[Coronita]

[quote=Hatfield]Right. I was at QCOM at the time they spun off LEAP, and they granted separate options for LEAP shares. Which I rode up and all the way back down. D’oh.[/quote]

At least you didn’t get royally f’d over when Ericsson bought us 🙁

Can you say, flush the $1million in options down the toilet? Yeah, that one still stings pretty bad after all these years. 🙁

[Coronita]

[quote=deadzone]An Ivy education is clearly not worth it for Tech, that is a fact. If anything it may be a detriment because you would be considered an outsider by most Tech professionals. For other career paths, you could certainly debate merits of Ivy or not.[/quote]

Now you’re really stretching there….

I’ve never experienced this sort of reverse discrimination simply becuase of having an Ivy league degree from a fellow tech workers that didn’t. Like you said, most other tech workers don’t give a shit (at least the really good ones), since all they cared about what how good you are. If there were anyone of them that felt that way, they clearly weren’t in a hiring position from VP all the way down that.

I’m guessing the only reason why someone might actually feel that way is if there were incompetent and felt threatened some way and had an ax to grind, like maybe at at government position (except maybe some killer NSA positions)….And if that were the case, they would be doing you favor by not hiring you because chances are that group/organization would be disfunctional and incompetent.

Then again, to some extent I tend to work with bosses that are intelligent and have a proven history of some accomplishments, that have some common personal interest, since I wouldn’t enjoy working for someone that I couldn’t respect or have no out-of-work pseudo-relationship with. And if I didn’t have a boss that I couldn’t stand or couldn’t relate to, I’d get the fvck out of that company as fast as I could.

I think it comes up many once or twice in a conversation every place I been school comes up at random occasions.. Usually goes something like this.
We end up talking about apps and cars eventually anyway…

It’s actually kinda of funny though. I did ask some of my coworkers where they want to send their kids to school when they go to college. The bosses tended to say Berkeley, Stanford, MIT. A few said, I wish my kids could stay local and go to UCSD/UCLA/Irive. And of course, some of us said, “God, I hope my kids ends up finding a better career in medicine or wall street that pays 5x more than us” for the amount of shit we go through. I don’t want my kids to be an engineer…ha ha”

[Coronita]

[quote=The-Shoveler]Lets hope it does not happen.

But I think if you had a lot of options in QCOM it might not be such a bad thing if it were to occur.

In other companies I have been with, they usually just make all options vested and cut you a check.

This is one of those things that works better if your Job title starts with a “C”.[/quote]

Qualcomm doesn’t typically full vesting upon change of control for most employees. Most big companies don’t.

[Coronita]

[quote=deadzone][quote=Dukehorn]There are a lot of millionaires who are plumbers, realtors, developers, ambulance chasers, etc. Good for them.

There are also lots of millionaires who are interventional radiologists, CEOs, CFOs, investment bankers, partners in law firms. Most of these folks who I know do have Ivy level degrees.

If you are a smart kid which pool do you want to come out of?

There’s nothing wrong with having a middle-class lifestyle with your kids just as there’s nothing wrong with being a Harvard Law grad who would like to be a Supreme Court clerk.

Different strokes for different folks.[/quote]

This Ivy league talk is such bull crap. Out of curiosity I checked the bios of all the executives of Qualcomm. Of the 12 execs, not a single one of them attended an Ivy league school. The closest was one of them got a Masters at Stanford, but even he got undergrad at a state school.

If it makes you feel more special, go ahead and waste your money to send your kids to Ivy league. But just admit it, the only reason is so you can brag about it (i.e. you are a d-bag).[/quote]

Actually,

1. Irwin did.
2. Viterbi went to MIT.

But then again, Qualcomm arguably is past its prime in its current state.

[Coronita]

They talk about this many times. It’s probably not going to happen.
I think QC’s numbers probably won’t be as bad as it seems. Seems like expectations are already pretty low versus last year.

We’ll see exactly how much damage Samsung did do by using their own chips in their flagship phone(s).

I think you’ll probably have a lot more M&A activity with the smaller fish. I don’t know who or if it came to my company how I would feel.

[Coronita]

[quote=scaredyclassic][quote=deadzone][quote=flu]One thing I never understood is, at least when it came to engineering or STEM related field, how “recruiting the best” meant giving someone the opportunity who was the best athlete while having mediocre technical abilities a spot in a STEM degree, while giving them plenty of tutors and extra help just so they can keep up with the real talent. Now, there are some cases when people are actually good at both, but plenty of cases where that isn’t the case…. Just saying…[/quote]

For an engineering degree, Ivy league holds absolutely no cache. A B+ student at U of Illinois, for example, will have better job prospects than a C student at Cornell all else being equal. If your kid is a super nerd, then everybody knows the most “prestigious” engineering school is MIT. But, for a B.S. degree looking for job in industry, I don’t think MIT gets recruited any more than the big public schools, probably less.[/quote]

what about Harvey mudd? My wife wanted to send our kid there. Might have gotten in kind of a long shot. I didn’t let him apply because because I didn’t want to pay.[/quote]

Great school, well known on the west coast. But I don’t see too many alumni. Perhaps, they are too smart for the work I do and most common work. Kinda like CalTech.

[Coronita]

One thing I never understood is, at least when it came to engineering or STEM related field, how “recruiting the best” meant giving someone the opportunity who was the best athlete while having mediocre technical abilities a spot in a STEM degree, while giving them plenty of tutors and extra help just so they can keep up with the real talent. Now, there are some cases when people are actually good at both, but plenty of cases where that isn’t the case…. Just saying…

[Coronita]

[quote]
As I’ve mentioned before and repeated here, when you go to some of these schools, the admissions folks already weeded out the non-achievers so you’re mostly going to school with the top future leaders and execs of the world. Yes, some joe schmo can start a business and be a millionaire or multi-millionaire from a state school, but the odds are against you.
[/quote]

You would be surprised about this. (flame suit on). In my observation, there were a few different ways to get into an Ivy League school.

1. By hard work academically, with some extracurricular things. Even, if you wanted to be the nerdiest science geek imaginable.
2. By some athletic achievement. Even though eventually, weren’t going to pursue an athletic career, once you got it, you had mobility to pursue a degree even though academically you probably wouldn’t have gotten in.

3. By having money and from a family with connections. You couldn’t be horrible academically, but you could get away with being average. Chances are, you would have been waitlisted for admissions. But surely, you would have gotten in during the waitlist period.

4. You met the criteria to fit some quota number. Several of my engineering classmates fit that category, and a lot of them nearly flunked out and/or transferred out of their engineering degree after 2 years. Those that ended with a C- from an Ivy League school with little connections (family or friend) had a real tough time finding a job post grad, partly due to the economy at that time, but partly since at that that time some employers couldn’t literally recruit students below a grade threshold, no matter what school they came from.

That said, having volunteered with the admissions board as a student member, we knew the concept of “weeding out” was very subjective. I, for instance, was wait-listed for admissions for just about every Ivy I applied for. And when when I was finally accepted, I thought it would be extremely difficult academically. But I graduated top 5% of my class, and had no problem finding an internship during my first 3 years, and had no problem finding a job any engineering company that I applied for as a backup (wall street firms was a different story). Meanwhile a significant portion of my graduating class (the ones that did survive, many didn’t) didn’t find something meanful and went on to post grad work because there was no better option (that was the day that Sun Microsystems/Netscape/Yahoo was considered hot, Qualcomm was considered a scrapy telco company, and Motorola was still #1).

So sorry, I don’t buy the concept of Ivy League’s “weeding out process”…Especially, if you’re asian+male, you’ll probably realize, well at least until recently, you’re already at a slight disadvantage, especially if you are trying to pursue something STEM related. And only recently, is it somewhat changing if you are asian+male, but mainly if you’re from overseas, probably with parents with money that can pay for full tuition or more, kinda like what the UC system is doing these days. For me, personally, I think I was a rule breaker, some punk kid at the time that the school (almost) wrote off.

If you(your kid can get in), great. If they can’t, it’s not the end of the world.

[Coronita]

[quote=scaredyclassic]So let’s start at the beginning.

First if you want to have a successful kid, best to mate with a very intelligent very well adjusted person.

In fact if you screw up at this stage it might all be over anyway.

Some lawyers say the trial is pretty much already decided in jury selection…before the case even begins. Same principle may apply to success for your issue.[/quote]

I’ve seen cases in which two really dumb parents have a really intelligent kid.
And I’ve seen cases in which you have two STEM parents that ends up having a kid that is completely opposite. Anyway 99% of you don’t need to worry because for the amount of work/effort you put in + whatever financial background you had from your family, chances are you did pretty well without being overly stressed about it.

Me, on the other hand, nothing ever came easy. And it was always frustrating that I always felt that I had to do twice as much work to get half as much accomplished that other people had it much easier than me, whether they were smarter, or if they had more resources at their disposal, or maybe they just had a personality that allowed them to get through just ok, because they could smooze much better than me and talk their way through things. If I could have avoided all that, and done just as well as peers, I would have avoided all that. Unfortunately, I never got those breaks. Hopefully, my kid doesn’t have to go through the same thing.

[Coronita]

Speaking of which

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/09/technology/google-people-laszlo-bock/index.html

“Google doesn’t care where you went to college”

When the company was small, Google cared a lot about getting kids from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But Bock said it was the “wrong” hiring strategy. Experience has taught him there are exceptional kids at many other places, from state schools in California to New York.

“What we find is the best people from places like that are just as good if not better as anybody you can get from any Ivy League school,” said Bock, who just authored a book titled “Work Rules!” and stopped by CNNMoney to share his smarts.

Every year, 2 million people apply to get a job at Google (GOOG). Bock himself has seen some 25,000 résumés.

So what else does Google not care about:

Grades: Google’s data shows that grades predict performance for the first two years of a career, but do not matter after that.

Brainteasers: Gone are interview questions such as: Why are manhole covers round? or How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? “Our research tells us those questions are a waste of time,” Bock said. “They’re a really coachable skill. The more you practice, you get better at it.”

A shoe: “Somebody sent me a shoe once with a résumé tucked inside because they wanted to get their foot in the door.” That one didn’t work.

Or a robot: Especially when it arrived broken, with exposed wires and a “press here” button. Call in the bomb squad.

My take on this is simply. Google has grown up. Once a small company heavily dependent on “the best” techies, it no longer needs “the best”… Good enough is fine now, because a few select individuals now tell the rest of the employees what to do. “The best” is also subjective.

[Coronita]

[quote=CA renter][quote=nla][quote=CA renter][quote=AN]Since, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg are all college drop outs…

A piece of paper can’t feed you but the millions/billions in the bank can… for a very long time.[/quote]

Just wanted to add Michael Dell and Larry Ellison.

Here’s an opinion piece that lists many others who never received a college degree, but succeeded, nonetheless:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/30/opinion/schmitz-college/%5B/quote%5D
But how many kids are the next Larry Ellison or Bill Gates?[/quote]

Very, very few, of course. But that’s the case whether or not they graduate from an elite university. These universities screen specifically for the traits that are most likely to be found among the most successful people.[/quote]

99.5% of the population aren’t Bill Gates or Larry Ellison who don’t need college because (1) they are exceptionally brilliant AND (2) because their parents had money and were well connected.

As much as we would all like to think our kids are brilliant or exceptional, most likely they are average to above average at best and no where close Gates/Ellison. For the remainder of the 99.5% of us, it’s hard to argue that not going to college opens more doors/opportunities than those that do.

Often times, folks like to take the most success cases and extrapolate that as it is more common than the norm. For every Bill Gates/Ellison that didn’t “need” college there are several thousands that arguably could have done much better with better education. IF that wasn’t the case, this country wouldn’t have so many folks struggling financially working at a dead end minimum wage job indefinitely or the majority of people in this country stating that the american dream is dead. If you look at a lot of these cases, you can’t help but ask if these folks would have been better off with some better education, because many of them barely graduated from high school. What we do know is with their limited education and limited skill set, they remained stuck at their predicament.

Even IF you were able to succeed without higher education decades ago, that was then. This is now. This world will increasingly get more competitive. The world is a lot smaller, with more people hungry competing for the same resources. It’s estimated than in Asia, top rank universities are pumping out 1 million highly educated STEM degree graduates EVERY YEAR, not including them ones from Eastern Europe, Russia,etc. These are people who are going to be more educated and more knowledgeable over the next decade. Call it evolution or call it modern day version of darwinism.

So, yes, you will need to help your kid(s) out as much as you can by opening as many doors as you possibly can, without breaking your wallet.

This is especially the case if your kid(s) don’t have the personality to compete or driven to complete something no matter how difficult something may be nor understand that moving forward things aren’t going to be easily “given” to them on the global scale, as it might have been more readily “given” to their parents or grandparents, when there was much less competition. My kid is one of with a personality that unless something drastically changes, my has zero competitive bone in their body, so things are going to be tough for my kid, unless somehow we can even the score a bit.

Two part plan is

(1) helping open doors for your kid(s) to survive on their own in their endeavors, whatever it maybe
and
(2) as a backup plan, setting up a trust fund for your kid(s) and teaching them how to manage their money well so they can live off of it case whatever reason things from plan #1 goes south, which these days is an increasing possibility.

#1 is under attack by global competition and #2 is under attack by those that haven’t planned for their kids future and now wants to wealth redistribute it back to make up for deficiencies, some of which was self-inflicted by being facetious and giving up opportunities that were available when times were good, simply because “(someone) didn’t like it”.

Folks that want to gamble with those odds and think their kids are going to be in that exceptionally 0.5% brilliant category also have the money to back up their kid’s dreams and forgo college because they think “they don’t need it”…Go for it. Good luck.

No politician from any party is ever going to “fix” this, because it’s not a problem that probably can be “fixed”

FWIW: founder of GoPro graduated from UCSD. While also brilliant, part of his success can be attributed to his dad’s help: his dad is/was an investment banker. Bill Gates parents were close friends with Warren Buffett. This is not to detract these brilliant people’s accomplishments, because even with that much help, majority of folks from (wealthier) background still wouldn’t have obtain the successes of Gates/Ellison etc. But let’s face it. With that sort of financial support from their parents, it’s kinda hard for them to screw up, short of a being a drug addict.

[Coronita]

[quote=FlyerInHi]Think of it this way.. In the past it was a lot easier to bullshit your way to the top. It’s a lot of harder now.

For example the gambling business in Vegas. It was about the mob and connections. Now it’s corporate run by listed companies who use big data to manage their businesses. They are much more likely to hire college grads. A college education was less useful in the past for sure.[/quote]

Bullshitting your way to the top is still part of the game. But its just that right now, bullshit believability starts with a degree.

[Coronita]

That said. I am an example of what happens when your 1%er aspirations of being able to take advantage of whatever ivy league doors are suppose to open for you doesn’t pan out unlike it does for your peers. Like I said, someone has to be at the bottom of the bell curve sometimes.

[Coronita]

.

[Coronita]

.

[Author]

Posts