Where are the Top 1% of Engineers (from Carnegie Mellon) | Hacker News Reader

Where are the Top 1% of Engineers (from Carnegie Mellon)

apeekatchu.com

35 pointsjchonphoenix15 comments

Bah. CS ("engineer") is a pretty rigorous and challenging curriculum at any competitive school, whether it's state or private. So graduating with a CS degree is enough of a level in my book. Of all the hundreds of candidates I've interviewed coming into Apple, the brightest and most self-starter guys and girls instead came from no-name schools in random parts of the world.

Sure in startup land you see Stanford come up quite a lot, because that's where all the money is and so those guys get solid introductions and meetings with all the right people.

Working at a company like Apple (or also Facebook/Google/Microsoft) means you need to be product driven and capable of learning quickly and on your feet. True, they are cushy companies in terms of benefits and pay, but they have high bars of entry. If anything, the opposite is now true, where they cannot afford to hire someone on a hunch, or experiment with them like a nimble startup can since it's near impossible to fire them.

So if you yourself are in a state school (or small "unknown" school), do not worry. If you want to work at a prestigious company out here in California, the real trick is to find the one area you're able to really excel at and push yourself to shine in it. When you're in the interview, make sure you talk about that one shining aspect and really talk it up. When the interviewers see your passion and how you overcame obstacles in it, you'll be a shoe-in.

As a CMU student who just took a leave of absence to join a startup, the one thing that really disappointed me was the total risk-averse mentality that exists at CMU.

Based on my conversations with other CMU alumni, I think there is a collective feeling that CMU students need to be encouraged to take risks, not the other way around. Fundraising campaigns like "Inspiring Innovation" and press releases with headlines like "Greenlighting Startups" are wonderful, but there's too much of a campus culture focusing on just doing whatever it takes to "get a good job."

Personally, I feel that it's the one place where CMU stays true to its roots: It was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools, and till date remains best at doing just that: being a technical school. That's why companies love to come to CMU to recruit: CMU students make great employees. CMU's doing exceptionally well given its relative youth, but I fear that if it keeps trying to be what MIT and Stanford were 10 years ago, it'll always be playing catch-up. As a university it needs to take a risk - a leap of faith.

On the bright side, having been in the Bay Area I've seen an increased percentage of CMU alumni come here and realize that taking risks isn't so bad, and then leave their nice job at Twitter/Facebook/Google/LinkedIn to go for it. It just takes exposure to the right environment for them to realize it. Hopefully as more and more CMU alumni are exposed to (and involved with) startups, they'll help bring awareness to CMU as a whole - I know I'm going to try my best.

Side note: In pg's essay, "How To Be Silicon Valley" (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html), he says: "The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon."

I'd be kind of curious to see more data, both for more schools & more years, and also to follow this "top 1%" through the years. On the one side, I'm curious if this is actually a good predictor of what hot companies are, and three years and a dozen people isn't enough data to make that sort of call. How many people were joining Google in 2005? How many were joining Microsoft?

On the second part, I'm a little curious to see how people's tastes in workplace mature over time. A fantastically smart, driven, awesome guy just out of school is still fundamentally a dumb kid with no work experience. Some of the top CMU graduates from 2002/3/4/5 presumably switched jobs in 2011. Did they go to the same companies as the graduates of 2010/2011? Which companies from 2005/6/7 retained the most of their fresh-out-of-college top 1% hires?

Disclaimer: I worked for Palantir.

Palantir does a good job pitching the "We only hire the best and brightest." The pitch worked on me. When I accepted the offer, the smartest person I knew from the CMU CS class of 2006 (my class) was working at Palantir, and this definitely reassured me on my decision.

Ah, bummer. I was going to apply to Palantir but I'm neither the top of my class, nor do I go to a particularly top school. May as well not bother I suppose.

Glad I saw this and didn't waste my time!

Ha. You may have missed the past tense on "worked for Palantir."

I was the bottom half of my class at CMU, so if it floats your boat to work at Palantir, apply away.

I'm offended you don't think I'm the smartest person you know from our graduating class :-p Anyway, hope you're enjoying the new job!

There is probably a little bit of confirmation bias: anyone who didn't end up at a large-name company probably dropped off the radar. Maybe he wasn't the top engineer, if he went to work for zarklxyr.com. Oh, but Facebook, that's impressive, he must really be good.

I was disappointed that zarklxyr.com was not a real link.

I assume you're referring to starting their own startups or joining one correct?

While I agree there likely is some confirmation bias, I can at least say that I included those who joined startups.

The sad part is, there are very few of them. When I was thinking of starting a startup at CMU, I was completely blown away by how little people there cared about taking risks. In 2010, the only startups people knew about were really Palantir and Facebook. In 2012, people at CMU actually still buy the tagline that Facebook is a startup.

It would be great if someone could change this, but as of right now, I'm relatively certain there is less confirmation bias than you think.

So the top coders from Carnegie Mellon are working on analytics for finance and spy-stuff, or mostly at very famous firms or grad-schools.

And this is a good thing? It looks to me like yet another sign that our whole social-proof-based talent-allocation economy is broken entirely. How can it be that 15 different people all really and truly wanted to do more-or-less the same stuff?

I'm actually quite sure you'll find much more diversity from Stanford on that front.

CMU students tend to be a little clueless on the job search side of things, so they tend to stick to firms that are well known or well respected because they're safe.

I see no reason to go so far as to call the actual students in question "clueless" - but there is definitely serious bias in where certain companies do and don't hire. Apple recruits heavily from Stanford for CS, but recruits from MIT for ID, for instance. Some companies only look at MIT, or CMU, or Berkeley - or hire there "first", for no other reason than the founders might have gone there, and thus feel better equipped to evaluate the curriculums and students from those schools.

It's interesting to see where the top 1% of CMU kids go, but looking at the top 1% of every top CS school independently of each other would yield dramatically different results.

You're still in the broken zone. You went from CMU to Stanford. You're still thinking, "What are the big names doing?"

I'm legitimately wondering: how do you find the smartest, most ambitious people who never managed to get a big, prestigious name or title associated with themselves, and fix that?

Honestly its probably more like the top 1% didn't follow the crowd and didn't want that job at (insert famous company here).

But thats my own definition of top 1%

Reply on news.ycombinator.com