As advice for hiring managers this twitter thread is very actionable: stop judging people harshly for working their way up.

As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system is already in play before even your first job.

What colleges do you think fancy tech employers hang out at and recruit at? What internships do you think are going to get your resume past their initial screen? Things like "Microsoft stack, not relevant" and "low profile school" are already a problem for many.

(The broader problem with wanting to work at TrendyCo is that by definition so does everyone else so they're going to be drowning in applications and have to resort to some stupid/arbitrary process to filter things down.)

Colleges are less impactful for trendy tech companies than they are for finance or whatever. I went to a no-name state school and could get into these things. If you really did an internship programming at Walgreens, it's easy enough to omit it from your resume.

Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society?

I ask because I've just joined an American company, and a person mentioned that they'd been hired and given a chance to excel "despite only having a state degree, much to my Mom's disgust", which surprised me.

In my country, there's not much difference between the respective universities in terms of 'prestige'.

Anecdotal, but as a hiring manager, I've interacted with only one person from Harvard, he was very impressed with himself and knew how to talk but when we asked him to do a small test project (we paid him for), the work he did was really not great. He took a long time to deliver something that barely worked, didn't follow best practices/common idioms of the framework he was using (framework that he selected by himself and supposedly had 2 years of experience in). He was also extremely aggressive in salary negotiations which is fine if you can deliver (and I know people who made a lot of money by being good at salary negotiation) but less so when you can't.

I've worked with quite a few MIT graduates and overall they've all been very good at what they do. So, sample size of one in the case of Harvard but I think Ivy leagues are not all created equal for a given major.

People sometimes get the impression that Ivies are about admitting only the best and brightest. But there are exceptions. Legacy admission, donor influence diversity picks. Also, I say diversity but I don't just mean race based picks. They are trying to build a student body that isn't made of people who all like the same sport for example. They need to fill out the various clubs.

I think the engineering based elite schools like MIT, Caltech or Stanford are probably a safer bet.

I also think being great in the academic world way different from the "real world" and there can be an adjustment period. I know there was for me!

> Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society?

In certain circles, yes.

Usually these circles have many people who have gone to Ivy League schools — lawyers, financiers, and consultants are professional communities in which a sub-group of these folks can commonly be found (esp. in the Northeast Corridor).

Note that some of the perceived discrepancy is misplaced. Most/all top students at pretty much any flagship state school would fit in quite naturally at Ivy League schools (probably top half at least, tbh). They probably just didn’t want to go to an Ivy or didn’t want to jump through the right hoops to get into one. Most people either find themselves accidentally doing things that Ivies like (winning something or doing something of note at a regional, national, or international level), or they make a concerted effort to do so.

If anyone has been in that system and taken a look around, it’s not hard to see the patterns that are needed to drastically increase the likelihood of getting admitted. Great grades and high SATs alone just doesn’t cut it.

The doors that elite schools (esp. the top ivies and Stanford) open to its members is impressive, imho. Is this fair? No. Is it the present reality. Yes. I expect it will remain this way for decades to come.

In terms of prestige, I will add that there are quite a lot of Ivy League students/grads who don’t come across as being very smart (they are smart enough, but definitely won’t blow you away or win any awards for intellect), but their “prestige” probably comes from something else (sports is very, very common, and demonstrated strong leadership is a huge winner).

As a side note, I will add that the American system is the opposite of Japan, Korea, and China, where the most prestigious universities are all national public universities.

To most people, there really isn't much of a distinction - what you accomplish is far more important than where you went to school.

To others, it is everything. I know someone whose mother constantly tells her that she is a dumb failure because she didn't go to Harvard (she went to Stanford).

> I know someone whose mother constantly tells her that she is a dumb failure because she didn't go to Harvard (she went to Stanford).

Sounds like the parent has some self-esteem issues she needs to offload.

I mean, maybe somewhere? I’ve interacted with precisely one Harvard graduate and he was the brother in law of my CEO boss who had gone to a state school. Even the best “Ivy League Feeder” private school in my city of 2 million has maybe 2 students a year go to an Ivy League. A guy I went to school with got a 1600 on his SAT (max score nationwide college entrance test) and wasn’t accepted to Harvard in 2004.

My wife grew up in New York on Long Island in a relatively good public school system with doctors engineers and lawyers children, and I don’t think any of her peers went to an Ivy League school.

I’m sure somewhere there’s groups of people who expect their children to go to Ivy League but man, I’ve never met them. They don’t hang out with us normal riff raff.

Cheers, it's not something I'd ever encountered, and the other Americans in the call seemed to know what it meant.

I went to UCSD (a public university) for undergrad and then Stanford for grad school (PhD). Both programs were CS.

In my opinion, the average CS undergrad at UCSD is honestly not that different from Stanford. At Stanford, there are a few truly, truly brilliant undergrad students; and possibly more than a school like UCSD. But you'll still find more than zero of those at UCSD, and it's not as if you're swimming in them at Stanford.

Having said that, there is definitely a difference in perception. People (especially people who haven't actually gone to Stanford) seem to expect everyone to be extraordinary at Stanford, even if most of the students are "just" modestly smart.

At Stanford, I had a startup founder walk into my office and just start pitching. I'm not sure what they expected to accomplish, but I thanked them and sent them on their way.

I've also met starry-eyed VCs who seemed to be of the impression that everyone in CS is starting a startup, and that I would (as a CS grad student) just be connected to all these people.

Anyway, overall my impression is that the difference in skill isn't that dramatic, but perception doesn't always match reality.

From what I've read the UCs are above-average state schools though. Doesn't UCSD rank just below UCLA and Berkeley?

that's absolutely correct. the UC system is not what people are talking about when they say "a state school." it's almost even a change of topic.

It's easy to get caught up in the game of college admissions as a parent. It's actually kind of a problem where kids get encouraged to shoulder a bunch of debt instead of just going to the also great state school that would be a fraction of the cost.

"Wrong kind of experience is worse than no experience" is an interesting concept.

It implies that the people thinking like this think that people aren't mutable. With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.

Which may be true for some people, but I'm fairly certain that humans are known for their adaptability, their willingness to learn.

At least that's why they get more skill points per level in D&D.

> With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.

I mean, if you work in a company/team with bad practices, then that's likely to rub off onto you and affect your further employment prospects, because it will be hard to unlearn being okay with untestable code, no documentation and even the code itself not being self-documenting where possible, the code being not scalable, having N+1 problems and so on.

It can also happen that the person learns "this doesn't work well, this also doesn't, this too -- I wish we were doing everything differently!"

And later, when joining a better company, s/he more deeply understands the reasons behind their good practices -- because s/he has seen the mess, without.

Having seen and lived in mistakes, is life experience, can be useful. Depends on the person

> And later, when joining a better company, s/he more deeply understands the reasons behind their good practices -- because s/he has seen the mess, without.

There are two assumptions here:

  1. that the person will be accepted into that better company, even with these pre-existing sub-optimal practices which may manifest in a coding interview or a take-home task
  2. that the person will be open to learning these better practices, instead of being set in their ways, after having had their first experiences shape their views without the desire to challenge them

I agree that there is definitely potential for growth, but in some respects, for certain individuals such pre-existing views might be a liability. Though that also speaks of one's quality as an engineer, of course.

Real life is not D&D.

No, you're kidding?! Thanks for clarifying that, that explains why when I was rolling my D20 for persuasion checks in stores, they kept asking me to leave.

That said, I'm glad there's no owlbears.