Ask HN: Requesting HN'ers to give me Career advice

OK, let me try to answer/comment on what you said. Excuse me if some of these sound blunt.

1. Your age is irrelevant.

2. Working at a management consulting company as an analyst is almost the definition of enterprise fizz-buzz programming. I haven't met any real hacker who works at those companies, and on the contrary I know quite a few who resent their IT jobs at such companies.

3. Quant jobs are also mostly dull, although if you get in a good place at a higher level, you might work on interesting stuff. If you're on the systems side of things, then high-frequency trading places have interesting work on optimizing execution times. However, the high pay at quant jobs is like cocaine -- you'll find it very hard to quit, even if you see more interesting jobs.

4. If you actually want to be a technical person solving problems for more than just the next couple of years, there's no need for an MBA these days unless you're NOT at a top-tier technical place. The better places like Google, Facebook, etc. will let you get very high up the corporate ladder without an MBA, and not having one somewhat innoculates against being pushed into more management-y roles.

5. It's hard to judge what your abilities actually are. You didn't mention anything about programming projects you've done (COMPLETED), which is one of the biggest pieces of evidence that you are good and capable at hacking. On the other hand you do mention accepted research papers at a good venue -- if the journal is actually good, then this will be an ENORMOUS help in your getting into a PhD program. A quick recap, in case you're unfamiliar about what matters for PhD admissions:

* Evidence of research ability. This is basically the only thing the top schools care about. The way they judge this is:

    * Previous papers published, and the level of the conference/journal they
      were published in. You (perhaps) have this. You are automatically above
      90% of applicants.

    * Recommendations from good researchers. You're at a top 7 school, and you
      did research. Hopefully it was with someone who (a) got to know you well
      and (b) was impressed with your work and (c) are themselves known as good
      researchers to others in their field. If so, you're basically in at just
      about any place you want, as long as you don't fuck up in some other
      category.

    * Grades matter somewhat if you're at a known good school where the
      academic standard is tough. It's far less important than the previous
      two, though.

    * As long as you don't say something completely idiotic in your essays,
      they don't matter.

    * General GRE scores don't matter at all, as long as you're above some
      fairly low threshold. Subject scores don't matter at all, even if you're
      only at the 50th percentile.

In summary, you have a very good shot at getting into a good PhD program, if you're accurately self-assessing your publications/school reputation. Also, it's much easier to get into a PhD program straight from undergrad since your recommenders will remember you best, and often working for even a year really dulls your desire to go "back to school".

While theoretically PhDs are internships for becoming a professor, in practice less that 50% continue on to academia in CS, so you shouldn't view it as a negative even if you eventually want to go to industry. A PhD will open doors to top research labs like Microsoft/Adobe/Google/Mitsubishi Research, where you'd get to work on cool, tough problems. Getting a PhD at a top place also requires many of the same skills needed for startups -- self-motivation, getting stuff done, working your ass off, being able to present your work well and "sell it", being effective at choosing the right problems to solve, solving them, and being able to communicate your results, etc.

On the other hand, it is a large time-commitment -- at least 4 years and perhaps 5-6 -- and your experience is largely determined by the quality of your advisor -- both technically and at a personal ...

My recommendation is to go the start-up route for the following reasons:

1) You will be able to solve interesting problems more so than a large company which at least early on will have you doing small iterations on what they already have

2) You will be exposed to the opportunity to get business experience of a type much more valuable than what you can get out of an MBA. Get an MBA for the network, not for the academics, and not if you want to solve interesting problems in the CS space

3) you will develop the type of valuable experience that all those job applications you are looking at want. Even if a start-up fails, you will be able to point to an interesting thing that you helped develop that will help with the job search in the future

Take this advice with a big grain of salt. Do what YOU want to do, like solve interesting problems that you have passion for without worrying about where it will lead you. If the problems are interesting, and the solutions are awesome, you will end up in a great place. If you go build something cool that you can show to start-ups, they will be much more interested in talking to you than if you are just a cover letter + resume combination.

Where are you located? If you are in the SF Bay Area I'd be willing to talk to you about opportunities around here.

Are you doing your masters at georgia tech, doing your internship at Yahoo! and an indian from IIT?

The only advice I can really give you is to give working in the real world a shot before going to more school. You're probably already familiar with what it's like to be in school. Unless you get really lucky, finding out where you belong is more of a process of elimination than anything else.

So my advice is to try all three of the options that you ask about. Once you've given those fields a try, you'll know if that's the place for you or not.

My feelings... If you told us you were the author of some amazing open source project that solves some impressively difficult problem in your area of expertise, then I'd believe the BS about how smart you think you are. You don't get into companies like Google or Facebook right out of college just because you think you are smart or because you have an impressive education. You need to have the complete package, and that includes tangible experience- by that I mean experience you have something to show for- and great communication skills.

It sounds like you need to improve your immigration status to achieve your goals. Seems logical that you should focus on that. Are you working on open source projects that exploit your abilities? If you are so hungry to solve problems then do it for free for a while. You will get noticed by important people if your work is good. If you get a good opportunity, then take a job that will stand out on your resume. Do your interesting work on your own time.

I generally don't like to harp on the open source thing, but it is the perfect mechanism to vault you into the position you want. As far as your age is concerned... yes, age is most definitely a factor. The fact that you haven't even finished your education and already have a laundry list of jobs you have no interest in shows quite a bit of immaturity. Your post read like an episode of Property Virgins.

I remember following a guy named Jose Valim during google's summer of code a few years ago. The kid was completely unknown, but made a name for himself very quickly in the ruby world. He took on many open source ruby projects to help solve common problems for the rails community. The kid just finished his phd and is already on the rails core team. I'm amazed at how much he's accomplished in such a short period of time. That's the kind of guy I look at for inspiration. He doesn't waste a second, he just gets shit done and gets it done well. If you can focus on that then all the other details will sort themselves out. You need to create your own opportunities.

Good luck!

Regarding algo trading, here's an interesting thread on it at Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s9d7/iama_100_automat...

The OP is pretty cool to PM about it too.

I fully appreciate you have a language barrier, and have considered that when reading your post; maybe I'm wrong but my first impression is that you are yet another young uni student with a big ego, no notable accomplishments, and absolute certainty of greatness and success.

> Here is my case: 1: I am 22 years and 3 weeks old

> by the time I graduate I would still be 22 years and 11 months old

Why are you so concerned with your age such that you think it is somehow important to be precise to the level of months and weeks?

> I am really good at C.S.

yet...

>I am scared of doing Ph.D., if I dont get into top few universities.

Why would this scare you? If you are as good as you seem to think you are, your degree will be a footnote on your resume within years.

> I love solving problems, unlike people who got interested in programming by making websites

It seems to me that is an insulting statement..are you not (loosely) implying most(?) people in CS programs are there because they want to "build websites", or in other words, aren't nearly enlightened as you.

> Hence I dont want a job which involves significant amount of (for lack of appropriate term) enterprise fizz-buzz programming.

Yes, this is a totally valid point, no complaints here.

> I would love to become an Analyst in company like McKinsey or Bains or BCG etc. Though such jobs are extremely hard to get My beloved other option is to join any of Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft. These again hard if not harder than above ones.

My honest interpretation of this is, you want to get wealthy, ie: you're not in this field for your love and passion of it, but because of greed. That's the feeling I get from what you say, reality may be different.

> My Final Aim is to get an MBA from a really good university.

My personal opinion, but this is not a particularly honorable goal in life, at least a first goal....especially considering some of the stellar ideas MBA's have burdened the world with in the last 5 years.

> Lastly I would love to get a Quant Job

Again, just my opinion, especially at your age, and especially if you are as smart as you think you are, can't you aspire to something more than this?

Maybe I have the totally wrong interpretation of you, and I honestly don't mean to be rude, but from what you've said, you seem to me to be the type of person that has specific career goals and I would be afraid that you would walk over top of anyone that stood in your way to achieve these goals...like someone that wants to climb the ladder to the top and anyone that gets in your way better watch out.

Maybe I read it wrong.

Reading your responses below it sounds like you want to work on interesting problems that have a quick turnaround in terms of real-life implementation.

I'm in a similar situation and I'm looking into doing a graduate degree in Operations Research (OR) or Industrial Engineering, which is usually offered either in Business schools or Engineering schools. You essentially do research on solving real-world problems with quantitative methods.

Many of the OR graduates (even those with PhD's) end up not in academia but in business. If you have more questions feel free to email me.