Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure experiences vary but I did all my general ed stuff at a very good community college with excellent teachers and a class size of about 20-30 people max per teacher. Many teachers were professionals with other jobs who taught as well, so it was an excellent educational experience, for the kind of things most people take in their first two years at any university.

Then I transferred to a well-recognized research-centric university, and I have to say, those first-year undergrads had it rough in huge classes with grad students doing most of the teaching. On the other hand, this 'second tier' school had upper-level math and science classes and I got to work in actual research labs with tons of cutting-edge equipment. There were some questionable researchers for sure (borderline frauds), but the majority were top-notch and dedicated to doing good science.

When looking around for a grad school I actually went to one of the 'top elite schools' to check it out - the labs were absolute crap at the one I went to, and the overall snooty attitude was even worse (I don't think they even like grad students at those places, they're more for undergrads). I turned down that offer, and never regretted it.

China's technological boom isn't being fueled by British-style elite schools for the posh to rub elbows at. They're more along the lines of MIT and Caltech from what I understand:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2140178/new-...

America is going the way of Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th with its class divide, and the elite schools are a good example of why that's a bad idea. We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.

> We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.

While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it will make the students cry because they're 7). For the crowd here, imagine reading an academic paper about making improvements to production systems from someone who's clearly never been anywhere near one and is glossing over all the important fiddly details. It's like they've been told that they're smart and going to revolutionize their field and they can do so without ever having to get their hands dirty with more messy details.

To repeat my crass over-generalization, MIT and Caltech style schools seem to do a better job of instilling in students the understanding that if you want to change something you need to understand it, and to really understand it you need to spend time in trenches. I've been consistently more impressed with the results graduates from those schools get.

At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.

We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.

The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.

But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.

The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.

This all makes sense though for clarity I think I'm discussing something a little different.

I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative.

One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After working in the industry for a while they realized the thing holding back their work was bad software. Their response was to abandon a super senior technical role, take a massive pay cut, and work as a junior software engineer. They worked their way up to senior at a FAANG then jumped back into batteries. They're running a very exciting startup solving some very interesting and important problems.

The attitude that allows for people to both identify that they need to do some pretty unglamorous work to achieve their goals and then do it is what feels more common out of MIT or Caltech.

My experience is that Ivy schools impose more of an attitude of "you're the leaders of society, start solving problems now!" whether or not the students really have the know-how to be proposing solutions.

I read comments like yours with interest because I used to be a hiring manager at a big aerospace company where I ran a department doing some cool stuff - signal processing, novel computer architectures, VLSI and WSI chips. We always recruited at top schools and got a few engineers from MIT. They were brilliant, but good grief they were lousy engineers. One guy was obviously a genius and generated great ideas constantly but he could never get anything done. Week after week he was always two weeks from finishing his next milestone...and never did. Another guy told me that, as his boss, my job was to make sure he was happy to come to work every day. I told him we would both be better off if he did a good enough job to make me happy every day. And another said he didn't think there was any work worth his attention at the company, yet he was still there scraping by year after year. Small data set, but I was discouraged from recruiting there after going 0 for 3. I wish I had hired someone like you knew.

This makes some sense, I've met or worked with easily 100 MIT grads, all of these failure modes feel within the band of the kinds of issues you have. The people who are duds on a purely productive level definitely fit the mold you describe and tend to burn out in low end jobs from what I've seen.

The attitude problems are common enough that managers used to recruiting out of these schools learn strategies specifically for handling them. I've regularly heard comments like "So-and-so is great but they're very green and just... very MIT" and everyone knowingly nods their head and commiserates. Things usually get better once they've been out of school for 4-5 years (though also, some are great straight out of school).

Graduates with none of these problems generally get snapped up by super prestigious positions so you're less likely to interview or hire them if that's not you.

The Imperial kids also do a lot of internships and summer jobs, and are often the kind of alpha nerds who have serious side projects. I interview and work with a lot of interns and graduate hires from Imperial (and a few from Oxford and even other universities), and i'm highly dubious that the work they do during their actual course is whey they are learning to program.

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