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<p>Exactly! This is what I am trying to say.</p>
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<p>I believe you are right.</p>
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<p>Yet I think there is little dispute that the vast bulk of successful tech startups tend to come from certain regions of the country. </p>
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<p>We are indeed talking about opportunities for career growth, so that begs the question - where is the best place for you to advance your career quickly - in a manufacturing plant, or in headquarters? Where is the political power of the company concentrated? Put another way, why haven’t the Big 3, for all their supposed outsourcing prowess, relocated their headquarters outside of Michigan? </p>
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<p>Here’s a question for you: what is the “technology GDP” output of the entire state of Maine vs. that of Silicon Valley? They both have roughly equivalent population sizes. I believe that Maine’s entire state GDP is about $50 bn, whereas HP’s annual revenue alone is over $100bn. True, most of HP’s actual output could be said to occur outside of Silicon Valley itself, but on the other hand, it is clearly true that the vast majority of Maine’s economic output is unrelated to tech. </p>
<p>The point being that nobody is disputing that you can run a successful startup outside of the traditional regions. It is simply harder to do so, from a probability standpoint. Since we are talking about career opportunities, it behooves you to move to a location that offers the greatest chance - although obviously no guarantee - that you will succeed in your career. After all, I suppose that you can, theoretically, become a successful movie actor while never leaving the state of Missouri. But the odds are low. Brad Pitt certainly didn’t like those odds. </p>
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<p>Michael Dell is an even more interesting example than you realize: he founded his company at UT in the city of Austin, which was (and is) a major technology center. I think he serves to reinforce my general point. </p>
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<p>Really? So there are lots of hedge funds in Miami? If not, why not? </p>
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<p>Ah, so now we’re getting to brass tacks: you have to be located in a place where important people actually want to live. It also begs the question of why don’t all hedge funds just move to Hawaii, which is far cheaper than Manhattan and roughly the same as Greenwich Connecticut. </p>
<p>See below. </p>
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<p>Interesting nonsequitur. </p>
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<p>This makes no sense whatsoever . Companies always want to maximize their profits. If they can figure out a way to save money by relocating, they will surely do so. It doesn’t matter whether your margins are large or small: if there are savings to be had, companies will take them. It’s not as if low-margin firms care about profit and high-margin firms don’t. They all care.</p>
<p>The real issue is that you probably won’t be able to save money by moving to Florida or Hawaii, for whatever you might save in terms of living costs will be more than lost through the loss of access to talent, infrastructure, and markets. What hedge funds require most of all is easy access to clients, which means you have to be in a place where buy-side fund managers happen to be. If a client wants to hold an immediate face-to-face meeting, he isn’t going to want to hear that you have to catch a plane and can be there in a few hours. </p>
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<p>Wait, so are you now saying that outsourcing has its limits? Glad to see you’ve come around to my side. </p>
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<p>I never said that all tech firms are built where infrastructure is available. This is a probabilistic argument: the bulk of them are. </p>
<p>I could point to a guy I know who smoked 3 packs a day and still lived to be over 90. Nor did he die from illness, but from being hit by a bus. (No joke). But that doesn’t mean that smoking is not dangerous. Heck, I remember he himself used to counsel everybody he knew not to smoke and how he regretted starting. Not every smoker suffers from bad health and not every non-smoker will enjoy good health, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe. </p>
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<p>So now you agree that certain places are nice to live in, and, frankly, Silicon Valley isn’t one of those places, compared to San Francisco. Nor do you save much money by living in the Valley as opposed to SF. Maybe SF is slightly more expensive overall, as while the housing is obviously more expensive, the groceries, utilies, and transportation are actually less expensive. {For example, you can actually live reasonably in SF without a car, but doing so in the Valley is practically impossible.} </p>
<p>But in any case, you said it yourself - people prefer to live in certain places and not others (like Missisippi). That weakens the appeal of outsourcing, for starting a hedge fund or tech firm in Mississippi will mean that you will have difficulty finding talented employees who are willing to move there. The coordination costs means that you are probably better off in a region that has the infrastructure you need. </p>
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<p>Uh, Berkshire Hathaway is not a tech company. I therefore do not see how it is relevant to the discussion. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the question isn’t do you have to live in one of those hubs to have a successful career. Obviously you don’t have to do anything. The question is, where are you likelier to be more successful. </p>
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<p>Nobody is saying that you have to do anything. Heck, I could theoretically have a successful tech career while not even graduating from high school. </p>
<p>What I am saying is that, given the choice between MIT/Stanford or IIT, the former gives you a better, although certainly not guaranteed, chance. There are no guarantees in life. All you can do is improve your odds. </p>
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<p>Seattle was a major technology center: Boeing had been a major technology presence for decades. </p>
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<p>This sounds like the question you posed above regarding the auto industry. Where do Intel and AMD operate their headquarters? Oh yeah, right, they’re in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. If outsourcing was really so effective, why doesn’t AMD relocate its headquarters to Saratoga? Why doesn’t Intel relocate its headquarters to Las Cruces, New Mexico? Isn’t it interesting that Paul Otellini and Dirk Meyer will build distributed operations throughout the globe, but don’t want to relocate their own offices. Why not? </p>
<p>More importantly, the real question is, again, for the purposes of career advancement, do you want to work in a manufacturing facility, or do you want to work in headquarters, where the political power lies? </p>
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<p>Like I said, there are people who can smoke and live to be 90, but at the end of the day, given the choice between smoking and not smoking, I think we can agree that the safer choice is not to smoke. </p>
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<p>Actually, Toronto hasn’t really done much pulling at all, but has more to do with the fact that Toronto is the natural economic and cultural center of English-speaking Canada. There are certainly far more opportunities for a creative career in Toronto than in, say, Thunder Bay. </p>
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<p>Let me put it to you this way. Ask yourself why the trend of urbanization throughout the world has been so monotonic ? According to the United Nations, in 2007, for the first time in world history, over half of the world’s people lived in an urban area, and this trend shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. By 2050, it is estimated that over 2/3 of the world’s population will live in an urban area. </p>
<p>Natural population growth cannot account for this trend - urban dwellers tend to have lower birthrates than does the rural population. The trend can only be explained by rural population moving in droves to urban areas where they can enjoy greater opportunities for economic and social mobility. Business creation is fostered by the access to human capital, markets and infrastructure that cities provide. </p>
<p>So one has to ask - why does the trend of urbanization persist, if advantages do not exist in doing so? Are all these rural dwellers who are moving to cities just being stupid? More specifically, if high tech workers enjoy, as you say, the benefits of proximity to attractive geography with strong educational systems and low taxes, then why doesn’t every Silicon Valley tech firm move away? After all, while the geography may be pleasant, the taxes are certainly not low, nor are the educational systems particularly strong. Similarly, why doesn’t the entire New York financial industry decamp elsewhere? After all, New York taxes are at nosebleed levels, the physical geography is mediocre at best, and the school systems aren’t particularly impressive. Are they all just being stupid in staying?</p>
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<p>If you don’t care, then don’t read it. Nobody has a gun to your head. </p>
<p>But I lost your faith in your discussions when you began to fabricate statements that I never said. See below. </p>
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<p>Please point to the quote where I specifically said that all people at any school other than MIT are stupid and not motivated. What’s that? You can’t do it? Alright then. Don’t go around fabricating quotes. </p>
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<p>Some people at any school are unmotivated and/or unintelligent, and that’s just a simple fact that cannot be ignored. For example, I have freely discussed that there were plenty of people at my school that were completely unmotivated. </p>
<p>What is important is how a company is able to know who is unmotivated and unintelligent and who isn’t. After all, everybody is going to claim to be motivated and intelligent, even when they are not, and the company has no foolproof way of knowing for sure. Hence, the company is safer in recruiting at an area where the odds of choosing an unmotivated student are lower. </p>
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<p>Humans are doing nothing to make life more unfair than it already is. All that is happening are simple economic truisms that nobody has infinite search capability and perfect information. If Brad Pitt had stayed in Missouri, he most likely would never have been discovered, for the simple fact is, movie companies were not going to be searching for handsome leading men in Missouri, for they don’t have infinite search capacity to audition every single potential actor in the entire world.</p>
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<p>Yet from the eyes of the employer, the institution is all it can see. The employer doesn’t know anything about you.</p>
<p>The problem, again, has to do with a lack of perfect information. You may be the greatest engineer in the history of the world - but how is an employer going to know that? No employer has infinite resources with which to vet every single possible engineer in the world. Institution names therefore serve as brand name signals with which to demonstrate your prowess. To be sure, they are imperfect signals. But they’re still better than no signal at all.</p>
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<p>I more or less agree with that. It’s about minimizing risk for the employer. They like to recruit people from schools that are generally known to have excellent students, schools in their local region which they know well (and who have historically produced good employees), or from their alma maters.</p>
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<p>First off, I don’t know why you’re choosing to include Staples (which is near Boston), Dell (which is near Austin), Citrix (born in the “Telecom Corridor” of Richardson, TX) and especially RIM, which is a spinoff of the University of Waterloo: the MIT of Canada, and Waterloo being the “Silicon Valley of Canada”. I think those examples actually serve to bolster my case regarding the importance of established tech centers. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure why you’re talking about a firm such as Express Scripts, for last time I checked, a PBM isn’t exactly a tech firm. Nor is Paychex. Cognizant too is hardly a true startup - it was really just the spinoff of the IT department of Dun & Bradstreet, as was Celgene from Celanese. {Otherwise, we might as well argue that all of the Baby Bells born from AT&T were also “startups”} </p>
<p>But more importantly, see how you’re stretching to find one-offs. But those are not clusters. Silicon Valley alone has dozens and dozens of tech firms. </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. Let’s say you’re looking for a woman to be your girlfriend. So you head for a bar where there is one eligible woman (and only one) who you find to be a wonderfully perfect match…and she turns you down. Now you’re stuck with nothing. That is precisely why singles bars exist: to give you the chance to meet lots of eligible women. </p>
<p>Similarly, let’s say that you move to North Kansas City to get a job at Cerner, and you get rejected. Now what? Now you have a problem. In contrast, if you’re in Silicon Valley, Boston, or one of the other major tech centers, you can line up interview after interview, and assuming your skills are strong, somebody is probably going to hire you. You’re not beholden to the whims of just one employer.</p>
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<p>One could reformulate that to say that the real problem, at any school, HYPSM included, is that the bad students ruin it for the good students. They make all the students look bad by lowering the average quality of the students, and the average quality is all that an employer has to go by, as no employer could ever possibly have perfect information about every student. The issue then, of course, is that some students have more bad students than do others.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example regarding a school I am just going to call X. I know a guy who went to X and, frankly speaking, is academically incompetent. At one point, he literally had a 0.5 GPA (half D’s, half F’s), while displaying no motivation whatsoever and never bothering to learn even a basic level of knowledge one would expect from even a high school graduate. He’s a walking embarrassment to school X, so much so that I remember my roommate’s cousin, after talking to this guy and observing that he wasn’t particularly academically astute, said the following:</p>
<p>Him: Did that guy really go to school X?
Me: Yes, he did.
Him: Hm. I thought X was supposed to be a good school.</p>
<p>That’s the problem; guys like that make the entire school look bad. X should never have admitted that guy in the first place.</p>
<p>“Yet from the eyes of the employer, the institution is all it can see. The employer doesn’t know anything about you.”</p>
<p>I believe this is overstated. While going to a strong name brand can help get the employer to look at your application, then he’s going to read about you individually. That’s when he’s going to look at transcripts, research, extracurriculars, prior experience. I’m not entirely sure that most employers would choose an MIT over, say, a J.S.U., ceteris paribus… especially if the J.S.U. had a slight edge.</p>
<p>I would say a lot of it is on the individual… well, at least after they’re in the running. I suppose that school name might influence who makes it there, but this isn’t necessarily how it <em>should</em> be, just how it <em>might</em> be.</p>
<p>Well, I’ll be happy when I have a PhD and doing research. Then, when I get a job and later in life start teaching at a college, I’ll remember this. I’ll have to just tell the kids (if I am working at a not “top-ranked” college) that they just stand no chance because they are losers who chose the college they felt comfortable with. I will have to tell them employers won’t like them because they are not going to MIT or UMich or some other top engineering college. Poor them… just little fish in a whole sea of whales…</p>
<p>AuburnMathTutor, I’m happy you can spread a good light on this. Thanks!</p>
<p>salve, nobody is saying that you can’t succeed from a non-top school. However, you can’t deny there is an advantage to being at school such as an MIT, GaTech, UIUC, etc.</p>
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<p>Actually, what you just said inherently implies the internal pardox that may cause an inferior MIT grad to be chosen over the superior JSU grad (not sure what exactly JSU is - I assume it’s Jacksonville State University - but I’ll go with it). You said it yourself - the strong brand name of a school like MIT may convince the employer to read your application. But that implies that the application of the guy from JSU may not even be read. What that then means is that the superior JSU grad doesn’t even get a chance because nobody reads his application. He’s already lost the game before it even began. </p>
<p>Again, the problem comes down to a matter of search costs. No employer has the resources to peruse the resumes of every single student in every school in the world. Heck, they’re not even going to solicit the resumes of every single student in the world. Brand names are one way to break through the logjam and get your foot in the door. </p>
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<p>You ca tell them whatever the heck you want, as long as you make sure that they know it is coming from you and nobody else. However, if you’re going to attribute such statements to me, then I assume you’re going to point to me the quotes where I specifically said what you claim that I did. I’ll be waiting for you to report back.</p>
<p>Otherwise, don’t go around attributing deliberately fabricated quotes to people who never said them.</p>
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<p>If that’s not necessarily how things should be, then that implies that another, more efficient solution exists. Like I said, the real problem is that organizations have neither perfect information nor infinite search resources, and that will never change. Brand names serve as a substitute for a lack of information by signaling the quality of the students. It’s an imperfect signal, but it’s certainly better than no signal at all, and probably better than any other signal that could reasonably be invoked. </p>
<p>The real question then is, how else is any employer with limited resources and limited and asymmetric information - that is to say, every employers - going to decide who to hire? We return back to the basic dilemma: nobody really knows how productive a particular job candidate is going to be if hired, and every one of them is going to claim to be highly productive, even the ones who are not. What are employers supposed to do?</p>
<p>^JSU stands for “Joe Schmo University” since the OP asked:</p>
<p>“Is a student from Joe Schmoe University really learning all the same stuff as a student from MIT? If so, how could it be possible that MIT dropout could graduate from XYZ with flying colors?”</p>
<p>I think a more interesting comparison is between MIT and a very strong but not quite as tip-top school such as U Minnesota (not ChE, where it’s top dog anyway). Both of these are top 20 (if you trust USNWR…) programs, but MIT is light-years more competetive for admission and about twice as expensive. In a closer comparison such as this, how much impact would the MIT name have? Would the UMN degree get the job applicant “in the door” for individual review?</p>
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<p>Yes, there is indeed an advantage, but you can succeed just as well from a school that is not #1 (which some people are refuting). I see you understand, but not everyone on here does.</p>
<p>Salve! - You have a higher PROBABILITY of being successful when you graduate from a top-tier school than if you graduate from a lower-tier school. Also, your earning POTENTIAL is higher… That is why the schools are on different tiers…</p>
<p>Notice: PROBABILITY and POTENTIAL</p>
<p>Please stop trying to validate your own life decision against your obviously suppressed self-doubt on this forum.</p>
<p>sakky,</p>
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<p>Ok, first off you like implications, and that is exactly what I used. I made a summary of what it seems that you stand for. I did not say that that was your exact quote. You go to MIT as I can see, so of course you are going to defend MIT and say it is better than every other school. You aren’t going to try to let some “simpleton” tell you otherwise.</p>
<p>Here are your quotes that I have implied from:</p>
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<p>Your words speak for themselves. You are an MIT student who can’t stand to think that someone might be just as smart as you. You have constantly questioned the motivation of students in lower-ranked schools and implied that you are not a good engineer if you come from one of these schools.</p>
<p>Maybe if people stopped competing with each other and started working together we could progress so much more. Instead you are sitting here trying to constantly tell me that MIT is sooo much better than anything else. How about you try to tell me “yes, I believe an extremely intelligent individual can achieve so much at IIT and make a very fine engineer”. Instead you persist on putting down the school. Never have I said that MIT was not a good school, because it most certainly is. But there is so much potential at any school. You are getting upset at me because I am defending the people who can be wonderful engineers but not go to one of those “top” schools. </p>
<p>To be honest, I never even knew MIT was a top engineering school until I came on here. It looks like their record has not reached everywhere. Before CC, I just thought IIT was a great school to go to for engineering and would give you a quality education. I know it still can.</p>
<p>Good luck at MIT (if that is indeed where you are going) sakky! I am sure you will make a superb engineer, and I truly don’t mean any sarcasm. I know that if someone puts their mind to it they can achieve, and they don’t need an MIT to do that.</p>
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<p>I KNOW!! All I am trying to say is that a person CAN still achieve at a lower-tier school and people shouldn’t become discouraged just because this “PROBABILITY” is higher at a top-tier school. That is all I’m trying to say. People can ACHIEVE anything they want, but they don’t need a top-tier school to do it, while that may be helpful, it’s not mandatory!</p>
<p>Fine. That is accurate. Just don’t try to say that IIT = MIT. It does not.</p>