Quote:
|
That doesn't mean anything if you're not motivated enough to seek it out. And if you try hard enough you can find the right connections at almost any school.
|
Yeah, but let's face it. Most people are lazy and aren't going to work hard to establish connections. They are just going to establish their network within whatever social setting they are placed in.
To give you an example, how exactly did Steve Ballmer become the CEO of Microsoft? Don't you think it has something to do with the fact that he was Bill Gates's old poker-playing pal in Currier House at Harvard? Let's face it. Bill Gates ain't exactly the most social guy in the world. In fact, he's so antisocial that people have speculated that he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome (a mild form of autism). The way he met Ballmer is that Ballmer just so happened to be around.
Similarly, many of the early employees at Yahoo just so happened to be Stanford school pals of Jerry and David. Many (in fact, almost all) of the early employees at Google happened to be school pals of Larry and Sergey. Same is true of Cisco Systems. Anna Lee Saxenian has written numerous books and articles detailing the importance of social ties, including college social ties, in the high-tech industry and entrepreneurship, with Stanford University serving as the world's predominant nexus of high-tech entrepreneurial matching and networking. There is a reason why Silicon Valley sprouted up around Stanford and not some other school. Similarly, there are numerous hedge funds and private equity firms that are founded by a few guys who went to college together at Harvard (or, to a lesser extent, Yale).
Look, whether we like it or not, the strongest factor that determines whether you will get a good job is probably social networks/social capital. That's why every jobhunting book and website advises jobseekers - usually as their first bulletpoint - to leverage their social network. I believe I read somewhere that over 90% of all available jobs are never even publicly announced, but are available only to those who have an inside connection. Maybe that's not fair, maybe that's not right, but that is the reality. You can't compete for a job opening that you don't even know exists.