Hacker News Reader

Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer.

Ihave no idea if UT Austin is a good comp sci program or if you're being sarcastic. This is the first I've heard of it.

Assuming you're being serious, then Joel Spolsky mentioned something similar in one of the stackoverflow podcasts.

His point was that a "top" school wouldn't get you hired directly but it would get you interviewed before someone else all other things being equal.

View on HN

I was not being sarcastic. If you buy ranking metrics, UT Austin has a top 10 CS program [1]. We have some of the best Systems researchers in the country [2], a professor from our dept won the Turing Award in 2007 [3], and Bill Gates + Michael Dell just donated a new CS building for our campus [4].

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/

[3] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/emerson_1671460.cfm

[4] http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/goto_gdc/

Ssshh, don't tell anyone that UT Austin is a top 10 CS program :-)

I would strongly encourage any potential competitor to never recruit from UT Austin (or any UC school, U of Washington, UWisc Madison, Waterloo, etc...). Oh, and amongst Ivy League schools please be sure never to recruit from Brown.

Maybe it's due to the fact I graduated from the UT system, but I thought it was well known that UT Austin had a top notch CS program.

Well for my part it's probably because I'm Canadian and don't need to know this type of knowledge:)

Though judging by the negative votes on my post I guess I'm being punished for my ignorance.

I thought I made a decent contribution to back up the original posters claim. I guess its true that no good dead goes unpunished:)

Sorry to hear about the response. Hopefully I didn't come off as being negative. I thought maybe I was learning something as well. Different people have different experiences. I myself don't know much about Canada except that it appears to be a beautiful place I want to visit some day.

I think it's probably if you go to a top 10 school, you know of the other top 10 schools for your program. As a CompSci undergrad at Georgia Tech I knew of UT, etc. Even if you don't go there for undergrad, there's still a possibility of going there for post-grad and people talk.

Plus, you had dijkstra.

> Ihave no idea if UT Austin is a good comp sci program or if you're being sarcastic. This is the first I've heard of it.

UT Austin actually does have a wonderful CS program.* The reason you likely haven't heard about it is that it is notoriously difficult for out-of-state students in the US to get into UT Austin, so you don't have as diverse a student body (geographically speaking) as you do at many other top schools. Less than 10% of undergrads are not Texans.

* I didn't go there myself, but I've worked with people who did, and they are top-notch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com