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Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most

Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upwardly mobile engineers are usually immigrants with high IQs who don't have connections and so have to work 60-80 hour weeks to make up for what they normally could have gotten "for free" with a more privileged upbringing. The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying... You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds. UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though. There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...

metadat 4y ago
> Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad... Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point. My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition. Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.
- Hydraulix989 4y ago
  If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Eastern Europeans overcome to earn top international ranks in IOI competitive programming, for example.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    > Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in. The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left. As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      Your first point seems paradoxical but I might be misunderstanding. When you said 'dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in', are you inferring that although the right to decide is owned by the dons, they are 'ordinary' so there is less selection pressure for people from powerful backgrounds?
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Basically I got the impression that the Dons/profs would not like if the college master tapped them on the shoulder and said "Little Johnny's dad gave us some money, please let him into your tutorial group". If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions. There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
        4y ago
denimnerd42 4y ago
come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course. they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.
- Hydraulix989 4y ago
  Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top schools in their home countries, but no network or strong family wealth here in the US. I always joked that Harvard graduates are above putting up with the semi-annual hoop jumping FAANG companies have for "performance reviews."
  - yellowcake0 4y ago
    Your coworker from MIT left to be a quant/software engineer at a hedge fund, or was the role non-technical?
  - Hydraulix989 4y ago
    Quant trader at a firm that I've never even heard of but routinely pays even engineers 7 figures
    - novok 4y ago
      I've also heard working at such firms has crazy finance hours too, which dissuades me from working there.
jollybean 4y ago
"Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering." Oh yes they do. It definitely opens doors. After that, depending on the role, it can have subtle effects. For mid-level management, right in the grinder, probably no as you say. For externally facing things, yes. They also might have more opportunities for lateral moves, into BD/Sales etc..
- Hydraulix989 4y ago
  Regardless of school, I would be hard pressed to find someone in my engineering organization who is an extroverted native English speaker with the very high EQ needed to hack it in sales. We're all better at working with computers than people.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    Yeah probably not, because those people would realize they'll make more money for less work, being in sales. I'm aware of at least one company a friend works at in the marketing department, and works directly with salespeople, and at that company a single salesperson brings in 40% of the entire company's revenue, makes 7-figures, and non-execs in the company complain they can't get him to do anything else in the job, like provide data for presentations and the like (personally I'm of the opinion that if they're generating that much revenue for the company, the salesperson has already done their job, and C-suite seems to think so too, but I digress). Other salespeople at that company pull in a lot less but are still difficult to get them to do other work (except attend meetings here and there), just slightly less so. They're still making good money. And that seems to be the norm at all the companies my friend has worked at. I imagine sales is more of a grind when you're starting from the bottom, and/or for companies where the margins are much smaller, but Corp2corp salepeople in particular seem to have a pretty sweet gig.
forum_ghost 4y ago
>Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. I have witnessed numerous times hiring managers that would request that HR only sends them resumes from 1-2 target schools, specified by name.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Tech has started to absorb more and more Ivy/HYPS kids, many whom would have chosen a more traditional path (consulting/banking) before eventually going to graduate school. I guess the current pay is too good for many to pass out on - even though careers in finance and consulting will pay more, if you manage to climb all the way up. But I guess it's the more "polished" post-MBA candidates from said schools that go on to become product managers, and eventually become executives. What school you went to, what your 2-4 first years of work experience was like, and what business school you went to, seems to work pretty well when signaling potential and success - especially when trying to either come up with funding, or convincing some big corporation that you're the man to lead their product XYZ.
netr0ute 4y ago
> If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees That's weird, because all those schools you mentioned are ivy leagues in the comparative sense.
- Hydraulix989 4y ago
  No. They are as academically rigorous but not nearly as good for networking or upward mobility

metadat 4y ago

> Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad... Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point. My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition. Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.

Hydraulix989 4y ago
If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Eastern Europeans overcome to earn top international ranks in IOI competitive programming, for example.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  > Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in. The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left. As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    Your first point seems paradoxical but I might be misunderstanding. When you said 'dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in', are you inferring that although the right to decide is owned by the dons, they are 'ordinary' so there is less selection pressure for people from powerful backgrounds?
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Basically I got the impression that the Dons/profs would not like if the college master tapped them on the shoulder and said "Little Johnny's dad gave us some money, please let him into your tutorial group". If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions. There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
      - 4y ago

denimnerd42 4y ago

come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course. they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.

Hydraulix989 4y ago
Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top schools in their home countries, but no network or strong family wealth here in the US. I always joked that Harvard graduates are above putting up with the semi-annual hoop jumping FAANG companies have for "performance reviews."
- yellowcake0 4y ago
  Your coworker from MIT left to be a quant/software engineer at a hedge fund, or was the role non-technical?
- Hydraulix989 4y ago
  Quant trader at a firm that I've never even heard of but routinely pays even engineers 7 figures
  - novok 4y ago
    I've also heard working at such firms has crazy finance hours too, which dissuades me from working there.

jollybean 4y ago

"Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering." Oh yes they do. It definitely opens doors. After that, depending on the role, it can have subtle effects. For mid-level management, right in the grinder, probably no as you say. For externally facing things, yes. They also might have more opportunities for lateral moves, into BD/Sales etc..

Hydraulix989 4y ago
Regardless of school, I would be hard pressed to find someone in my engineering organization who is an extroverted native English speaker with the very high EQ needed to hack it in sales. We're all better at working with computers than people.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Yeah probably not, because those people would realize they'll make more money for less work, being in sales. I'm aware of at least one company a friend works at in the marketing department, and works directly with salespeople, and at that company a single salesperson brings in 40% of the entire company's revenue, makes 7-figures, and non-execs in the company complain they can't get him to do anything else in the job, like provide data for presentations and the like (personally I'm of the opinion that if they're generating that much revenue for the company, the salesperson has already done their job, and C-suite seems to think so too, but I digress). Other salespeople at that company pull in a lot less but are still difficult to get them to do other work (except attend meetings here and there), just slightly less so. They're still making good money. And that seems to be the norm at all the companies my friend has worked at. I imagine sales is more of a grind when you're starting from the bottom, and/or for companies where the margins are much smaller, but Corp2corp salepeople in particular seem to have a pretty sweet gig.

forum_ghost 4y ago

>Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. I have witnessed numerous times hiring managers that would request that HR only sends them resumes from 1-2 target schools, specified by name.

TrackerFF 4y ago

Tech has started to absorb more and more Ivy/HYPS kids, many whom would have chosen a more traditional path (consulting/banking) before eventually going to graduate school. I guess the current pay is too good for many to pass out on - even though careers in finance and consulting will pay more, if you manage to climb all the way up. But I guess it's the more "polished" post-MBA candidates from said schools that go on to become product managers, and eventually become executives. What school you went to, what your 2-4 first years of work experience was like, and what business school you went to, seems to work pretty well when signaling potential and success - especially when trying to either come up with funding, or convincing some big corporation that you're the man to lead their product XYZ.

netr0ute 4y ago

> If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees That's weird, because all those schools you mentioned are ivy leagues in the comparative sense.

Hydraulix989 4y ago
No. They are as academically rigorous but not nearly as good for networking or upward mobility