a friend linked this to me earlier today: nitter (someone else maybe archive it? I don’t know what tusky has done to birdsite and how to make wayback play nice)

in one lens/view one could see this as just more of the same (if people were already gunning for YC track shit, there’s other things already implied etc), but even so: just how bad is(/must) the “belief” (be) for young people to feel this intensely about it?

I’m over here just watching the arc of likely events and I can barely fathom the anger and disappointment that may[0] come about in a few years after this

[0] - “may” because it seems a lot of folks have their anger redirected far too easily; remains to be seen if it can remain correctly directed in future

  • @selfAEnglish
    8•10 months ago

    I wonder how much it has to do, also, with the fact that YC has become an educational brand as powerful as some top schools. You already have the top school brand on your resume by virtue of dropping out of it, why wait another 3 years to add the next big educational brand

    venture capital does some weird fucking things to your brain

    I can’t fault anyone for switching away from a CS degree; a bunch of folks I’ve been very close with have had to drop their CS careers when they found out firsthand how racist and sexist their degree program and the field in general is. also, some of the best programmers I’ve worked with have had degrees in unrelated fields (the best one had a psychology degree) and were better off having not dealt with the bullshit that comes with getting a CS degree.

    with that said, I’ve also met a very significant number of assholes who came in assuming they’d learn nothing, couldn’t handle not being the smartest person in the room, dropped out, and spent the next couple years grifting as a “startup co-founder”. these hustlers are almost always the worst engineers you can hire, because for them the hustle never stops — they have no learning process, because they already know everything.

    • @bitofhopeEnglish
      7•10 months ago

      YC has become an educational brand as powerful as some top schools

      Sure, no school will prepare you for the amount of hype and grift the tech industry has to offer quite like reading Hacker News does.

      As an educational institution I’d rate them somewhere between Prager U and UnIversity of Phoenix.

    • Christopher WoodEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      I think you’ve nailed it.

      Found a startup, get paid C-level salaries for a few years, exit or not, repeat.

      • @selfAEnglish
        4•10 months ago

        I’ve usually dealt with the less successful version, whose startups either crash and burn or end up buying them out for a very low price. after a few iterations of that, they’re ready to downgrade to a senior engineering position! if only they could find an interviewer who doesn’t see through their bullshit