A puzzle about prestige

There’s an obvious-in-retrospect puzzle I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time: why are so many people I know in prestigious jobs unhappy? I’m not the only person who’s noticed this: it seems like every year there’s an NYT article about someone making $500k/yr or $1m/yr who’s desperately unhappy whose friends are mostly also unhappy.

For a long time, I thought this must be some kind of sampling bias. For NYT articles, this bias is obvious — they want to tell a certain kind of story, and, for any given storyline, they can find a handful of people whose personal stories line up with the story. But what could the bias be in the people I know? That’s less clear. And the more I talked to people who should have a sample that’s not obviously biased w.r.t. to this, the more puzzling this became (e.g., talking to the founder at a coding school that’s run > 1000 people through it, > 10% of whom are at Google, where the majority of the folks at Google are unhappy, but 100% of the people at Twitter and Dropbox and the vast majority of folks at Microsoft are happy).

The thing I can’t believe I didn’t realize sooner is that people will choose prestige over happiness. No one joins Twitter for the prestige (or not since 2013 or maybe 2015, anyway), so anyone who’s joined in the past few years (everyone in the sample mentioned above) is going to have other reasons for joining Twitter. In the case of each person in that sample, the person joined because they had a very strong recommendation for a particular team and manager. There’s still some randomness here — things can always work out badly, even with a strong recommendation for a particular team, but it tilts the odds heavily and it happens that it worked it in each of these cases.

There are too many people in the sample at Google for their situations to all be the same, but a common situation is that someone either only interviews at Google (with a plan to interview elsewhere if they don’t get an offer, but they get the offer and take it), or they have an offer at another company that sounds like a great fit, but they take an offer for what is basically a random team with a random manager at Google (maybe they've gone through team matching and know the team, but they don’t know enough to have any idea if they’ll like it, or sometimes there are even red flags that they ignore). Despite the amazing PR about how great Google is, it’s not so different from other large companies. If you take a random job working for a random person, the odds of that manager being good, the team having interesting work, etc., aren’t great, but the prestige lures people in and overrides their judgement.

If you ask someone why they took a job, almost no one will say prestige (at least almost no programmers will, I will actually hear this from folks in law and finance), but people will sometimes say “prestige” in other words, like “Google will look really good on my resume” or “my parents will be excited to hear that I’m working at Google”. But, no matter what the career path, most people seem to choose the most prestigious option most of the time, while saying that it’s not about prestige, which makes me think that it is, in fact, about prestige.

Often, people will make up a reason that doesn't really make sense, e.g., a Python programmer will say they're taking an offer at Google over Dropbox or Twitter because Google has interesting low-level problems that these other companies don't. While this is technically true -- I strongly suspect Dropbox and Twitter "only" have people doing board design, whereas Google has people doing chip design -- this is totally irrelevant to someone who writes Python all day, unless the aura of working at the same firm as other people who do chip design somehow directly affects your happiness.

As a company, one of the great things about having prestige on your side is, not only does this get people in the door against their best interest, it also keeps them there. I commonly talk to people at Google (as well as at top private equity firms, etc.) who are absolutely miserable in their job but can’t leave because they can’t bear to leave such a prestigious job (what if I can never get back on track, etc.). It’s actually a bit of a mystery to me why more companies don’t try to become prestigious. I’m talking about big companies here, but this also applies to startups. Stripe has had incredibly good developer-focused marketing since very early on and gets tremendous mileage out of being prestigious in a way that (just for example) Slack doesn’t. This dollar cost of this marketing was very low, although it did require careful thought and a willingness to expend effort on a certain kind of developer marketing even when systems are on fire due to the standard hyper growth startup problems.

Maybe it’s harder to become prestigious than I realize and the other startups from Stripe’s generation (as well as Google’s) tried and failed. But in a lot of cases, it seems like companies don’t really try at all and marketing that is very obviously bogus (if you know people at the company) works really well.