Your alma mater will resonate throughout your career. Your GPA will disappear after your first or second job.
Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.
That is a poor example. RPI is an excellent institution. After you get past the top-50 or so schools, reputation matters far less. If you are truly attending a 'low-tier' school then MIT might matter, but for most jobs the vast majority of institutions are only small differences.
For my first job post PhD I was told I was selected over folks from Stanford and Princeton: my doctorate was 'only' from UT Austin.
I've also sat on admissions and fellowship committees for doctoral programs and students. GPA matters more, at least among the 'good' schools. And even then, I've never seen a 2.0 student beat a decent GPA (3.5+).
Now after about 3.3-onward, I agree that GPA does not matter a bit. In fact, I'm adverse to hiring or selecting students with a 4.0. This typically indicates a poor optimization heuristic (GPA over learning/challenges/interests).
So I have standing to say that RPI has been mismanaged as an institution. Besides my personal experience, RPI's political troubles are well-documented and well-known [1][2][3]. With failed leadership and failed policies, this university has come to sit below CMU which itself is just below MIT.
UT Austin is a fine school from what I heard, and does not seem to have the toxicity of the RPI brand. That is, a second-rate school for second-rate students.
[1]https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-One-Leader-Set-a-Toxic...
[2]https://news.vice.com/article/americas-highest-paid-college-...
[3] https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Troubled-alumni-sto...
Man, does this list goes on.
https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Campus-Notebook-RPI...
RPI is a neverending horror story.
I do agree with everything else.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/univers...
That’s a great way to phrase it.
That being said, the only time I feel this is in social settings and it's usually minor. People ask where I went to school and then I usually get an "oh?" back, as they've never heard of it. But it's never really impacted my professional life to my knowledge. Maybe I didn't get the same opportunities as these people as quickly, but I've worked at and enjoyed success at a few of the big names and am enjoying my time at a well known "start up" now.
Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up. School doesn't matter once you're out of it.
By what standard? What does that life look like? It seems so foreign to me. It seems like a lot of HN is comprised of this sort of folk or people who know them.
I don't work in the Bay Area, I work in Phoenix. I imagine it's a different world out there: instead of saving 90% of my income and living in a van, I own a home and save 75%. Instead of talking to people who work at Apple and went to MIT, I talk to people who were self-taught, or attended some other institution I'm not familiar with.
Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.
I've seen people who had 25+ years of experience lose a job position to someone who didn't know what `setInterval` was.
To me, an "elite" tech person would be someone who wrote software that people actually cared about and had a strong amount of domain knowledge in a particular area, or prototyped hardware and sold a product that people bought. Even then, these people are flawed just like everyone else. Not too long ago, the author of Redis posted an article about shortcomings of Lua here on HN, and a deep inspection of his post simply yielded the finding that he wrote a Lua binding with a glaring exploit in it, and his entire article revolved around trying to justify his own flaws.
To me having parents that have money doesn't make you elite; it's just something to think is rather nice and want to work toward as well.
It seems to me that there exists a demographic of people in tech that seem impressive to others, but haven't actually contributed anything significant or tangible to the industry. They probably exist in senior positions of companies that I've never heard of that serve a niche that I'm not a part of. I don't know, but they aren't "elite" to me.
Kids, do and make things people care about. School doesn't matter at all. Learning matters. Spending a small fortune to maybe associate with people who will get you a job is trying to play the lottery, but with a far more expensive ticket.
When you're denied a job at a startup after receiving multiple degrees ask yourself if it was worth it. It takes 30 minutes to invalidate 4-8 years of your hard work. People want people who can do the job.
That life looks like living in Seattle or the Bay or New York, making somewhere between $180-$230k a year first year out of undergrad, being able to travel for concerts and live in luxe Airbnbs with your similarly elite and pedigreed friends.
>Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.
I think this is a reasonable viewpoint if you believe society (or even people) cares about how skilled you are in your craft. Unfortunately, society doesn't, and rather only cares about how much you make.
As such, society will always consider a jet-setting Facebook or Google new grad making $250k her first year because of a signing bonus or negotiation skills superior to someone who graduated from ASU working at Amazon/Cisco/HP/etc companies making $150k or god forbid, even less. There's a lifestyle difference that I'll never be able to match.
> The folks in Phoenix out here can't make that type of money unless they're a Principle Software Engineer/Architect/VP or higher
If they work at Amazon they can as an L6 or above.
So much so that I often feel like I would have been better off never having gone to college in the first place than having gone somewhere not in the top 50 (or even in the top 10). Presenting yourself with no degree at all as a "tenacious, self-taught fighter" feels better than "I went to the University of Bubba because MIT said you're not smart enough" (plus MIT is really far from where I grew up and really expensive). On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of really smart programmers who don't have a degree who've felt that not having one has held them back - although I've always wondered why they don't just go back and get one.
I work at a top tech firm, and while we hire across the board, at the micro level I have seen strong biases by some managers for the top tech schools. As an example, I once forwarded the resume of an undergrad whose GPA was decent (not stellar), but whose resume indicated strong initiative and interests related to software (Lisp, etc - material not taught in that school). He made lots of excuses not to even interview this person. And later hired someone with a really low GPA (low 2.x), but he was from Berkeley! This person did well in the interview, but the candidate from a lower ranked school never even got an interview.
Depends on the level of attainment you are hoping to achieve. If you want to become a major player in your company or industry, it most definitely has affected your professional career. Social settings are everything when it comes to business and tech when the higher up the ladder you go. If your aspirations are just a 9-5 programmer or at most a tech lead for your team, then your alma mater and your relationships and common bonding experience doesn't matter much. But if you have higher aspirations, then your connections, relationships and how you play within social settings matter.
One of the easiest ways to bond is with share experiences. And shared college experience is one of the easiest avenues to shared experience.
> Kids, go to school where you can afford. Bust your ass, make connections, move on and move up.
Unless it's an ivy league, stanford, MIT, etc. Then do whatever you can to attend because these names and the connections you make in top tier colleges will serve you forever. You get an opportunity to hang around with the children of the leaders of major world nations. The children of top business, tech, political, etc elites.
> School doesn't matter once you're out of it.
GPA doesn't matter. Your school does matter if ( a big if ) it is top tier. And it matters even more internationally. Go anywhere in the world and tell people you are from harvard or yale or stanford. Trust me on this. There are doors only open to these people.
The only time you should mortgage your future on college is for one of the top elite colleges. Anything else, just go to the one that makes the most business sense to you.
Unfortunately, my school is going to resonate (poorly) throughout my career now.
I did this too, so I can definitely relate there. Went to undergrad 15 miles from home and commuted my last year.
> and enjoy being young.
I'm afraid only the elites get to enjoy themselves when they're young. The rest of us aren't so lucky.
The government of Sweden does routine quality checks on the university program (we don’t do the whole major/minor thing, we have focused programs) and my computer engineering program in a small university was ranked second while KTH and Chalmers were tied for last and were ordered to change their programs to keep giving out engineering degrees in that field. In case you’re not Swedish, those two are the most renowned schools.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.
- William Shakespeare
Better to be a top student in an average school than to be an average student in top school. More opportunities are offered to the better students. More chances to grow come about too.