Comment by PaulHoule
1 year ago
Yeah, about those layoffs. There is heavy coverage of Intel’s plans to lay off 14k a year. People fresh out of college might be impressed but if you’ve been around you’d know they lay off 10k people every few years like clockwork.
It’s enough that it’s the last place I’d want to start a job at because I could get laid off just as soon as I start.
I just don't understand the romanticism that's been cultivated with joining these large companies. I interviewed with Google after they reached out to me many years ago, because I had a chrome extension that someone noticed. At the time I thought that was cool. They rejected me because I was anxiously preparing for it the wrong way. That's part of my bias here as well - they didn't need to reach out to someone self-taught. But looking back, I think of all of the things the recruiter was telling me, and the arrogance of them just name dropping "google" and expecting me to bow, and I think bullet dodged. Employment is a social contract just as much as a legal one, and it goes both ways.
The world has gone mad with status-seeking behavior. It's not even about the money, it's about "what will they think?"
A Harvard/Stanford/MIT education used to be about the rigor, the education, the knowledge, the tutelage. Now it's about having that name attached to yours. Same goes for FAANG.
It’s kinda why I don’t boast about my affiliation with an Ivy. I am proud of everyone from the plant science department to the sprint football team and the food service worker’s union. I don’t want anyone to think that I am better than anybody else or I think I am better than anybody else because of it though.
I had a conversation with my advisor some years ago, who did his doctorate at MIT in the early 70s. I opined that MIT was now trading on their name harder, standards were slipping, people weren’t as hot shit now as they obviously were in his day.
“No, it’s just, it’s survivorship bias. There were plenty of people like that there then too; you just haven’t heard of them because they’ve done nothing with their lives since.”