How expensive and competitive education is in the USA seems so alien to me; I wonder if it's really worth it. The only apparent benefit is networking and I'd dare say that only matters in Finance/Law. Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford?
The vast majority of Google/Facebook/etc. employees aren't from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Berkeley/etc.
It's definitely much harder to get a job at these companies straight out of college if you didn't attend a big name university. 10 years later, it doesn't matter.
I got my undergrad from an unknown French university, and went to grad school at a large US state university with no brand name recognition (as is the case for many, many immigrants). Recruiters from top tier companies ignored me out of grad school, but after a few startups/talks at major conferences/open source projects/etc., I now work at such a company (and now recruiters are very eager to get some of my time).
Even a few years later, impressive work experience and open source projects should far outweigh what university you went to.
Now, having been a hiring manager at one of the major tech companies, I've seen how arbitrary the process can be. At least the SAT you can study for and master, if you really want to get a perfect score... but when it comes to hiring, there's so many factors that are unpredictable and out of your control.
Expensive: Yes. Competitive: Not really. In the state university I went to, if you could not get admission, you really did not deserve it. The SAT score required was fairly low. In fact, if your SAT score was just above the threshold of admission, chances are you'll flunk college anyway.
Compared to some other countries in the world (Turkey, South Asia, etc), the competition is ridiculously low. I know many people in those countries who could easily score well in the SATs but still not be good enough to get admission into a decent public university.
I think what I was trying to say was that getting around 1050 (out of 1600) is very easy as long as you are willing to study. If you do not have the discipline for 1050 (and it really requires very little discipline - most smart students will get a higher score without studying at all), then you likely will not have the discipline to self study in college.
(BTW, I didn't mean to imply 1050 was my school's requirement. I just happen to know it was above the requirement as I knew several students who got in with scores around 1050...)
It's designed for 1000 to be the median result of the population taking the test (though it hasn't been renormed, AFAIK, since 1990, and the 1990 renormed was because on both halves the actual results had drifted down from 500 medians since the original design half a century earlier, so there may have been some drift, though there have been a lot less of the kind of changes in population taking the test than those that drove the earlier drift.)
- can you code in a whiteboard to pass the interview?
- are there visas available to get you to work in your country of choice?
I studied in Chile, and worked there too (in several companies no one has heard of in the US). Six years ago Google interviewed me, and I've been working for them since. Google paid for all expenses to bring me from Chile to the US - and I'm not the only one.
Now, having someone inside Google to refer you and endorse your hiring helps. If you don't know anyone - try open source. There are some awesome communities to join:
- https://medium.com/google-cloud/analyzing-github-issues-and-...
I found it valuable to have a curated list of things to learn (both the class list, and the syllabus within each class), the opportunity to work together in person with other students studying the same thing, access to professors, and to live in an academically-focused community.
I went to a well-regarded, but not top-tier, California State school. That school is currently accepting 4,500 new students every year out of a pool of 50,000 applications. A few years after I started working, I started being contacted by various famous companies. I'm more limited by not really wanting to move to Silicon Valley than I am by my choice of school.
In my opinion, university helped direct my learning path, provided external incentives to learn things that I might've been reluctant to learn otherwise, provided a great learning environment, and put me in contact with people that I wouldn't have met and benefited from without being there. Having a degree from almost anywhere will make it easier to find a first job than trying to do it through self-study.
It's like hiring based on bullshit (cough essays) or work samples.