Working rigorously and wasting your childhood years to flounder and pick CS at Stanford is absurd to me.
Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in without having to go to an elite university or enter higher education at all.
Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in without having to go to an elite university or enter higher education at all.
An astounding amount of tribal knowledge is hidden behind elite-CS-spaces. Some high-school hackers are the right combination of lucky, talented-and savvy enough to enter these spaces. But, walking that path without the fallback of an elite university puts you 1 mis-step away from eternal mediocrity.
I don't believe one can be successful and miserable. Accepting misery is accepting failure. You can have money and be miserable. It is actually quite common.
A lot of success really is who you know, so going somewhere where you meet a lot of people who are going somewhere can be very useful. But of course, they also need to be people who are open to networking, understand the value of networks, etc., which I suspect is somewhat more true of people who attend Stanford than those who go to UCs just because of the mindset of the folks going in.