) is that I know quite a few miserable PhD students, whose advisors control large aspects of their life. For example, a few of them were house-sitting their advisor's newly purchased mansion overnight in sleeping bags. These were foreign students.

[agilebyte]

In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.

[btown]

True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.

[agilebyte]

It does not seems so to me. To show that your interests align, you do one of the challenges that Jeff lists in part 2. Part 1 is only to show you are a strong programmer/ambitious so your projects can be in anything it seems.

[jrs99]

if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.

[pnathan]

Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....

[jrs99]

to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.

[pnathan]

That is an interesting dilemma, yeah. To be a sharp homework-hammering undergrad is not to be a good researcher & fuzzy situation manager. It's why there's such focus on undergrad research these days, it helps identify the capable people and build their skills (as well as getting some amount of budget help).

The professor at Brown clearly enunciates some of the issues with the current system quite well.

[HarryHirsch]

But to make it a meaningful experience (and get out of it with a PhD) you need a wholly different skillset. It's clear that you have never seen a kid who destroyed the productivity of a whole office because he treated his colleagues Just Wrong, and that you have never seen a fellow who just couldn't transfer what he learned in class to real-life application.

[jrs99]

i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.

[_delirium]

That's not as true anymore. If you did some interesting independent-research projects as an undergrad, which you got published as conference papers, that strongly overrides your undergrad course grades nowadays, at most schools. Basically publications trump everything, and grades are only used if you don't have any publications.

[mathattack]

I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.

[robrenaud]

If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.

[mathattack]

Thanks for sharing. I think you hit the main point - it winds up wasting a lot of people's time, and also gives short shrift to others in the process. In a sense I put this up with the moral equivalent of practice interviewing with real companies. It's not illegal, but it isn't behavior one would advertise, and it's hard to call it ethical.

It would be different if the answer were, "You've worked 2 years for Google or started a company that went through YC" because that's no different than a company asking for Big 4 Accounting experience when hiring a controller. (Having a Big 4 offer letter wouldn't suffice)