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Comment by viburnum | Hacker News Reader

Every tech company I’ve worked at has been run by Ivy people but all the actual code is written by Cal State graduates and high school dropouts.

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This is not true of any FAANG and I've worked for all of them. Go to any of them and you will see that most of the SWEs are some combination of MIT, Cal, Stanford, and tier-1 public schools and top 20 (by US News Report) private schools.

I worked at Amazon and I didn't meet a single person in the L4-L6 engineering set that went to an Ivy or other top school (except for one or two that went to CMU). The rest went to state schools including myself.

Now I'm at a somewhat well regarded startup and most of the people around me went to Cal States, Arizona State, or UC's.

flagship state schools are in that "tier-1 public" category. We're talking Berkeley/UCLA, UT Austin, A&M, UVA, Georgia Tech, etc. etc. etc.

Similar to banking, I doubt FAANG doesn’t filter out apps by school to save time. Another confounded being FAANG now also naturally attracts the preftige chasers

From my experience the best people are usually state school undergrad (e.g., Berkeley / UIUC / UNC / UW / GTech) plus selective grad school (Harvard / Stanford / MIT / CMU). At the graduate level those schools are much more meritocratic and it's usually a better indicator of ability. Plus doing well at one of those undergrads is actually really hard.

Does that include CTOs? I've been around quite a few companies, and this ivy/oxbridge thingie mostly involves working in areas with a strong prestige element to them.

I.e. there get-shit-done areas, and there are showing-off areas, with very different ruling classes in them, different problems too.

Ivy has the money, we have the brains.

Yes. I see people promoted to elevated managerial positions not on merit but were they went to school. We deal with this by "managing up", it's exhausting.

It can be very draining.

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