@parentofastudent “you just need to study a lot for the interviews and be smart, they care about how you do at the interview not what school you are from.”
This is exactly right. They care about what you can do. You can be from South West Quinoa State and if you can solve their problems in the interview, and are reasonably able to explain the solution, then you have a great chance to get hired.
I think what the top schools do well is get a high percentage of their students hired at top firms. At some of the top schools, the average CS grad is getting $100k+. That is impressive, for a bunch of 21 year olds.
@scotlandcalling , your anecdotal example is as meaningless as generalizations ! I am not a recruiter; I work for a VC firm, so obviously you know better !?!
You’re combining two entirely separate questions: whether elite colleges provide a better education and whether graduates of elite colleges have better career outcomes. Each could and has been its own thread.
@roethlisburger the topic says “Silicon valley companies hire the most from these colleges”.
Not sure how you interpreted it, but I interpreted it as " If you went to “these” selective colleges then SV likes you"
So it is completely OK to want an education from the colleges desired by SV employers
I dont think I ever said elite colleges offer better education.
I only said elite colleges are prestigious and preferred by many elite employers so its OK to aspire to attend an elite college.
If the topic was worded as “South Eastern Quinoa college is SV employers’ most favorite college”
From having worked in the Bay Area (SF/Silicon Valley) tech biz since the 80’s, my totally unscientific, anecdotal impression of which schools have the highest number of graduates in local tech jobs (as opposed to marketing and accounting-type jobs) would be -
UC Berkeley
San Francisco State
Stanford
San Jose State
The following UC’s about equally - UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego. I don’t recall ever having knowingly worked with someone from UC Riverside, Irvine or Merced.
Even then, the above schools probably don’t provide more than 2%-3% in total of all the tech workers in the Bay Area tech industry. Add in graduates of “prestigious” STEM schools and you’re still not over 5%. That means people from all manner of schools from all over the world can come to SF/Silicon Valley and find a job as long as they’re competent.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone here who has a degree from the University of Phoenix. I know a lot of people with degrees from a local University of Phoenix-ish school called Golden Gate University, though those tend to be for non-tech, white collar jobs at the local high tech companies. The GGU grads all seem to be perfectly competent.
The daughter of family friends graduated from Chico in philosophy and went to a major SV firm to do software testing. Takes all kinds!
I have a S who was a math major at a research university known for its Core and quirkiness (and who turned down top engineering programs) who’s an SWE at SV. Does just fine, has a job where his theoretical and big-picture approach is appreciated. Oh, and they LOVE that he can write well and is comfortable presenting to large groups of programmers and engineers.
I’d expect that SJSU, Santa Clara, Pitt, etc. know EXACTLY what the local employers want and are excellent at educating folks who want to pursue that path. We also know of folks who have been hired at some of these places without having completed their degrees (but having mad skills nevertheless) who then go to the regional schools to finish punching that ticket while working at some of these big SV companies.
“Of the top 10 universities that send the most graduates on to careers in Silicon Valley, none were Ivy League institutions, according to a new analysis by online recruiting company HiringSolved.”
Most of the Ivies are not that large. They don't have enough grads to show up here.
Note: I do wish that the government required all companies to publish this level of detail with a list of the companies individual grads are going to. Take a look at this and ask your school to do the same. Only a few do it at this level. We could all make more informed decisions.
Average Penn SEAS CS salary is $105k. CS grads are scattered among Silicon Valley, Washington, NYC. Lots of placements at Google, but they are mostly in the NYC office, which is their largest after Mountain View. They are also going to Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg. If your average grad is pulling down $105k, then a significant number of them are really getting impressive offers.
My point is that the Ivy League brands do nothing to help you in Silicon Valley interviews, but that does not mean that the Ivy League students failed in any way or that attending those schools for CS was a poor choice. They are doing quite well, on average, they are probably doing better than most schools.
The only time I can think of when a tech company might benefit from having more employees from brand name schools is when a startup is going to VCs for funding. For example, I think it helps to be able to tell potential investors that this company was founded by a Stanford grad and a Berkeley grad and includes grads from Harvard, MIT, Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Michigan, or Harvey Mudd. Basically without knowing anything more, you know that it is a high quality and well-educated team. That also provides a little cover for the VC if the company bankrupts because it supports their assessment that they had strong pedigrees. If instead they had chosen to invest in a company with all community college graduates and it had bankrupted, then the VC staff would be more at risk.
The big companies who have both the hiring needs and recruiting resources tend to recruit widely.
It is the smaller companies that are more prone to recruiting locally, because they have fewer hiring needs and recruiting resources. If you need just a few new graduates, why recruit all over the place when quick visits to a few local schools like UCB, SJSU, UCSC, Stanford, and SCU will give you enough candidates to interview and hire?
Regarding that those in distant locations can submit resumes directly on web sites and do initial interviews by phone or video conference, that is true, but if those in distant locations do not even know that the company exists (which is seemingly the case in these forums for any computer company whose initials are not in GAFAM), they will not even know to apply there.
These anecdotes are all over the valley and go both ways (“Stanford students live in a bubble and expect the world to come to them… some lack skills yet still believe their school name will carry them/UCB students know how to deal with the real world better because their journey is more challenging” etc). I think they mostly serve to promote stereotypes or to get a chuckle at a dinner party. As usual, the best course of action is to evaluate the individual and use the “school name” criteria as a last ditch act of desperation.
The description of the candidates sound more like what one might hear about PhD students. There, one would definitely evaluate the thesis/research and judge accordingly. One wouldn’t belittle solid ground-breaking work on the basis of where it was developed… In any case, with PhDs and their specializations, sometimes you get guys that are very theoretical and some that are more practical. Varies with the student, their advisor, their research, etc, etc but not necessarily because of the school. Now San Jose St doesn’t give out PhDs… so for a masters level position, one wouldn’t want to overpay for a PhD nor place one there and get them bored.
@Much2learn, I believe you’re right about some start-ups. My son, graduate of MIT, works for a booming start up as a data scientist (not in Silicon Valley, as he and his wife had no interest in applying for jobs there, and my son had no interest in working for established, large companies). He and one other young man are the only two men on the data science team that don’t have master’s degrees. I believe graduating from MIT and being who he is got him the job. The other guy, FYI, graduated from Rice. Most of the other employees come from the local state university. The CEO graduated from Stanford.
Yes, some of GAAM or GAFAM is based about 700 miles away from Silicon Valley, but they do have offices (where technical work is done) in Silicon Valley.
Sure, if you’re Apple. Most tech companies aren’t Apple. The enormous amount of money companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend flying people in for interviews can’t be matched by most other companies.
Even huge wealthy companies like Apple would prefer to save money where they can. If you have to hire 300 entry-level engineers, would you rather spend $300K to do it or $0 if you could find the equivalent quality locally? That’s why (in part) companies like Microsoft give money to and develop relationships with nearby CS departments, like UW and WWU. You want homegrown local talent. You also want someone who is going to come and live in Seattle and work for Microsoft long-term, not come here for 2 years and then leave to go back “home.” Hiring locals makes it more likely they’ll do that.
Skype interviews aren’t as good as in-person interviews. (There’s actual data on this.)
It baffles me that someone read this thread and this is the message they gleaned from it. I saw a couple people making comments like this and I am very confused. Nobody said this. Seriously, zero people. Some people made reference to the fact that Ivy League or elite university students are not always smarter or more talented than students from lower-tier institutions.
Also, there are a lot of other places to do tech work besides the Valley! Austin’s way cheaper and has lots of jobs.
