
How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story - barry-cotter
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/how_elite_firms.html
======
2arrs2ells
To some extent, it doesn't really matter what they select for. If anything, I
think they're selecting for an ability to figure out the rules and "play the
game."

i.e. if you can't figure out a way to work the system to get into a top school
and get a > 3.5 GPA, you're not going to be able to navigate client politics
on a consulting project. Similarly, if you can find a way to make yourself
seem really interesting on your resume, you'll probably be able to present
yourself in a polished way to a VP at your bank.

If you're a hacker who doesn't want to "play the game" (i.e. you skip college,
or go to a state university for free), it's likely that you're not going to be
a good fit for these kinds of big firms.

~~~
gambler
Problem is, big firms still need work being done. In the long run, social
games like this are extremely counterproductive.

~~~
2arrs2ells
You're right, but my contention is that the "work" is the relatively easy part
- the hard part is navigating the social/political context in which the work
is being done.

This may sound incredibly silly, but if a giant Fortune 500 company contracts
with you for a huge consulting project, it doesn't matter if you're "right" -
if the "right" answer isn't one that's relevant/applicable/palatable to them.

My argument is that being able to "play the game" under the unspoken rules
that your future employer sets out is a useful signal for being able to "play
the game" with the unspoken rules/strings a client attaches to a contract.

~~~
msellout
As an employee of a big consulting firm, I'll second that. How and who you
present your ideas to is much more important than the ideas themselves.

~~~
paganel
> As an employee of a big consulting firm, I'll second that. How and who you
> present your ideas to is much more important than the ideas themselves.

My wife actually works in procurement for a pretty big European oil company,
and she had the "chance" to attend a couple of pitch presentations made by
BCG, McKinsey and a few others for a "green energy" thingie. You're right,
after all was said and done the company CEO was positively more impressed by
the guys who looked and acted better during the presentations, and not
necessarily by those who had the better ideas but had presented them more
nervously. Also, having the looks (no matter if you're man or female) and
height helps a lot.

------
kapilkale
I was head of east coast undergraduate recruiting at a consulting firm in LA.
I'd say that the article is mostly accurate, on the whole.

I used to look through thousands of resumes at east coast Ivies. I'd basically
throw away anything that had under a 3.3 GPA or a 1350 SAT, unless there was
something completely out-of-this-league in the extracurriculars.

The issue is the same one that YC faces. There are too many applicants for
these positions, and not enough time to adequately evaluate them. So if
there's some sort of red flag on the application, the expected probability of
making a hire after the interview is lower and it just doesn't make sense to
interview when there are better resumes available.

It's like playing texas holdem. In heads up, a king-two has over a 50% chance
of winning. But when there are 10 other hands, you don't want to take the risk
of someone having an Ace. Similarly, there are lots of winning candidates out
there, but there isn't enough time to interview them all.

If I could go back and re-engineer the process, I'd use far more statistics.
I'm certain there would be something programmatic that would figure out a way
to do it right.

I'd be willing to bet that in the next 15 years someone is going to go Billy
Beane on Bain McK and BCG, pick up the talent that seems to be falling in
between the cracks, apply technology to the consulting process, and make a
killing.

~~~
michaelochurch
_I'd be willing to bet that in the next 15 years someone is going to go Billy
Beane on Bain McK and BCG, pick up the talent that seems to be falling in
between the cracks, apply technology to the consulting process, and make a
killing._

Actually, I think those firms are pretty good at selecting the type of person
they want. Sure, the 90th-percentile Penn State grad is much smarter than the
30th-percentile Harvard graduate. For technology, you'd rather have the PSU
grad who can code. On the other hand, for McKinsey, the latter is arguably a
"better" hire. Why? Because investment banking and management consulting are
about image and the ability to sell oneself; being 15 IQ points smarter
doesn't do much. Not all Ivy League students are very bright (some are, some
aren't) but what can be said of almost every one of them (with their admission
to the most selective universities as strong evidence) is that they're good at
selling themselves.

~~~
rayiner
Given that Ivy admissions these days is based almost entirely on high-school
GPA and standardized test scores, I wouldn't wager that the PSU grad is 15 IQ
points smarter than the Harvard grad.

~~~
bane
GPA and IQ are not all that strongly correlated (about .50)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#School_pe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#School_performance)

Self-discipline, working memory, socio-economic status are all better
predictors of GPA.

[http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/PsychologicalScien...](http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/PsychologicalScienceDec2005.pdf)

Standardized tests, depending on the test, often test for conformance to
expected grading criteria and aren't really any better at correlating with IQ.

In fact, it's often shown that in many cases, high IQ is negatively correlated
with GPA (the smartest kids by IQ often get lower grades because they spend an
awful lot of time being bored out of their skulls in school).

[http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/Publications/VTBookUndera...](http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/Publications/VTBookUnderachievementCh16.pdf)

I'd be perfectly willing to take the bet that a randomly selected 90th
percentile PSU grad _is_ smarter on an IQ test than a randomly selected 30th
percentile Harvard grad (by at least 15 points).

~~~
rayiner
The difference between PSU and Harvard students is SAT scores, not really GPA.
Penn state's 25-75 range is 1750-1990 (77-93 %-ile), while Harvard's is
2070-2350 (96-99+ %-ile). The SAT is about as well correlated with IQ tests as
IQ tests are with each other. Statistically speaking, the 25 %-ile of
Harvard's class in terms of IQ is probably right around the 80th %-ile at
PSU+. Do you think a 90th %-ile PSU student has a full standard deviation
higher IQ than a 80th %-ile PSU student?

Note I'm not using the word "smart" because as Malcom Gladwell points out
there are diminishing returns beyond top 10% IQ's. However, you're the one who
made the claim based on IQ.

\+ It's probably more pronounced than that because of the way admissions is
handled individual schools do not have bell-curve distributions of SAT scores.
There are sharp drop-offs below the 25th and above the 75th because schools
don't have to report this numbers to USNWR.

~~~
bane
I think you are predicating your bet on Harvard relying on the SAT as a
principle acceptance criterion -- which I've read several times only makes up
about 30% of the acceptance scoring criteria.

Top schools often put as much more weight on extra-curriculars and other
social conformance factors when selecting students, this is important in
"certifying" graduates with that school's brand name.

i.e. "We certify that this student will do any possible nonsense imaginable to
jockey their way into a noticeable and expected position."

For example, kids who've spent their High School in the Key Club, Model U.N.,
running for an student office position and had a spot in at least one sports
team (benched or not), plus volunteered once a week at a retirement home and
highway trash pickup once a month are more likely to get in then on raw GPA or
SAT scores.

For some social segments, like East Asian students or Ashkenazi Jews, who've
focused almost exclusively on GPA and SAT (I'm generalizing quite a bit I
know), they're finding that top schools will exclude them in favor of a High
School football team captains/student body president with lower scores. Tiger
moms are finding that they are having to turn into soccer moms to get their
kids into Harvard.

To the firms that make a point of selecting graduates from these schools, this
kind of acceptance criteria ensures that they'll be able to get as much
grindwork as possible out of recent grads when they hire them. They know that
they can squeeze 80-100 hours a week out of these folks, churning out endless
slide decks and grinding numbers on spreadsheets without actually having to
put any sort of intelligence to work.

Or to put it another way. If the SAT were really all that important, and
considering the SAT's positive correlation with IQ (I think it's around .8),
wouldn't the schools just accept an IQ test instead?

(note: you are correct in not calling the measure of IQ "smartness", it
reflects capacity not the current state of intelligence)

~~~
rayiner
I'm not assuming Harvard gives determinative weight to SAT scores. But its
25-75 is what it is. At least 75% of Harvard students have above a 96th %-ile
SAT. In practice it's a necessary but not sufficient qualification.

------
rayiner
Articles like this should really lay to rest the idea that there are rational
market forces at work behind compensation.

One thing the article doesn't go into is how insanely easy it is to game this
system if you've the knack for standardized exams. The LSAT requires no prior
knowledge, and simply tests how quickly you can work with logic in your head.
With a 4.0 in basket weaving, and a 175 on the LSAT, you're almost guaranteed
admission to Harvard Law with a $160k+bonus job waiting for you at the other
end.

~~~
2arrs2ells
Except that admission to Harvard Law doesn't guarantee a $160k+bonus job these
days! And my understanding is that being in the top of your class (or top 50%)
in law school is more difficult than a 4.0 in basket weaving.

(I agree with your main point - law school admissions selects for completely
"gameable" things).

~~~
rayiner
For class of 2011, which was the one most hard-hit by the recession, Harvard
Law was still at about 80% of people who wanted it getting those jobs. I'd
imagine it's back over 90% now. Even Columbia is over 75% now.

As for getting in the top half... it's another highly game-able thing. Your
grades are based entirely on exams that are basically like the LSAT---they
test you on how quickly you can apply a relatively simple set of rules to
ambiguous facts. The only classes that test your writing (which is what you
actually do as a lawyer!) in the all-important first year are typically
weighted very little, or even ungraded.

~~~
2arrs2ells
But what % of those 80% are getting top-tier biglaw jobs (or clerkships)?

I have no idea - but my dad does law in the public sector (read: not
lucrative) and anecdotally he says he's able to hire lots of top 10 law school
grads who never would have applied for that kind of job five years ago.

~~~
rayiner
> But what % of those 80% are getting top-tier biglaw jobs (or clerkships)?

At Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Yes. The other good schools (top 10/15-ish)
are in the 60% range. Outside the top 20, it's probably in the 10% range and
below.

------
cperciva
_[T]hey differentiated being a varsity college athlete, preferably one that
was also a national or Olympic champion, versus playing intramurals; having
traveled the globe with a world-renowned orchestra as opposed to playing with
a school chamber group; and having reached the summit of Everest or
Kilimanjaro versus recreational hiking. The former activities were evidence of
"true accomplishment" and dedication, whereas the latter were described as
things that "anyone could do."_

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Almost all of the "top achievers" I
know also demonstrate exceptional talent in a completely different field.

~~~
microarchitect
_Almost all of the "top achievers" I know also demonstrate exceptional talent
in a completely different field._

I'm not so sure about that. What was Dennis Ritchie's exceptional "other
talent"? Sergey Brin? David Patterson? Yale Patt? Linux Torvalds?

~~~
buff-a
_What was Dennis Ritchie's exceptional "other talent"? Sergey Brin? David
Patterson? Yale Patt? Linux Torvalds?_

Conviction?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
You don't actually hire any of those people - they hire you. Those are 'not
the droids you're looking for'

------
wallflower
"Google's hiring guidelines explicitly stated that we should only add people
smarter than we were. That's why we started running a line on the homepage
that said, 'You're brilliant. We're hiring.'...

Larry and Urs were willing to waste a few hundred million impressions to reach
the dozen or so people they might consider hiring...

The page at the other end of the link had been written entirely by Jeff
Dean[1]"

-From "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59" by Douglas Edwards (July 2011)

[1] <http://labs.google.com/people/jeff/>

------
ryanlchan
The recruiting funnel isn't supposed to be perfect. In fact, most of these
'elite firms' know that their recruiting funnels bring in, essentially,
statistical noise. And that's just fine.

Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1
hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could
accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it
stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag
on the firm to do hiring.

The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades -
were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your
choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20
minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per
resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?

~~~
mc32
Also, to build on that. There was a time I did some grading of short essays.
When I first started doing that I read through all the stuff very attentively
and tried understanding everything. As time went on I later was able to get a
good feel for quality and could tell if something was going to be good or not
pretty efficiently.

It may seem unfair, but really, over time you acquire a pretty good filter.
There are probably similarities with reading through resumes. You become
familiar with gauging a resume reasonably well with a few seconds or minutes
of reading through them --after you've read through enough of them. It's
repetition and pattern recognition, in a way.

------
ofca
All the time I see networking having the best value over time when it comes to
hiring. Meritocracy only looks good on paper, reality is completely different.
Good grades and interesting hobbies? They say - fuck that noise. Firms simply
wont take a chance with you if they got someone 'familiar' waiting in line.
Get over it and exploit it.

------
rluhar
The article lines up with my experience helping screen / hire graduates on to
the technical program of a large US based investment bank in London. Only
graduates from a handful of Universities in England (and the Republic of
Ireland) were considered. These were not limited to the elite engineering
schools (Imperial, Cambridge, etc.) however. They did not ask for academic
transcripts etc., but only on the final grade (or "class" in the UK).

The most interesting thing I found was that the technical interview did not
really matter as much as other interviews and group exercises. I think this
made sense since we were hiring candidates straight from University.

~~~
ig1
Almost no-one uses transcripts for graduate recruiting in the UK.

There's also quite a bit of variation between how banks hire graduates in
london. Some such as KBC have very hard-core testing, some like barcap use
psychometric style programming questions, while some use mostly "soft
testing".

~~~
arethuza
Out of interest, what would an "academic transcripts" be anyway? Marked exam
papers, essays, project work, dissertations?

~~~
robotresearcher
It's a list of all the classes taken, with their dates and grades received,
and usually the grade point average (GPA) which is traditionally in the range
[0..4].

The official transcript is issued by the university and is considered reliable
proof of your grades. An employer might request this along with references.
Grad school applications usually require them.

About GPAs, for those in a different system, in some places it's possible to
get a little over 4.0 through extra-credit assignments. The top couple of
students in the year might have 4.1, for example.

None of this existed in the UK, a least when I was there.

------
irpap
Isn't the process a bit different when it comes to hiring geeks? Being a good
software developer for example is a quite measurable and comparable skill. I
think the extracurriculars that indicate social skills such as organising
charity events etc, would be more relevant if you're a manager or a
consultant; but if you are a developer or a mathematician, would people mind a
bookworm?

~~~
captainaj
It's very different, the first step of a ticket to an investment bank,
consulting firms etc is your "super-elite" school name.

------
seigenblues
ah! Finally! Clear evidence of a meritocracy at work! </snark>

Actually, in all seriousness, doesn't this suggest there's a real imbalance or
opportunity here to be exploited? Companies that hire like this surely must
have some other systemic blind spots, no?

~~~
alexhawket
Yup their stregths are also their weaknesses. Big opportunity for a contrarian
to go in and do the exact opposite of one or more of their hiring strategies.

Avoid the elite schools completely and radically cut the cost of acquiring
talent (with presumably less competition for said talent). Pick out promising
talent that may have been overlooked by lack of pedigree. Pick out outliers
with unconvential ideas. Increase the diversity of personalities and
backgrounds to increase the odds of radically new ideas. Ignore grades and
come up with your own methods for testing candidates.

Many possibilities.

~~~
pnathan
That was the lesson I was drawing from the essay; it seems as if they hire in
a monoculture. That implies to me that hiring more freaky people with as much
weird as can fit into a job is likely to produce some pretty wild stuff.

------
danenania
In other words: impress a superficial rich guy.

------
radikalus
To be fair, many trading firms and hedge funds don't recruit this way at all.
There was the brainteaser phase, but it's pretty quickly falling out of
fashion...

I'm not really sure what the use of "Elite" in this context means; these
consulting/banking jobs pay pretty well and are reasonably low risk and allow
young ambitious people a means towards bigger and better things, but I don't
think most people here would think of these as higher EV than what you'd find
pursuing competitive positions in a lot of other sectors.

------
fleitz
Everyone works like this, perceptions are virtually indistinguishable from
reality. Lawyers, Investment Banks and Consultancies can be gamed by going to
the right school. The startup ecosystem can be gamed by committing to the
right open source projects. It's just as important that you wear a good suit
to meet with MBA types as it is that you wear the appropriate t-shirt and
jeans to meet with hacker types.

Merit, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

~~~
krakensden
You really don't see any difference between guessing the value of a lawyer by
unrelated extracurriculars and guessing the value of a developer by work on
relevant open source projects?

~~~
fleitz
Your question presumes that the extracurriculars are unrelated and that the
open source projects are related. In that particular case I'd agree with you.
However, I don't presume that the average programmer can anymore discern what
open source projects are relevant, than the average lawyer can discern what
extracurriculars are unrelated. I think in the particular case of law pro-bono
cases and amicus curiae briefs would be more appropriate to juxtapose with
open source contributions.

Similarly, depending on what field of law you want to go into and what types
of people you want to work with as a lawyer you'd pick your pro-bono work with
similar rigor to open source project selection if the end goal was career
advancement.

------
tryitnow
I have noticed these discussions rarely revolve around what real economic
problems are being solved by these individuals at elite firms. This is in
sharp contrast to the startup world. I like to say the entrepreneurship is
just like a job interview, except your interviewers are your customers and
they're grilling you every day.

The more people we have who can perform under that pressure the better our
economy will be.

------
geebee
I suspect that this doesn't hold nearly as much in high tech as it does in
other fields like banking or law.

For starters, the "top" programs in engineering and computer science is
shuffled pretty heavily - Caltech, MIT, and Stanford are in there, but so are
Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, etc... These are all serious
institutions, of course, and of course by national standards even the huge
public ones are selective. But I've also noticed (this is just my own
experience) that top "tech" companies considerably less concerned with whether
you went to a "top" school in the first place.

I wonder why this is - I mean, I'm glad for it. I have a few theories.

The typical techie degree programss (math, physics, computer science,
engineering) are so rigorous that people tend to respect the accomplishment
(as long as it comes from a recognizable school with integrity).

Tech is a fundamentally creative field, rather than a positional - in other
words, techies have the opportunity to create wealth rather than position
themselves for a slice of the pie. If you can create wealth, well, get out
there and do it! No permission is required.

On a similar note, high tech is extremely disruptive - time and again, tech
founders overthrow the established order. These disruptive people often do
come from Stanford or Harvard, but I think the personality type of someone who
seeks to disrupt the ruling elite is going to be more open to top talent
regardless of where it comes from (unlike investment banking or law firms,
where (according to the article) graduates of super-elite schools are likely
to filter out people who haven't attended a similar school).

Also - high tech tends to have a closer, more symbiotic relationship with
academics than investment banking or even law. So high tech will place a
greater premium on degrees from universities where top research in engineering
and science takes place - not so much out of snobbery as because they have a
close connection with these universities and get to know the students there.
Interestingly, this doesn't correlate all that well with eliteness of
undergraduate admissions (the ivy league, in particular, is surprisingly MIA
where it comes to top graduate and or faculty departments in engineering and
science... Cornell, which isn't high in the ivy pecking order, is probably one
of the best).

------
calibraxis
Also required reading is "Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy" by Duncan
Kennedy (Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School).

([http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Legal%20Education%20as%20...](http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Legal%20Education%20as%20Training%20for%20Hierarchy_Politics%20of%20Law.pdf))

------
alexanderberman
This article makes me happy to be a techy!

------
skrebbel
"Elite", that's when you can hack into the school's mainframe and turn on the
sprinklers, no?

~~~
daimyoyo
No. Elite is hacking the Gibson mainframe.

------
vsl2
As a former associate at a "white shoe" law firm and having been part of the
recruiting/interviewing process, I can vouch for most of the observations the
article makes.

The Process:

1) HR (and the hiring partner + his helpers) looks through the piles of
resumes and decides who to interview or give a full-day callback

Aside: Many top law schools have job fairs where students bid on law firms to
interview with and law firms have to accept interviews with those students who
bid highest. The schools set this up so that low-GPA students can still get
interviews and hopefully impress the interviewer with his/her
passion/personality. Surprisingly, this can work out quite well in many
instances for the low-GPA students, so long as the stretch isn't too big. Law
firms agree to these terms or otherwise, schools deny them access to the job
fair. Maybe the recent economic turmoil has changed the dynamic, but I'm not
sure.

2) The initial interview (at a job fair or otherwise) is just one person who
interviews you and decides whether or not to give you the opportunity for a
full-day callback interview on site.

3) On site, there are usually 3-4 one-on-one interviews with a mix of partners
and mid to senior level associates. Then its a lunch interview (at a high-end
restaurant) with a couple of junior associates.

Any one of the aforementioned people can kill the interviewee's chances with a
strong "No", though there are always exceptions when a partner has strong
feelings the other way.

From my experience and talking with partners and associates, the only real
criteria interviewers tend to consider:

(i) "Gut feel" - meaning whether you like the interviewee and view him/her as
an enthusiastic likeable person (remember that you'll likely have to spend
lots of late nights working with this person),

(ii) School/grades - knowing how everyone in the legal industry knows how
important law school pedigree is in the profession, someone making it into top
law schools is considered a huge indicator. Even young associates are very
congnizant of law school because we know how hard we tried to get into the top
schools because we knew how important it was (much much more important than
for undergrad). And don't forget that this is a prestigious law firm with lots
of white-haired conservative Yale and Harvard old men.

[Note: This will often have a hard/soft cutoff which will reject an applicant
no matter how great the personality or extracurricular]

iii) Exceptional extracurriculars/interests - only things that really make an
applicant memorable are worth anything because anyone with half a brain can
come up with a list of activities/interests.

iv) Physical attractiveness for women - given that senior management in the
legal profession is still dominated by men and that the most attractive women
generally don't end up being lawyers, I think this can sometimes come into
play (and lets not pretend that it doesn't in the rest of the world).

------
michaelochurch
Meh. That's a bad definition of "elite" if you ask me; those aren't the most
interesting jobs or companies. Entry-level "white shoe" law positions are
horrible, and junior-level investment banking is an atrocity. If that's what
they're calling "elite firms", then their standards are low. Those careers are
miserable for the first 5 years-- unless proof-reading pitch books at 3:00 am
on a Sunday is your thing.

Worth noting is that these firms go after _mediocre_ Ivy graduates. The 3.8 CS
majors are overqualified (except for quant positions). It's not about
intelligence. It's only somewhat about social status. Mostly, it's about the
people they're trying to hire: status-hungry kids with an _unconditional_ work
ethic. These people make bad hires in technology (unimaginative, egotistical)
but are great junior I-bankers because they'll do whatever is put in front of
them, even if it's the most awful work in ridiculous volume, for the sake of
prestige.

What is the profile of the 25th-percentile (as opposed to 50th or 75th) Ivy
Leaguer? Someone who's not especially smart, but loaded up on trophy
extracurriculars and averaged a 3:30 bedtime during high school on account of
perfectionism and overcommitment. For investment banking, that's the ideal
hire for a junior position.

~~~
rayiner
> Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates.

The banks typically hire around the top 1/3 at Ivies, even higher these days
given the economy. My friend, a 3.9 physics major at H/Y/P chose banking over
research, and so did a lot of his similarly well-qualified classmates. Hard to
turn down a job where your starting pay is about what a mid-career researcher
with a PhD makes.

~~~
michaelochurch
One of two possibilities.

1\. Your friend was taking a quant job, for which 3.9 and a physics major
wouldn't make him overqualified.

2\. He had a family connection to put a thumb on the scale and get him the
most interesting projects. Banking is a pretty good deal if you have this. You
still have to work 100-hour weeks, but after 2 years you can go whereever you
want.

~~~
flacon
"You still have to work 100-hour weeks"

Assuming they are working 50 weeks a year.

50 * 100 = 5000 hours $125,000 / 5000 = $25/hour

Thats half what I make per hour.

Sure they might make more later on, but I'm not interested in giving up that
much time for 1. something thats not my project and 2. for so little per hour

~~~
ssharp
This is ignoring two things:

1) The $125,000 is a starting salary, which will go up substantially if the
hire proves successful. There are lots of future earnings to consider when
working in this type of position.

2) The psychological perception of the work and income. Does the person
realize or care that he is working 50 hours a week @ $25/hour, or does the
person care that he is making $125,000 annually? I am not a behavioral
economist (IANABE?), but I'd have to imagine that this is a huge factor -- the
salary vs. hourly mindset.

~~~
flacon
"50 hours a week @ $25/hour"

I believe its 100 hours a week, which frankly sounds absurd.

My comment is not ignoring either of your points since:

1\. I state the salary will go up.

2\. The point of my comment was to realize that making 125K is not much if you
are working 100hr/week and have no time to enjoy it, thus a high salary might
seem great but looking at it on an hourly basis can be useful etc.

In life, generally you can have more money or more time, rarely can you have
both. I would rather have more time personally.

~~~
ssharp
Sorry, I misstated and misread your post.

Some people may be very interested in time smoothing. That is spending time
now, with the expectation of spending less time in the future because of
present time invested. I think PG has talked about this in regards to
startups. Work really hard for a concentrated number of years to reap large
financial rewards and have the option of never working again.

Regarding the time/money trade off, that is, as you mention, a personal
preference. I'd assume the type of person looking for a big
law/finance/consulting job is the type of person who places much more weight
on having lots of money and being part of the money culture, than enjoying
downtime.

------
kahawe
OK, here is the dirty truth about applying and being hired: for the average
"elite" company and pretty much all companies, if you are going through the
hiring process as yet another manila folder in a pool of 200, you have
probably lost already and will have to spend a lot of frustrating time writing
applications and jumping through the ridiculous HR mind-frakks-to-read-you
thrown at you. The way to ideally go about being hired is bypassing that
process - you need to know people at the place you want to work at, ideally
you have worked for them already and could show your skills and that you fit
in. You need someone there cheering for you, someone who can make it happen
and you need to get them to want you to be there.

Interning is a great way of getting to that point. Working as a consultant is
just as great. The idea here is to get into a position where you can show your
skills to the people who can ultimately request hiring you - then the whole
dreaded HR process is just a formality. Get to know people and make a name for
yourself, be the "go-to" guy whom people come to ask. Know a lot of stuff and
do good work, then you will be surprised how often you can bypass all the
ridiculous HR shenanigans and the rules will be bent for you, backwards if
need be. Yes it is hard work but it is productive work instead time spent on
polishing your CV to the latest fads, bells and whistles.

And this does NOT mean you have to be extremely out-going or need to have
unreal social-skills; you just need to have a "value", you need to be good at
stuff.

Call it borderline-nepotism if you want but I am sorry, this is not what they
tell you about being hired and it is very real and far more important than all
those bells and whistles and "tricks" for applying... and it is all about
doing a good job, having a great image and having a high value so they WANT
you. Win-win for both sides ultimately.

~~~
matwood
_OK, here is the dirty truth about applying and being hired_

Absolute truth. I have had many jobs at this point and the _only_ one I've
ever gotten without already knowing someone was my first job at a grocery
store. Even with that one I didn't just fill out an application and drop it
off. I found the guy who ran the store and handed it to him personally (did I
know him at that point? ;) ). He glanced at it and told me to start the next
day.

Every job since then I've been recruited by someone that I already knew who
worked there.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Same experience. Interviewed cold exactly once in 30 years - right out of
school.

------
mqqq
When they said elite, banks, law firms, and consulting business did not come
to mind. The first two I consider them as leeches.

~~~
asto
I'm quite sure you're just trolling but I'm curious to know why you think the
first two are leeches but not the third.

~~~
paganel
> I'm quite sure you're just trolling but I'm curious to know why you think
> the first two are leeches but not the third.

You're by definition a leech when instead of being allowed to go bankrupt
you're feeding on other people's money (so called "Government support").

That's not how banking got started back in the 15th-16th century, I never read
of the Genoa bankers for example asking Philip II "hey, why don't you let us
rob you of your South America gold?", as far as I know it was the other way
round (Philip II screwing the Genoese bankers). But then again, back in the
day we didn't have main-stream media Keynes-ian supporters saying things like
"if we dont' give our money to support the banks the whole system would come
crumbling down".

