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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but find this entire article flawed because he's basing his analysis on a man who went from Harvard to Google...they're both incredibly prestigious, so really the article is about going from a low satisfaction to a high satisfaction job, which is kind of a no-brainer.

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If he went to a software engineer position at Google, I would not say that's as prestigious as a Harvard professor.

To the general public probably, but within the CS subfield of systems in particular I don't think there's actually a big prestige difference, and it might even go the other way. You get a prestige boost for your research by being able to say that it was "implemented at Google" in your papers; if anything, his talks at conferences will probably be better-attended than previously.

Sorry to say, Harvard's reputation in CS circles is pretty abysmal.

I'm sure there are some fine folks there, but compared to the status of the school....meh.

In hiring circles folks with CS degrees from Harvard are generally frowned upon, "couldn't they have just gone to a better school for CS/Engineering at a cheaper cost? Musta gone for the brand name recognition...we'll pass"

From http://www.seas.harvard.edu/faculty-research/people:

"Harvard ranked # 1 in Mechanical Engineering; # 1 in Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; # 5 in Mathematics; # 3 in AI, Robotics, and Auto Control (Science Watch, most recent data)

Harvard ranked # 7 in Theoretical Computer Science

In terms of citation impact, Harvard ranked second nationally in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in a 2002 analysis by ISI (for 1998-2002 data; most recent)"

I can probably find rankings that put Harvard at wildly different rankings in all of those categories too. The fact of the matter is, outside of Law and Business (okay okay, Math too), Harvard does not exactly float to the top of anybody's personal list as a source of any kind of great engineering. That's okay, that's not what the school focuses on.

We actually had this exact discussion recently at a client site and brainstormed top schools we could look to recruit from for C.S. and Mechanical Engineering types and Harvard was not on anybody's list for either of those. Not top-10 and not in the discussion at all.

Most people are wildly surprised to find out that folks like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, almost verbatim the response is "Harvard has a C.S. department?" Most people assume Stanford or MIT.

#1 in Mechanical Engineering. Really?

That specific ranking seems a little fishy to me. Also, I'm having a fair amount of trouble finding any corroboration online that Science Watch ever put Harvard up there in any ranking. If anyone could find a link to a Science Watch article with their methodology, I'd really like to see just what it was about Harvard that made them rank it over say, MIT (the current US News top) mechanical engineering.

I highly doubt he was hired as a "Software Engineer", more likely as a Chief Scientist, System Architect or something like that given the scope of his work and expertise, he will probably lecture for Google internationally on his work and have a large team working underneath him. His new position is no doubt worthy of such a move, though I dont know the details.

He stated in his first post about working for Google that he is exactly that:

my job title is simply "software engineer." (http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/06/working-for-google.ht...)

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