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You may be right that she’s more of a manager than pure engineering.
I have no idea though on the nepo-baby comment. No one from Albania comes from much money. But being attractive, social, and a tier 2 mind seems possible. A Dartmouth Engineering degree isn’t easy. Schools like Dartmouth do sometimes push kids to more engineering management than pure engineering.
It's probably not nepotism in the strict definitional sense. But I've almost never heard of someone coming out of undergrad straight into project management at a prestigious company. Let alone from a non top 10 engineering school. Call it connections, familial or platonic. But she got into her positions based on some amount of capability and likely a large amount of "who you know" and was at least capable enough to build on that. But my realization was that technical knowledge and skill and actually attempting to do the work will not get as far as knowing the right people, being able to schmooze, and social climb your way into a prestigious position. Probably a bit of sour grapes.
Zuckerberg, SBF, Chamath. Seems like a lot have done it. In Musks orbit it seems like he does it a lot even with non-attractive people. His Doge choices were young. Nikita Bier at Twitter.
PM roles aren’t pure engineering. Dartmouth outside of HYPS is as prestigious as anywhere and coming from Albania getting into a top school is hard (white and had fewer resources). Albania to Dartmouth Engineering is a strong indicator of ability and agency. Only MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are more prestigious of the engineering schools. If my goal coming from Albania was to get into US tech I would probably rank Dartmouth as my 9th choice after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, University of Chicago, and Colombia. Maybe CMU is better but Dartmouth opens up better trad finance jobs too. And probably about half a dozen schools at the same level. A poor white you would basically choose whichever lets you in and/or consider their aid. Seems a little weird to me to not consider Dartmouth engineering as prestigious enough not to get a foot in the door to perform.
Though she did backdoor Dartmouth thru a guaranteed transfer program, but again she’s essentially poor unconnected white so getting Ivy isn’t easy.
She's a white woman in engineering, emphasis woman. There is never enough women of any race in engineering, she meets the quota. Doubly so at some Ivy League where they explicitly discriminate for it. I doubt she paid a lot out of pocket or was sufficiently put out by it.
We have very different definitions of good engineering schools. You seem to be ranking them based on international prestige. The Ivies aren't great engineering schools. They aren't horrible, you'll get a great education, but they don't crack the top ten, though I guess this list includes Princeton. Ivies are schools for kids of the elite. Elites don't go become engineers.
Engineering School Rankings
First, I’ve never heard of a school tilting admissions based on intended major at the undergraduate level (Ivy plus). Because it’s obvious extremely easy to just lie.
Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now. Most have higher female populations. Notre Dame is the only other topish school that has more males than females (guess conservatism or football draw). So the Ivies almost certainly moderately discriminate against females if anything. My guess is engineering backdoor program shifts it male.
Engineering rankings have major issues with the emphasis on research. Purdue is 8th. No one is choosing Purdue Engineering over Dartmouth engineering and most wouldn’t even choose University of Illinois over Dartmouth. Purdue engineers hit a career ceiling much earlier. The IQ gap between a Dartmouth engineer and a Purdue engineer is gigantic. And people want the credential signaling of Dartmouth (and signaling of 20+ IQ points) on their resume.
This reminds me of the Lantern episode Sunday night where the alien could recite Google on a topic but didn’t know things every American knows. lanterns No academically talented student is choosing Purdue over Dartmouth. OpenAI isn’t hiring from Purdue.
The lower end engineering schools are preferred for like basic engineering on old tech like building a road or keeping a foundry running. SV is going to take the candidate with demonstrated higher IQ everyday. And Dartmouth does that. It’s not just “prestige” it’s the filter of getting into Dartmouth as an indicator of ability.
Then you must have had your head in the sand this past decade, idk what to tell you. You strictly have not been paying attention. Lying is entirely the point. Ivy's are selecting for if you are willing and can play the game, signaling elite social understanding. Schools absolutely discriminate on demographics based on intended major.
Again bad stats. You are stating the the general population should be used as the judge for a localized population. This is the pay-gap stats slight of hand all over again. Also she didn't go into CS now, she went in 2007-2011. Back in peak CS gender discrimination territory.
I did. And I went to another top 10 from that list as my master's program.
I have met and worked with many engineers, undergrads and PhDs, at FAANGs, Research companies, internships, etc. From prestigious schools (MIT, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, CMU) and good-state schools (Purdue, Georgia Tech, Texas AM, Urbana, Iowa, Wisconsin Madison, Michigan), and I can tell you that at no time was undergrad school education ever correlated with perceived IQ. Let alone 20+ IQ points, which is the difference between an average IQ and gifted. Last time I was seriously tested I think I got a 129(?) converted via a Raven's Progressive Matrices test.
Any evidence of that? I have classmates that went into FAANG companies, Tesla, SpaceX, NASA, Palantir, and those are just the few I remember. Considering Murati's first job was Tesla, it looks like haughty Dartmouth is in the same hiring bucket as lowly baseborn Purdue lol. A quick scroll through OpenAI's LinkedIn, and about 40% of its workforce comes from public state schools. A ton come from Stanford, but that should be a shock to no one, given that Stanford is in the Bay where OpenAI is headquartered, locality matters is probably the overwhelming thing that I have learned. Companies hire from local schools more often than not.
Lucky for you that I'm the one building all the Military AI weapons then, with your opinion, they obviously won't work very well and thus the world is safe.
Yeah... have been in the bay, have been hired by companies in the bay, have left the bay. I don't think you know what you are talking about. This reads as a non-American or supremely closeted person with a poor understanding of America or really the world.
“ I did. And I went to another top 10 from that list as my master's program.”
You literally complained about not getting the opportunities of a Dartmouth grad. Like your whole posts was she’s just getting PM jobs early because of nepotism, but maybe it was the Dartmouth degree value?
And you do need data that lying about enrolling in engineering is an admissions hack to the Ivy League. If it was then 99% of applications would be engineering.
I’m more wall st focused but yes they want the high IQ schools for selection. But like I said your complaining that you weren’t fast tracked to PM and now claiming firms don’t care about the Dartmouth name….yet apparently they do.
Possible but how many of these other grads went on to be executives at major companies in their 30s? Doing an ablation that to show the value of a Dartmouth degree separate from the individual isn't really possible, but comparatively to other parts of its student population becoming a major CTO at 33 is extremely rare.
I've never wanted to be a PM, I've always wanted to be an ML researcher, which is what I am now... I'm cynically examining how she got to where she is, and comparing that against myself and people I've worked with, including Ivy grads and FAANG engineers and wondering how many of us have the same set of opportunities for that level of advancement.
My general question is: how did a no-name nobody, without any exceptionally displayed technical skills get onto an executive-acceleration track so early that, by age ~29, she was entering OpenAI at the VP level? I'm sure we'll never really know, but if you don't look at outliers without clear evidence of why and are skeptical. Then we operate on different levels of pattern recognition and sense making.
I don’t see her as an outlier. Dartmouth Engineering as I’ve repeatedly said is a perfectly fine high 2nd tier credentials to work from (MIT/Caltech/Harvard being tier 1). 29 isn’t that young. OpenAI wasn’t OpenAI when she joined. That’s like joining Jane St in 2005. Dartmouth engineering still puts you in the top .3% intellectual ability so sociability and lookism doesn’t seem to be crazy to get you a little jump to executive. She might not be Bill Gates smart but there aren’t really that many people at his level. She would only be jumping ahead of people marginally smarter. She’s well within the ability cohort and not in a nepo category.
Sure not many make the executive ranks anywhere. But if she has executive traits she’s also clearly smart enough to play at that level. There’s not that many people in the world a clear step function higher in intelligence than Dartmouth engineering.
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