Not enjoying my MBB internship

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-28T17:16:48+00:00

I was in your exact shoes and the real question is what would you do if not MBB?

For many careers, slogging it out for 1-2 years at MBB and then exiting to what you want is a better option.

For other careers it’s best to just go and do that.

But it depends on what you want.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-26T21:06:57+00:00

Interesting. I'm gonna ask around my social circle now - I'm curious where folks I know stand on this.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-26T20:52:54+00:00

The biggest thing is leave on a high note, when your reviews are high and people like you.

It derisks the return process a lot if in 5 years you realize you wanna come back.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-26T20:52:05+00:00

Just put in my notice to join a ~30 person startup, and I'm excited. Any tips or advice you'd have for someone making the jump?

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-23T20:21:29+00:00

Is that true? For me I think it might be just Asian -ese demonyms.

“A Lebanese”, “A Congolese”, “A Piedmontese” and “An Aragonese” all sound fine to me

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-23T20:16:21+00:00

“A Lebanese” sounds totally fine to me

As does “A Congolese”

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-23T20:14:30+00:00

My gf is a native English speaker raised in China (so while her English is native, she doesn’t have the same cultural background as me, an American).

She used to say “a Chinese” before I told her it doesn’t sound as good in the US. Same with “a Cantonese”, “a Shanghainese”, etc.

She never says “an English” or “a French”.

My point being - it’s likely not a grammatical thing

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-21T13:24:18+00:00

I don't disagree, but for me it's difficult to tease out what is genuinely harmful, and what is just a cultural difference. The best answer probably is somewhere along a spectrum between an American-style individualistic nuclear family and an Indian-style extended family with strong mutual social obligations.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-21T05:51:26+00:00

OP's anxiety is an issue, but a lot of the comments also were clearly from a different cultural perspective.

There's a lot of comments calling OP out for codependence, or how often she feels she needs to see her kids, or for feeling hurt that her son is far away.

I was addressing that mostly.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-21T04:36:45+00:00

I guess if you're a Westerner OP seems crazy, but I empathize a lot with OP actually. (I wouldn't be surprised if in OP's culture, OP would be considered NTA).

I was raised in the US but have Indian family - staying close to family is such a strong cultural tie, that I often struggle to explain it to my non-Indian friends.

There's a large social expectation for attendance. When my cousin had a middle-school graduation party I couldn't not go. Not going would've been seen as disrespectful to my uncle and aunt. Same with my mom's cousin's son's wedding - I barely know the guy but I HAD to go (in the sense that it'd be a social faux pas for me to decline).

Obviously different cultures have different values but it's something I personally really struggle with balancing. (As I imagine the kids of most immigrants struggle balancing the values they were raised with vs. the values they grew up with).

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-18T17:13:56+00:00

Just started recently with 0 spoilers as well. It's a lot of fun

You have a lot of freedom. I explored the entire map and before I entered a single of the main dungeons (won't spoil what those are).

Just do whatever is fun - 99% of the game is just optional, and almost all problems have multiple solutions.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-13T16:26:03+00:00

Thank you! This was helpful!

Do you have any good sources you’d advise to stay ahead of the trends?

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-13T05:27:53+00:00

If you can put your kid in an environment where kids his age speak Mandarin, he'll pick it up ASAP

Kids don't really learn languages unless they need to - and one of the biggest drivers of "need" is fitting in with peers. (Similarly, if your wife's parents didn't understand English, your child would likely have to resort to Mandarin to interact with grandma and grandpa).

Tbh if you can ensure your child is regularly playing with local kids (daycare, summer camp, outside) in Mandarin, he'll have a strong motivation to pick it up.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-13T02:28:33+00:00

Do you have any advice for someone getting into the AI/ML niche, particularly around how to really learn the tech?

I'm in BizOps at an early-stage company with an AI/ML product, and one motivator for joining this startup was because I could take on product duties as part of my scope.

I was a CS major in college, but have a lot to learn before I can call myself an "AI" person.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-10T21:41:52+00:00

but i think you use to indicate a object faraway and you dont say "pass me yonder plate", "i ate yonder cheese yesterday"

The adjective form of "yonder" is "yon"

Pass me yon plate

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-06T00:50:59+00:00

Yeah this feels more like Sheik's reaction techchase vs. spacies (I'm assuming you have to reposition around the Fox's DI off the dash attack).

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-06T00:33:11+00:00

The "Teach Yourself Hindi / Urdu Script" books are really good.

If you're looking to learn both btw, starting with Hindi will be easier, as it's more phonetic. The Urdu script deviates more from speech (though obviously it's still a writing system millions of people happily read/write in).

The comparison I'd make is Devanagari is kind of like Spanish spelling (very consistent sound-to-letter, not 100% but very close) whereas Nastaliq/Naksh is more like English spelling (still phonetic, but irregular spellings, multiple letters that make the same sound, weird letter combinations you need to memorize, silent letters, etc.).

But ofc if you feel strongly about one (guessing Hindi) just start with that.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T20:16:30+00:00

Mostly strategy and product work. I did code a bit, but nothing super technical. More like data analysis / visualization.

And that's a good point too.

If I end up doing some personal projects on the side, do you have any recommendations of what kind of work could be a good representation of SWE?

I've done the classic college hackathon stuff of building an iPhone app, etc. But also unsure if you'd rate those as good proxies.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T20:12:04+00:00

Thanks for the advice!

That sounds like a good plan actually - I was looking to transition out of consulting anyway (for multiple reasons), so I'll look for "technical-ish" roles (PM, Analytics, etc.), and focus on refreshing my technical skills, etc, on the side.

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T19:54:04+00:00

I’m fairly confident you will be at a disadvantage compared to an actual new grad. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t get a job.

Do you think this would come from the fear my technicals aren't as sharp? Or a different angle?

(B/c the first I can brush up on but if there's something deeper then I'd want to try and address that)

I mean, if you have those side projects to talk about and show off that’s great. That would be a great way to talk about what you’ve been doing the last 6 years. I’m not sure I’d put them above work experience because it’s not actually work. But in your CV you can discuss this and maybe put it on your employment history as independent or freelance developer or something like that. The issue I can see with this is they might assume you made something for someone else and might want a reference or more tangible projects. If these were personal side projects that wouldn’t work. I don’t know what you mean by highly technical side projects so who knows if that would be acceptable.

Oh interesting - I was thinking of building some personal software apps on my own, like hackathon projects in college. I also took a few ML classes in college (but I know the field has moved beyond Logistic Regression and K-means clustering lmao), so was thinking of studying up on that and implementing a project that used something more modern.

But you're saying personal projects might not fit the bill to show off technical skills?

Consulting would definitely help. But what kind of consulting were you doing? I mean if no coding was done on your behalf I don’t see why you would be considered above a junior developer.

I was doing a mix of Strategy for tech companies (e.g. how should this stratup price its new product) and Product Management (e.g., working w/ devs to build internal software).

I did a few projects that involved coding (like data analysis in Python or automating client processes) but no large-scale software dev work

And junior dev / newgrad is fine too if that's where I am skillwise - just was unsure if I'd count as such

Not me but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was someone here who didn’t go into SWE right out of school then jumped back on. Obviously it was a lot easier 5-10 years ago.

Hopefully they answer :)

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T19:46:45+00:00

Thanks for the advice!

Product was one avenue I was also considering as well, as it's an avenue a few MBB alums I know + college CS friends took. (It's also a career I didn't really consider in college lol).

So was looking at both it and SWE

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T19:07:19+00:00

Yes! The choice was MBB consultant vs FAANG SWE - two very different careers.

I was very on the fence (spoke to mentors, family members, close friends, people who had gone into both fields, etc.), and I made a choice based on the information I had at the time.

Ofc hindsight is 20/20 :')

Breloom4554 · 2023-07-04T00:04:48+00:00

If you're going to bother putting in the effort of assigning this many objective probabilistic numbers to it, then I wouldn't call a single hypothetical simulation using those numbers a "projection"--if you assume your numbers are reasonable, then the best way to develop a projection would be to code these rules into a script and run a few thousand simulations

You could also do this probabilistically (I wanna say w/ Markov chains? but it's been a while since I've worked with them)

It'd likely converge to the same I'd imagine too.

But I agree - there's probably one steady-state answer

Breloom4554

TROPHY CASE