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> but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement The range of degrees is very wi

> but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement The range of degrees is very wide. Even within some universities you will find graduates with completely different levels of ability despite achieving the same degree. Some universities are set up to pass everyone through to graduation and the professors try to give opportunities for the really motivated ones to actually learn. The range of degrees you will see is also dependent on where you’re hiring. Graduates from the programs with the strongest degrees aren’t applying to average jobs. They’re being recruited before they leave campus and they have a deep network of people in top companies to get referrals from. This creates a strong selection effect where the type of C.S. graduates you encounter is dictated by the strength and compensation level of your company. Top school CS grads can go straight into jobs that pay higher than Senior SWE compensation in many markets. They’re not interested in applying to average junior SWE comp jobs at companies that nobody will recognize on their resume.

kccqzy 2mo ago
> Even within some universities you will find graduates with completely different levels of ability despite achieving the same degree. Agreed. Even without considering students’ motivation and skill, sometimes this is just caused by flexibility in the degree design. Some universities offer students a lot of choice in the courses they take. For example, I chose not to take the algorithms class (I decided to self study it at that time) and instead took the graph theory class. It turned out that at that time my self-studying overemphasized algorithms likely asked in interviews (like greedy or dynamic programming) but didn’t cover more theoretical aspects like P/NP, pumping lemma, etc. This was something that I started regretting years after graduation. I think offering too much choice to students who were still learning is probably a mistake.
maccard 2mo ago
> This creates a strong selection effect where the type of C.S. graduates you encounter is dictated by the strength and compensation level of your company. Top school CS grads can go straight into jobs that pay higher than Senior SWE compensation in many markets. They’re not interested in applying to average junior SWE comp jobs at companies that nobody will recognize on their resume. My experience has been that it’s the norm to find that even people who come from “recognisable” names follow a bell curve distribution that matches people who come from other places.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  Graduates from every university follow a distribution. I’m not trying to claim that all graduates from a university are equal. The center of that distribution is higher or lower depending on the university. The university matters a lot.
  - maccard 2mo ago
    That’s my point - the centre of that distribution is the same whether your came from Meta or the Podunk Times

kccqzy 2mo ago

> Even within some universities you will find graduates with completely different levels of ability despite achieving the same degree. Agreed. Even without considering students’ motivation and skill, sometimes this is just caused by flexibility in the degree design. Some universities offer students a lot of choice in the courses they take. For example, I chose not to take the algorithms class (I decided to self study it at that time) and instead took the graph theory class. It turned out that at that time my self-studying overemphasized algorithms likely asked in interviews (like greedy or dynamic programming) but didn’t cover more theoretical aspects like P/NP, pumping lemma, etc. This was something that I started regretting years after graduation. I think offering too much choice to students who were still learning is probably a mistake.

maccard 2mo ago

> This creates a strong selection effect where the type of C.S. graduates you encounter is dictated by the strength and compensation level of your company. Top school CS grads can go straight into jobs that pay higher than Senior SWE compensation in many markets. They’re not interested in applying to average junior SWE comp jobs at companies that nobody will recognize on their resume. My experience has been that it’s the norm to find that even people who come from “recognisable” names follow a bell curve distribution that matches people who come from other places.

Aurornis 2mo ago
Graduates from every university follow a distribution. I’m not trying to claim that all graduates from a university are equal. The center of that distribution is higher or lower depending on the university. The university matters a lot.
- maccard 2mo ago
  That’s my point - the centre of that distribution is the same whether your came from Meta or the Podunk Times