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Comment by DANK_YACHT | Hacker News Reader

I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.

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I agree with that. I went to a low-ish tier school (UIC) and was not particularly motivated to do anything. My classmates just wanted to be drunk 24/7, I wanted to go build robots and stuff. It wasn't the experience I was looking for and dropped out. I wish I had at least chosen UIUC. The corn fields aren't that bad, in hindsight.

I did get to take a Unix Security Holes course with DJB. That was the first semester I was there, and that was kind of another mistake. When you're doing 400 level classes your first semester, it sucks when you have to go back to the basic 100 level classes to complete an arbitrary requirement for your degree. (Had to take "Intro to Java" taught by a chemistry professor. He did not know how to program. Huge waste of time and the state's money.) I have avoided a number of security pitfalls in my own work because of what I learned in that class, though, so it was definitely worth taking. Set me up for a career of accurate and bug-free code ;)

(Incidentally, what precipitated me dropping out was the Unix Security Holes course. The homework for the class was to find 10 security flaws in existing software. This was quite the easy task back in 2004. I found a bug in the course registration system. The vendor that made it was infinitely appreciative, patched it instantly, and sent me an iPod as a thank you. The school was very mad at me and tried to have me expelled for violating their computer use policy ("hacking"). It was a client-side XSRF issue though, so technically their computers weren't used, and I obviously investigated the flaw responsibly; the system wasn't destabilized, no production data was changed, etc. DJB fought hard for me and I didn't get expelled. Also got one of the highest grades in that class! The school did silently block me from using computers in computer labs and using the course registration system, though, after DJB's rage had blown over. I didn't have the will to fight it, so I just left.)

TL;DR: go to the best school you can get into and afford. You won't regret it.

> go to the best school you can get into and afford

A sad (albeit true) reality of democratised education adjusted for profit.

If anyone was also unfamiliar with the acronyms:

DJB = Daniel J. Bernstein [1]

UIC = University of Illinois at Chicago

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

>The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence.

You might be conflating class signaling with intelligence. I've dealt with plenty of people from Harvard that did not impress in the slightest, but oh boy were they good at getting their suits tailored.

I second this notion. I was actually super well-qualified for Harvard, because I happened to go to a feeder prep school and I took calculus, Latin, and Greek. But I had some class gaps if you will, and sometimes kids with worse grades and qualifications made me feel stupid.

One snobby rule there that some kids had was to always pretend like you know more than you do, and never show weakness. So you have to say "Whaaaat? You've never heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?" -- even though you only learned about it last week. You psych out the competition so that you don't have to compete on a level playing field.

I’m not conflating class signaling with intelligence. It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said. My point was that college involves the exchange of ideas, and each student’s intelligence is a combination of their baseline intellect combined with the ideas they’re exposed to. Most of this idea exposure comes from other students. If the students you are surrounded with have good ideas, then the quality of your own ideas improves.

>It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said.

Yeah, probably says I know something about normal distributions work.

the few ivy league graduates i've worked with were idiots with no original thought who constantly needed handholding. they were good at parroting other people's opinions & ideas and at schmoozing with the boss so maybe those are the good ideas that students at their school had.

If you can get beyond the clickbait title - what Gladwell is really trying to say is there are likely many highly qualified students who enter top tier university as STEM majors but select themselves out of STEM majors and into a generic liberal arts degree.

He's essentially saying at a societal level/personal income level - a STEM degree from a mid tier school > generic liberal arts degree from a top tier school. Particularly if the recipient is not truly passionate about the liberal arts degree and is using it as a backup plan.

I think what you are experiencing is a bit related to survivorship bias. You are being exposed to the people who passed the gauntlet of getting into the top-tier school and graduating in presumably STEM. Of course those folks are smart and there are reasons you'd be blown away by them.

> The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice.

It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.

> The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference.

I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.

> It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.

But not all top students in mid-tier attempted to go to Harvard. So if you were basing the "smartness" of these two populations based on this single decision alone, then the low-tier students at Harvard would be smarter because 100% of them attempted to go to Harvard, which was a smarter choice than the choice made by some of the students at mid-tier universities who chose not to apply to Harvard.

> After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.

In my experience, peoples' first few years out of college has a huge effect on their career trajectories. People I know who had high salaries out of school continue to have high salaries. People who didn't get good entry-level jobs continue to struggle (relative to the rest of the pack, they're not starving).

"I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school."

Have you considered that the students whom you are working with were among the bottom quartile at their alma mater? The very best tend to take unique paths.

What specific differences did you see? I was also at a mid tier school, though I did have a scholarship, and was intimidated when I got a job working alongside an MIT grad and a PHD from Yale. The MIT grad was a very good solid guy, and the Yale guy was also solid, I'd be happy to work with or hire either again, but there was no 10x difference, maybe more like a 1.3x difference at best between the team average and the MIT guy.

In general the phds I've worked with were tbh below the average- they always seemed to be big on ideas but less so on actually implementing them and following through.

This was from my days in the finance industry, working in algo trading/hft, but I will admit I was definitely in a tier below the groups that were absolutely minting money, but these were coveted jobs.

The biggest difference was that most people were interested in something. One friend was really into robotics. He introduced me to a lot of robotics concepts and he had a plan on how to pursue a career in robotics. Personally, robotics wasn’t my cup of tea, but I ended up with a lot of exposure to the subject. Another friend wanted to study AI, specifically neural networks. This was over 10 years ago, so neural nets weren’t widely deployed like they are today. Another friend was into music, and wanted to play music all the time. Even through I wasn’t super into any of these topics, each interaction was enriching to me and expanded my mind to include new and interesting aspects of computer science and software engineering.

Regarding phds, I totally agree that they are not effective workers usually. The desire to get a phd is almost like a mild form of ocd where people get obsessed with one particular problem and are willing to dedicate ungodly amounts of time to the topic. This is usually the opposite of what you want when trying to deliver something in the commercial sphere.

A lot of ivy league kids come from upper middle class families where it is kind of expected that you set high academic goals and try to attend prestigious institutions, their parents generally take an enormous amount of interest their success and continually guide them.

I actually found the opposite...

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