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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the second tier of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. Lol.

While CMU is huge in computing, it's lacking in prestige. Cornell is most-frequently referred to as a 'fake Ivy' everywhere college discussion can be found, and has been since the 1980s. I direct the audience's attention to the results of the search query "fake ivy university":

https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+ivy+university

This is actually accurate. The main product of the Ivy League is prestige by association in the general populace, and it requires mass marketing to try to keep their brand of prestige scarce. The fact that the studentry and faculty are as able and smart at the state universities is irrelevant to the product.

Never seen that before.

There’s definitely a hierarchy to Ivy League schools, but it varies depending on which one you went to.

(Source, one of 3 in my immediate family who went to an Ivy.)

I thought UChicago had that laurel

Second-tier compared to the world's top universities; that is, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and their ilk. I've seen posts on this website[0] how some big tech companies almost exclusively skim off the top.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543371

CMU is definitely "top five" for CS, though (at least in the US, which is mostly where the big tech companies recruit from anyway). And while going to a top school might be an advantage at somewhere like Google, you have good odds of getting in even if you don't. There are other ways of differentiating yourself that are more effective.

That's bs. I work for a big tech company, and do interviews for them as well. Most people went either to a state school, a normal university in another country, or a small liberal arts college. Very few big tech employees have degrees from the "elite" class of universities. The same is true for interviews, the vast majority of interviews are not given to the so-called "elite" class, and the new grads I've interviewed from said class are no better or worse on average than people who attended less prestigious schools.

But that's because most people don't go to elite institutions. The only way to know this would be to build as data set of all the hires at FAANGs, for example, and then compare students from elite institutions to non elites. I would imagine these companies are not keen on sharing this data though.

True. But there are more prestigious companies than the big tech firms which do this.

The poster said "big tech companies". Presumably this means Amazon, FB, Google, Microsoft, etc.

There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies? The notion that you have to jump through hoops to get a tech job is pretty ridiculous. If you know your stuff you’ll have no trouble to find a job even without a degree from a fancy school.

because the bug tech companies are more likely to pay big $$. There's a huge gap in salary potential between FAANG and the rest. There's always outliers among the rest, but that's generally the case. So if you're optimizing for $$ and prestige, you optimize for getting into FAANG.

I've worked at two of "FAANG" and know enough people at two of the others (all but Netflix). The vast majority of Americans at all those companies went to mediocre public universities. (I don't know enough about foreign educational credentials to judge whether that's true of non-Americans).

The notion that FB/Amazon hire primarily from the top 5 universities is so totally unrelated to reality that I feel like I'm watching people discuss the consequences of the fact that the earth is flat.

Sure if money is what you want to optimize for, that's the route to take. For me it was always more about the passion in building things, money is nice but IMHO other things are more important.

I'm pretty confident that most of the young people optimizing to get into the very top schools, are optimizing for $$.

Perhaps to some extent some are optimizing for social class (staying in the one they grew up in).

> "There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies?"

Big tech companies tend to have interesting work. Why would anybody jump through the hoops to go to a top university to get an ordinary coding job?

Going to a university that's top in your field is perfectly fine for anyone who intends to go to a FAANG, take it from me. Tech employers care about what you can do with your education, not where it came from.

It is simply not true that big tech companies hire almost exclusively from world top 5 schools.

Speaking as someone who went to CMU myself, this joke is even funnier.

A common "feeling" among many of my classmates at the time, was that most of us went to CMU because we couldn't get into MIT.

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