Comment by pandaman

Don't know about boomers, but I knew a guy with MS from Stanford who worked at a Bay Area Fry's in late 1990s. That was when the dotcom was spinning up in full force and anyone who could tell Perl from HTML could aim for a CTO at some lavishly funded startup. So nothing much changed in the past 30 years: a prestigious degree is not a golden ticket, you need to make connections while getting that degree and then use them productively. It also severely hinders your ability to get most of the jobs (like the article's protagonist applying for a food prep had any chance) - that guy only got Fry's job because all of the people who normally would be selling Gateways and eMachines to soccer moms had been already writing CGI for dotcoms at the time.