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Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my experience, the
by timr 12y ago
Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my experience, there's not much difference between a top MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school. The difference is in the distribution: the best schools can pick amongst great applicants, and therefore have a better average student.
The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs, and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.
But to the extent that this turns into a bias against students from other schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as every other accredited program. Even the books are the same.
But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone else. More candidates for the rest of us.
- jhonovich 12y ago"In my experience, there's not much difference between an MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school." So the average student at a top school is roughly equal to a top student at an average school?
- hkmurakami 12y agoAs a former average engineering student at a top school who's befriended and worked with a good number of top students at good but not top schools (ex: students on full rides in state school engineering programs), top students at these schools are probably somewhat better than the average student at a top school. Of course, this is just an anecdotal perspective. Your mileage may vary.
- timr 12y agoI spoke imprecisely -- I don't have enough information to make that kind of a claim about "average students" (hopefully obviously). But of the people I've worked with, there's no difference at the high end. Good students are just as good at no-name schools as they are at MIT. I updated my comment to be more clear.
- hkmurakami 12y agoWhat you do get at the top schools are students who excel at being good/great "students" (ie excelling within a predefined system). Some companies probably want that sort of quality, and are okay with having a large number of false negatives with respect to technical talent.
- timr 12y agoI am firmly of the opinion that getting a high GPA in a degree program is a strong indicator of determination, focus and work ethic -- qualities that are essential to "technical talent", that people who complain the loudest about formal education often lack. Setting a high bar for academic achievement enriches your applicant pool more than most other signals. So while I think that credentialism is bad when taken to an extreme, I do think that credentials still have value.
- btoptical 12y agoActually Google found that GPA is a weak indication of how a person performs. Apparently, according to Google, the GPA is only weakly correlated with job success in the first year or two. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...
- timr 12y agoI didn't say that I believe in GPA as a stack-ranking score. I just believe it has value when you're comparing someone who barely graduated with someone who graduated with honors. Even Google uses GPA for new grads (so says the article), probably for similar reasons. Also, as long as we're being pedantic: "success at Google" is not clearly related to "success in a small company", or even "success in the world". We don't even know what they mean by "success".