Yes. Also, in general, besides Google none of the old FAANG seem to have the same draw at least within S22’s circles. They don’t want to be a generic big company SWE given the trends in AI and other hot areas of tech. I have also seen kids being more willing to walk from Tier 1 quant because they seem more willing to take the bet on an AI upstart.
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It is good that kids are able to step away from seemingly stable jobs like quant and try their luck in exciting new areas like AI to make their mark. If they can’t take a risk at this stage, they can’t take it later. Also, at this stage, comp in quant is tied to comp in AI. The skills are very transferable in either direction. There is a gold rush in AI, and there is a narrow window of opportunity of perhaps 1-2 years to take advantage of it before there is a reckoning.
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No, that is not close to a valid conclusion from your if.
Cultural narratives do not necessarily match realities, and data that allows for fully informed choices isn’t always available.
Those two items alone mean that even if everybody was simply an automaton-like “rational actor”, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to make the correct choice even if they behaved according to the available inputs. Your syllogism does not hold.
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Same with S23’s circle in hardware / elec engineering and mech E, kids are preferring startups when they have options.
This is true for my May grad MechE/CivE S22. He got a job doing what he’s interested in - but for a large company. The job starts in two weeks and he’s already talking about how he hopes to learn enough and grow enough that he can leave the large company and go to startup. The ones he’d been looking at all required a few years of work experience, so they weren’t biting for a new grad, but that’s really where he wants to end up, and he is actively planning for how to get to a smaller company doing more of what he’s excited about.
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Just an anecdote that one of the newer engineers on my D’s team just moved to her mid sized company after more than a decade of jumping around different start ups. None “made it” big and he said his family was sick of the crazy hours and unpredictability.
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My s loved startups. He did jump from 3 or 4
Of them , but he has been fortunate with 2 unicorns.
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And meanwhile, my C23’s friend circle of Industrial Engineering majors are pretty much all with well-established big national or international manufacturing concerns.
I suspect that it’s a clustering effect—people with similar idea(l)s tend to cluster with each other.
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I think that if S22 gives this company a chance, it would actually be really really great. It’s European owned and they have way better benefits as a new employee than anything I’ve ever seen. I’m nervous that he’s not giving them the benefit of the doubt because (1) he really doesn’t like the location, and is looking at living there as a “paying your dues” exercise to move on to bigger and better and (2) he’s wanting higher salary (it’s a good salary, but it’s commensurate with living in a rural area and not Boston or Bay Area, where his friends are located).
My biggest struggle, as mom, is knowing when it’s appropriate to say “hey, have you thought about all the intangibles that are worth more than just the pay check” and pushing him harder to give it a chance, and when to know to just back off and let him figure it out.
I mean, they offer three weeks vacation + 13 paid holidays. That’s a LOT for a new employee! Plus other really good benefits. I know someone whose father in law worked there for a long time and he has only great things to say. I want to tell him to lean in to this job and stop already thinking about the next one, but I don’t want to be PITA too in his business mom. He’s going to have to figure this stuff out himself.
But no startup gives you that kind of work life balance.
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That’s the same advice we give kids who are looking to start a college with their eye on transferring to a better one ; ).
I hope your son will give this company a fighting chance. Those benefits are great!
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Usually startups are good only for the founding team, and for a very few early employees, for anything other than the most stellar companies like Google etc. Or in raging bull markets like we have for AI right now.
My kids were against going into startups. They thought that joining or even doing a startup is a negative expected value choice, because only a very few in a hundred succeed.
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i mentioned this elsewhere on the forums- startups are all not the same. Most of the negative EV comes from picking outfits that were never going to achieve product market fit or founders who aren’t mature enough to handle the uncertainty.
Post Series B startups with a repeat founder backed by a top venture firm is a combo that almost always leads to outcomes better than big tech on an EV basis because of equity growth and the pay generally tends to be very good.
I’ve generally advised folks to stay far away from YC/incubator startups even though sometimes it’s hard to do that given the outsized press. Most of these are vanity projects but once in a while you find a gem but if you are that good at picking risk then one might as well be a day trader.
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Haha. You seem to have a very knowledgeable view of this industry. This looks like a living in California benefit.
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Our youngest S graduated in May with MCS. He will start at an established hedge firm in August. He did consider start ups during his search and had a work trial with one in SF back in the spring. The whole experience was different than other interviews. For example, he was told to develop something, make it run and present it to a group by the end of the 2nd day. He did it and after the presentation with Q&A, he was told they will let him know with their decision before they leave for the firm’s week long trip to Hawaii in a few days. S never heard back. He was totally fine with it bc he was not going to live and breathe every waking hour of his day thinking about the start up’s goals. The CEO of the firm said he has dreamed about the start up’s goals since his undergrad year’s at one of the Ivys and the staff is expected to do the same. S couldn’t muster genuine enthusiasm for it. He does not regret going out there for the experience though. His travel expenses were covered by the firm. Though he did have to nudge them a bit longer for his stipend that he was offered.
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also the benefit of having been a founder and investor and startup employee with various degrees of failure 
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On the flip side I can tell you that the quant path can be competitive with most startup outcomes unless you are comparing yourself with bn $ personal exits. This is not well known because the people involved are not in the public eye, and are very private, unlike the tech guys that require their company going public etc in order to become rich.
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This is what my engineering grad is doing. He has his MS in biomedical engineering but there are not very many BME jobs available and even the “entry level” jobs want 4+ years of experience. He’s applied to many BME adjacent jobs and also some technician jobs that are much lower level. He’s gotten a few bites but nothing solid yet. He and his fellow BME friends are all trying to just get a foot in the door and gain some actual work experience.
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He will figure this out on his own.
I started my career in a somewhat undesirable location, figured it was temporary, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that all of my colleagues were in the same boat! And yes, we had a social life, and yes, we did fun things on the weekend (did I know that biking around an airport was a recreational activity? Well, when you live somewhere with lots of hills and rugged terrain and the only flat trail in the region is the airport, that’s what you do. And it was so much fun watching planes takeoff and land while you pedaled!)
The camaraderie worked for some of us, didn’t work for others, and that’s OK. And you figure out the money piece (less cash but cheap rent and EVERYTHING costs less) really quickly. When one of my friends declared “there are no nice places here to go for Sunday brunch” we all decided “rotating brunch”. You want Belgian waffles and home-made whipped cream? Buy a waffle maker and start whipping. Someone else wants “dill infused gravlax and sourdough bread”– he bought a huge side of salmon from the local supermarket fish counter (no, they don’t insist that they carve it up for you), made his own gravlax, and baked a pretty lumpy but very tasty sourdough.
Time to step back– this is part of the learning process for him.
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I have stepped back, I just think about it in my head and share here so I can get it off my chest. Notice I said
I just worry for him, and probably always will. I want him to dive into this job and this town and see all it has to offer, and it makes me sad that so much of his current thought process is on how and when to leave a job he hasn’t even started yet. But he doesn’t need to hear that from me, and he doesn’t need me to solve “how to make small town better.” I’m confident he’ll figure it out. I just hope he’s happy while he does it.
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