This is far from true. If you look at the total workforce in tech, the majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc., etc. MIT and Stanford have had amazing great people, but they are far from the "primary" source of talent.
(yes, a bit of an aside, but it rankles)
I think what they probably meant talent pools for some companies in the tech industry, or something similar.
Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.
In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.
That's interesting, and somewhat rankling - as both times I interviewed at the G in FAANG, not a single interviewer gave a nickel about any of my experience, or projects I had worked on.
It's such a joke that the keys to a golden line on your resume and a giant salary are gated by the luck of which 7 people get picked to grill you that day, how busy they currently are, and what their pet question is.
Job hunts are a campaign. If you're pretty good you'll land a job but you might not land every job.
While this varies from company to company generally resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs.
Even if you have a 95% pass rate for any one interviewer, you're at like 77% for passing a 5 person panel. Good but hardly a guarantee.
But if you have even three job interviews, the chance that you'll get atleast one is 98.7%. Not so bad!
Sure it's a bit hand-wavy but I hope it takes the edge off this interviewing business for you the way it does for me.
Cheers!
Moreover, I'm not really interested in "years of experience". Previous titles don't really matter, too.
What does matter for junior and middle developers: personal projects, specific products or features developed by them or their team, accounts on Upwork, GitHub or StackOverflow, recommendations from other people, a personal website or a blog.
We are talking about the initial screening filter, so _anything_ proving you are a real developer is fine.
Which is funny because Silicon Valley companies won't think candidates from those schools are that interesting, while simultaneously thinking that the intelligence and defense has better programmers. People are people.
I don't even think it's ideological. The reason the defense industry lacks top tier talent is because it's quite literally the most stifling and frustrating place to work possible. You're mired in endless bureaucracy, incompetent management, arcane rules and regulations surrounding secrecy, and some of the world's least flexible working arrangements. It ends up being a great place for people who want to punch a clock and get a reliable paycheck, but a deadend for anyone trying to make their mark.
-- KH-11 satellite, and presumed successors
-- Stuxnet
-- Utah data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)
-- The rather enormous intelligence budget that allows all kinds of creativity
The above indicates that there must be some corners of these agencies that are extremely technically skilled, and able to do real stuff with breathtaking ambition. Given the budget, these "corners" might be pretty big, and attract some excellent talent.
Those that know, aren't talking, and those talking (ahem!), don't know.
For one, GPS was created by the DoD and I am still blown away that it is so good, accessible, and free for consumer use.
Pretty hard to argue with that list.
A friend of mine (who went to NMSU) worked for NASA. He wrote the code that determined what angle the solar panels need to be at to get the right amount of sun to power the ISS. Crazy number of edge cases, and people die if you have a bug.
Was pretty impressive to hear the things he had to do and the processes they had for minimizing the risk of someone dying. I'd put that on par with many things, too (although Stuxnet has its own place for genuflection).
Stuxnet was probably mainly Mossad.
The Utah data center was a pretty run of the mill data center, but apparently plagued by technical issues.
And yeah, they have a huge budget which allows them to buy a lot of toys for a bit above normal price.
Their mathematicians are top notch though from what I've heard.
You're right on the money for math though, crazy smart mathematicians.
But if you're a programmer without a scientific speciality, then there's less reason.
The contractors have some freedom to pay as they see fit -- they pay more than the national labs in my experience -- but they still have to justify their rates to the government during contract negotiations, and the government can push back. The pay is "ok", but has been falling increasingly behind "Tech". So now there's brain drain, particularly among programmers.
My impression is that if you do work directly for federal or state government, you also are likely to be alongside a substantial number of contractors.
Reality Winner was a contractor, by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
Multiple programs were built to fix the compensation for military members whom were paid even less than civilian counterparts in the same offices. It's why the churn rate is so high. Even then, the majority of cleared jobs still aren't commensurate with external salaries.
I’m not disparaging the nsa etc talent, but it’s very hard to arrive at fair comparisons in this area.
The sec teams at faang are just not tasked with stuff the nsa does.
Not that any specific set of their employees are super geniuses.
While SV still has to run a profitable business while trying to care about security.
Along with sovereign immunity to CFAA and other laws
Since there are currently 23 IITs, the numbers that go to US (and SV) every year can be very significant. The long term effect of this phenomenon can be observed from the increasing number of US (and SV) tech companies CEOs are from India education background.
These schools are very good btw. Berkeley is tied with Stanford for example, UI #5, Washington #6, UT is #10.
Conversely Harvard is ranked #15, but that's the things about rankings: they're often used to prune out people who don't "know someone", and when the metrics do not match someone's perceived "elite" status, they are ignored.
All of the schools you mention are attended by elites and commoners, produce talented people and untalented people, jerks and kind folks, and all the permutations of that.
I just wish we'd focus more on competent and kind, and less on connections or wealth - companies that do this will prosper IMHO, and companies that rant about "meritocracy" will wither as they drive away half the population.
Women are just as capable of coding well - creating a toxic culture is reducing your talent pool by half, something people obsessed with "facts and logic" should think more about. Insisting on "elite" schools when the good ones are public will also harm you long term if you're doing more cutting edge stuff.
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3,130
2 Stanford University 3,444 ' 3 University of California--Berkeley 2,337
4 California Institute of Technology 536
5 Carnegie Mellon University 4,112
6 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor 3,247
7 Purdue University--West Lafayette 3,428
8 Georgia Institute of Technology 4,252
9 University of California--San Diego (Jacobs) 3,141
10 University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign 3,736
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...
For comparison, GATech claims 61% of their students get engineering degrees and an enrollment of 14,142, thus ~8,626 undergraduate engineering students.
https://coe.gatech.edu/about/facts-rankings
Other school's engineering enrollment:
UT Austin claims 6,003 undergraduate and 2,101 graduate.
https://www.engr.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-rankings/program...
Berkeley claims 3,746 undergraduates and 2,357 graduates.
https://engineering.berkeley.edu/about/facts-and-figures/
MIT claims 2,451 undergraduates.
https://engineering.mit.edu/about/facts-and-figures/
Stanford claims 1570 undergraduate and 3603 graduate.
https://registrar.stanford.edu/everyone/enrollment-statistic...
I think the parent comment is correct to say there are many larger engineering schools than MIT and Stanford.
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate/eecs-cs-co...