[laidoffamazon]

The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC

The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.

[alephnerd]

> The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC

So is UIUC, but UIUC CS/ECE placements are the same as Yale if not better.

> The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook

Most CS Yalies aren't getting hired at SpaceX, Broadcom, and FAANG. Heck, circa 10 years ago, CS@Yale was dependent on MIT, Harvard, and UConn's CS departments for classes and on-campus recruiting for CS roles.

---------

As such, my question is

1. Are you located in the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC? - if not, you need to find a way to end up working there even if you have to take a hellish commute.

2. How long has your career gap been? - if it's been more than 6 months you need to find a way to spin unemployment and the bad job market into an opportunity (eg. Worked on my own bootstrapped startup, active contributor to OSS projects, attended grad school - highly recommend GT's OMSCS because it's cheap and lets you transfer to on-campus if you so wish)

3. How do you present your career? - Resume and LinkedIn writing/designing is an art

4. Are you picky about salary? - any white collar job is a good job in a bad white collar job market. A bad white collar job is better than being structurally unemployed

[laidoffamazon]

For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.

-----

The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.

If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.

I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.