Google has passed Goldman Sachs in one measure of prestige

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Chelsea Clinton Wedding

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Status-conscious young people are increasingly working at technology firms such as Google, at least according to one measure of prestige.

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One of the most underrated sections of The New York Times is its wedding section, which chronicles marriages of New York's young and successful.

As Todd Schneider points out in Vox, that makes it a perfect data set for examining what New York "society" considers to be prestigious and desirable.

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Here's the chart that shows Google passing Goldman Sachs:

WeddingCrunchers_GoogleGoldmanSachs (2)

Wedding Crunchers

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After all, most wedding announcements include many of the same details: where the partners went to school, what they do for work, and how they worship. That leads to passages in announcements like this one:

The groom, also 30, is a computer scientist in Mountain View, Calif., at Alphabet, formerly known as Google, where he is working on self-driving cars. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton.

One big trend in the wedding section recently: more wedding section subjects are now working at big technology companies, especially Google. In fact, in recent years, Google has at times surpassed Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that is one of the most prestigious employers in New York.

"NYT wedding mentions get at something core to New York City's prestige-obsessed culture that would be difficult to quantify with traditional employment data alone," Schneider writes. He finds trends using a tool called Wedding Crunchers which looks at 63,000 announcements dating back to 1981.

Google vs. Goldman Sachs isn't the only technology trend the NYT wedding section reveals.

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