Startups are another example that lie outside the FTC trifecta.

There's a lot more prestige in being a founder now than there used to be. It was relatively unsexy to be a founder 16 years ago when YC first started. Now everywhere I look, everyone seems to want to be one (myself included). Capital is cheap, and it's very easy to raise a pre-seed or seed. With lower barriers-to-entry and plenty of social status to reap, lots of people are flocking to the sector.

That's something people should consider when they want to jump ship and become a founder. Would you still want to do it if it was no longer the sexy thing to do? That's a pretty important question to ask—motives, at least anecdotally, seem to matter a lot as to whether someone goes on to succeed. There may have even been some selection bias at play with YC's early batches. Back then, it probably selected for the type of person who was a bit more contrarian and wanting to try startups for purer reasons than money or prestige. It's impossible to measure that—but it probably has had some impact on those batches' success.

Why did I choose these three? Mostly because they were the most popular among Harvard students statistically. I wasn't trying to bully these fields in particular, nor was I making the claim that everyone in them was driven by prestige alone.

By all means, go for the FTC job if you're interested in it independent of the prestige. Or even go for it if prestige and money are what you want! There's nothing wrong with that.

Just don't trick yourself into thinking FTC is the best option for you, or shy away from trying other things, because of the prestige alone. That's really the thesis I was trying to convey in The Prestige Trap—to be more discerning about the effect prestige is having on our career decisions.

This was an interesting point that I wish I would've explored in more depth.

I grew up in a relatively lower middle class area. I had never heard of a management consultant or McKinsey until I got to college. Prestige in my hometown was becoming a doctor. That probably explains why I got along with a lot of pre-med kids at Harvard—it was a proxy for our backgrounds more than anything else.

Most advice is pretty terrible when you try to make it apply to everyone.

I got a lot of emails after publishing The Prestige Trap to the effect of: "I attend \(X\) non-prestigious school and have been rejected for every job I apply for. Prestige does matter."

Those people were 100% right and certainly identifying a barrier they faced that Harvard students don't. I'd be lying to say prestige doesn't matter.

One of the things I learned from writing this essay is the importance of thinking deeply about what implicit assumptions do and don't apply to your writing. In this essay, I was writing mostly for an audience of my peers—people who were already overdosed on prestige and had likely hit a point of diminishing marginal returns in pursuing it further. For readers from a different background, this advice probably doesn't apply.

Granted, I don't recommend those people who emailed me go seek out a prestigious job/degree next either. I'm not sure what they should do—I won't speak for an experience I haven't had.

It's hard to understate how important this is. In hindsight, that's the biggest danger of the traditional elite college admissions process: it trains students to think the world is more linear and straightforward than it actually is.

If you read Hacker News regularly, you'll encounter a lot of frustration over the whiteboard interviews found in big tech. Very wholesomely, a lot of software engineers wish the interview process relied more upon evidence of personal projects and one's portfolio than contrived, CS-theory style problems.

I wonder to what degree whiteboard interviews originated as a way of replicating—either intentionally or unintentionally—elite admissions processes? The road to making software interviews a fairer test of ability is probably also the road to improving college admissions.

I think I overstated the case here, at least slightly.

Since I wrote The Prestige Trap, a surprising percentage of my friends have left FTC and pursued quite varied career opportunities. Some of this might be related to the "Great Resignation" and COVID-19, but I suspect a lot of it is just a normal part of top students' early career journeys.

Paul Graham has another wonderful essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html.

One of the reactions I found the most surprising to The Prestige Trap was how many people disagreed with this explanation of prestige.

A decent chunk of readers took the materialist position that prestige is simply a function of how much money a job pays. While the two are strongly correlated, I think the latter is a lagging indicator of the former more than anything else.

This is made evident by the fact that there are plenty of jobs which are pretty high prestige but pay terribly (e.g., people who work on the Hill as interns comes to mind). The natural response is that those low-wage jobs lead to high-wage opportunities in the future. But if you talk to people on the ground who are actually thinking through these career decisions, it's rarely as simple as that. The path to the high-paying exit ramps is not as linear for the 21-year-old mind as you'd think.

A good example of this is finance. Less than 6% of Harvard Business School's graduates pursued finance in the 1960s, whereas upwards of 30% do so today.

Source: The Financialization of the American Elite

In hindsight, this was a terrible example that understandably didn't land with my more CS-oriented readers. Stripe already has a lot more cultural cachet than the average startup—in fact, it's probably more prestigious than Google and Facebook in some SV circles.

Part of why I must have chosen such a bad example here is how difficult it is to come up with them—anything that easily comes to mind is necessarily prestigious to some degree!

I should have acknowledged that there are a lot of other reasons that prestige is valuable beyond it just guaranteeing a modicum of approval from your peers. For example, a point a lot of people made to me is how prestige is useful for getting noticed when you apply to other jobs down the road.

That's true, but I want to bracket that idea—prestige is only useful when it's a selection criterion that interviewers care about. So yes, prestige will open doors—but those doors themselves will be more of the same.

And that's what motivated me to write this essay in the first place—my friends were coming back from these high-prestige jobs and feeling miserable. What's the point of keeping a path open if you know you don't enjoy it?