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0 pointsken479y ago0 comments

I disagree. The things you say may have been true decades ago, but are not entirely accurate today.

The US's banking industry's reputation took a big hit in 2008, and it has become increasingly common for top university students to head into tech over finance since then. Not to mention, firms like Goldman Sachs are replacing many of their traditional traders with software engineers.

Outside of top law schools, the prospects of law grads have diminished greatly over the past decade or two. And some varieties of lawyers, such as patent trolls, are especially frowned upon -- the opposite of "top-tier" and "distinguished" in the eyes of many.

And I don't think the pool of potential doctors and the pool of potential software engineers overlap much at all. I would guess that the number of university students deciding to be doctors instead of software engineers is quite small.

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freyr9y ago

Finance may have taken a hit recently, but if you're in the northeast (NYC, Boston, etc.), it still has much higher prestige. It also has a much, much higher compensation ceiling.

The same goes for lawyers working in cities. Many law students are underemployed, but overall there's a much higher compensation ceiling.

Management consultants weren't mentioned, but a large percentage of top grads end up there, being groomed for executive positions in Fortune 500 companies.

Many of the Ivey League students gravitating to tech are likely envisioning themselves as founders or C-suite executives, not engineers. Outside of the SV bubble, software engineer is not a top-tier job. Nor is it a particularly well paying job. In SV though, it has prestige.

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johan_larson9y ago

The things you say may have been true decades ago, but are not entirely accurate today.

OK, I'll buy there's something to that. But keep in mind that students' choices aren't made purely with a clear-eyed understanding of how things are now. They are made in part based on an understanding built up over time, some of which reflects how things were when they were when growing up. In particular, parents and other advisers who have a lot of pull can easily be acting on the basis of a decades-old view of the world. So even if things are shifting, current actions could well be lagging behind.

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