Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

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> I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k.

They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic.

I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything, I don't have the optionality of doing just anything. I took the best offer I got at a company that most elite school students would consider to be beneath them (Amazon).

Anyways, I'd also bet you make multiples of what I make now too as someone with a higher level if you're an SWE or adjacent.

I'm just trying to shatter the illusion. Stop wrecking your mental health because you can't hang with the IMO kids. Many of these people are, unsurprisingly, very insular unless you want to talk about math and TC all day. Sounds really fun. The red pill is to be happy you're already making a fuckton of money for typing shit into a computer and make some friends in pottery class

> because you can't hang with the IMO kids

Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression

[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-leagu...

You are simply wrong. Mechanical engineering majors, as an example of the most common non-CS major, don’t have any such high-paying opportunities until at least after a PhD (and even then they are lower than you are saying). Many make less than $100k out of college. Even CS majors have a hard time getting an interview at those top-paying companies.

Wait, are you saying Course 6 is still the most common major? And thus still has the most direct path to making $500k a year out of undergrad?

Of course, MechE's frequently also work at these companies or in finance too...

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