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<p>Likewise, “doesn’t fit well into the corporate culture” doesn’t always mean “brilliant iconoclast who is better off creating his own thing anyway.” </p>
<p>Sometimes it just means “uppity jerk who thinks he’s all that, and has no ability to learn from and work with others.”</p>
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<p>Well, actually, they do seem to predominate the lists of those going to top employers or grad schools. For example, nearly half of all MIT seniors head for grad school, with by far the most popular grad school being…MIT. Similarly a large contingent of Harvard seniors head to the exotic locale of…Harvard graduate school. {Heck, in some Harvard graduate programs, it’s seemingly difficult to find a student who didn’t complete their undergrad at Harvard.} By far the largest contingent of Harvard MBA students graduated from Harvard College than from any other undergrad program.</p>
<p>That TIME article is as out of date as a Lehman tote. It is from 2005 when things were very different in many ways. I’d suspect cube life is looking much better today.</p>
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<p>I’ll take your word for this, but it’s kind of cute to me that when some school in another part of the country has this kind of pattern, it’s a regional school, but not when it’s in Boston :-)</p>
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<p>But you could be Bill Gates. You could be Steve Jobs. Interestingly, both Microsoft and Apple were founded during poor economic times. The world would clearly be far different if Gates and Jobs decided to work for regular companies rather than found their own. </p>
<p>[Why</a> to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy](<a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html]Why”>Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy)</p>
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<p>Nobody is saying that those jobs would shield you from busy grunt paperwork and demanding clients. To be clear - I am no fan of the consulting and finance industries, for I suspect they are largely parasites on society. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I completely understand the mentality of the students who enter those professions, for it is entirely rational. The logic is, if I am going to have to put up with grunt paper-pushing anyway, at least I should be paid well for doing so. Why should I push papers around in a regular company for average pay when I can do so at a consulting firm for higher pay? </p>
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<p>I agree that it sometimes means exactly that - which is why those people are not good fits for large corporations, but better off in more iconoclastic industries, such as tech startups. </p>
<p>The phrase: “uppity jerk who thinks he’s all that, and has no ability to learn from and work with others” actually sounds like a charitable description of the young Steve Jobs. More succinctly, he has been described by journalists and even his close colleagues as a word rhyming with ‘Brass Hole’. Some have even gone so far as to call him a sociopath. Bill Gates wasn’t exactly the easiest person to work with either - it is strongly suspected that he suffers from Aspergers Syndrome. </p>
<p>To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to find many tech mavens who are pleasant to work with. But you can’t argue with their success.</p>
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<p>@@ Yet another assumption that people from non-elite schools are just sort of life’s slackers and all. Just today, I interviewed a young woman from DePaul for a given position. This woman is ambition on steroids and has a stellar resume for being just a few years out of school - it’s evident her previous employer trusted her highly with big responsibilities. Just because she didn’t go to an elite school – maybe she didn’t have the money, or her parents weren’t willing to spend the money, or she wanted to stay close to home, or whatever-- there could be a million reasons. Sorry, just more than a little tired of all of the high school seniors and college freshmen assuming that ambition, smarts, etc are only found in elite schools. And I’m an elite school grad.</p>
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<p>Oh really? Seems to me that the fascination with consulting and finance has only increased. After all, the finance industry is now paying * record bonuses*. That’s right - bonuses are even higher than they were before the crash. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html</a></p>
<p>[Bank</a> of America Expects Record Bonuses for Some Staff (Update2) - Bloomberg](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>[Wall</a> Street Bonus and Compensation Levels Likely to Set a Record - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003351773983136.html]Wall”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003351773983136.html)</p>
<p>But to be clear, nobody is claiming that finance and consulting means escaping ‘cube life’. You’re still working in a cube (or, if a consultant, in a conference room at your client). The job involves a lot of grunt work and silly paper-pushing. Nobody is claiming otherwise.</p>
<p>But at least you’re getting paid well, something that your regular company counterparts cannot really say. I don’t see too many regular companies paying record bonuses now, do you? But the finance industry seems to be doing so.</p>
<p>As I’ve always asked, why don’t the regular companies pay better? If the finance industry can pay record bonuses, why can’t you? If they don’t, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the top graduates don’t really want to work for regular companies.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t implying that people from non-elite universities (which encompasses my education background) are somehow lazy. I definitely wasn’t making any inferences about intelligence; I was only stating that elite college grads, more often than at their non-elite counterparts, do not seem content with life as a cog at the average large company – hence the statement about the plotting to be VP from day 1.</p>
<p>I have attended what most CCers would consider non-elite universities during my time in college, which spans some 6 years now. My non-elite friends (well, the ones who aren’t stuck in the doldrums of grad school) all have found jobs at companies such as GE, Harris, and Lockheed. I have a few friends who went to elite schools, and the jobs they landed have been decidedly different and skewed toward finance or startups. That isn’t to say that some of them didn’t find their way to Intel or Microsoft, however.</p>
<p>@Sakky,i get your point.Now,assuming i am among the top 1% of the students at a mediocre state school,what is the probability that i can be among the top,say 40%of an MIT class;the only segment,i believe of an elite school that gets those high paying finance jobs?What fate awaits me if i graduate in the bottom 20%of a top school,and would the financial implications be better than if i was the top student at a mediocre state school?</p>
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<p>The statement is probabilistically true, not deterministically true. The fact is, more ambitious students are more likely to be found at the top schools. Or, put another way, the average schools tend to have a higher proportion of umambitious students. Let’s be perfectly honest - there are a lot of students at the average schools who are not highly motivated to advance their careers quickly or make a lot of money. They’re content to simply have an average job for average pay. {I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that.} </p>
<p>But the fact remains that a higher proportion of students at the top schools tend to be ambitious. I suspect that much of that has to do with the social milieu that those schools offer: when you see your colleagues (i.e. your classmates) obtaining high-powered jobs, you tend to want to do the same. But when your colleagues are content to settle for average jobs, you tend to lose ambition yourself. Obviously some people are more sensitive to social forces than others. Nevertheless, all of us are affected by social forces to some degree.</p>
<p>If you want a mindless drone, why would you go to a school filled with kids from affluent, well-educated families who had to work for a living instead of getting drunk off their butts and skipping classes at state gov’t schools? I see nothing particularly surprising here…</p>
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<p>One of the greatest problems that Intel and (especially) Microsoft is saying is that the best engineering talent no longer really wants to work for them, when they were able to previously, garner the lion’s share. The best talent increasingly prefers to work for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other trendy startups. </p>
<p>*Bottom line, Microsoft is no longer able to attract the best
engineers. Google is. Engineering talent and agility are the keys
here, combined with a disruptive shift towards anywhere, anytime *</p>
<p>[Microsoft</a> Unveils Office for the Cloud — But Anchors it to the Desktop | BNET](<a href=“MoneyWatch: Financial news, world finance and market news, your money, product recalls updated daily - CBS News”>MoneyWatch: Financial news, world finance and market news, your money, product recalls updated daily - CBS News)</p>
<p>Troubling Exits At Microsoft
Once the dream workplace of tech’s highest achievers, it is suffering key defections to Google and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Even on college campuses, long a fountain of talent for Microsoft, the tide seems to be turning. On Sept. 7, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Science & Engineering Business Club held its annual recruiting barbecue, with about a dozen companies setting up booths to recruit as many as 1,500 students. “There was a lot of buzz around the Google table and not a lot around the Microsoft table,” says Bob Richard, associate director of employer relations at MIT. How much? When Richard walked through, he says, students were lined up six deep to talk to Google recruiters, while only two students stood at the Microsoft table. Carnegie Mellon’s Reddy says his top students opt for Google and Yahoo ahead of Microsoft these days.</p>
<p>[Troubling</a> Exits At Microsoft](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>Now, granted, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine and X-box are bright spots that may serve to attract prime engineering talent. But let’s be perfectly honest - how many stud young engineers are truly excited to work on the next version of MS Office? Or Windows? Honestly, would you be excited? Most young engineers tend to prefer to pursue the frontiers of new technology, such as mobile computing or online/cloud gaming.</p>
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<p>Well, first of all, the number of Harvard undergrads in Harvard graduate programs is not even close to that of any other undergraduate program. For example, historically speaking, the number of Harvard MBA alumni who graduated from Harvard College is about double that of the next most common undergraduate program (Yale College). Similarly, the number of MIT grad students who were former MIT undergrads absolutely dwarfs the number who graduated from any other undergrad program. </p>
<p>But interestingly, the 3rd most popular graduate schools for MIT undergrads to attend behind MIT graduate school is…Harvard graduate school. {Stanford is #2, but only by a slight amount). Similarly, a high proportion of MIT graduate students were undergrads at …Harvard. This becomes less surprising when you consider the cross-registration and faculty research collaborations between the two schools. For example, molliebatmit, one of the most prolific and insightful posters in the MIT section of cc, was an MIT undergrad who is now a Harvard graduate student. (She’s married to a former MIT undergrad who then became a graduate student at…MIT). </p>
<p>As I’ve always said, one of the most effective pathways to enter Harvard or MIT for graduate school is to attend undergrad at Harvard or MIT.</p>
<p>There is way too much snobbery on this thread. It’s as if some folks can’t deal with the fact that perhaps a Penn State or Minnesota grad is more desirable than a Yale or Swarthmore grad. Deal with it. Careers in Fortune 500 companies, especially Fortune 50 companies, are nothing to sneeze at. It means a middle class lifestyle or better. Is there a problem with that? </p>
<p>And as far as this post goes, give me a break:
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<p>What nonsense. They wouldn’t get hired because they never made it to their senior year. How many Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerbergs are there? 98% of public and elite school grads will not become Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerburgs. That’s a fact. But they are going to have to make a living somehow. And some elite school grads will have to compete against the Penn State and Minnesota grads and some are going to lose. That’s the real world. I work for a Fortune 50 (I"ve worked for three of the Fortune 50) and I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Deal with it. </p>
<p>I have one kid at Oberlin (she turned down Cornell U.) and another at Penn State. Neither chose their college based on how much money they might make after graduation or with a desire to become the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. How they ultimately do in life (monetarily) will have little if anything at all to do with the college they chose.</p>
<p>People, get over it. Some people seem to think that a so-called elite school diploma entitles one to favoritism for life, as if you should always be preferred over a graduate of public U. After all, your “elite” school was better, correct? Please. Give me a break.</p>
<p>Plainsman- you are projecting (again). That isn’t what people are saying. There IS a lot of mis-information here, but it isn’t your standard “Ivy is better no matter what” stuff. The error here is in thinking the elite school grads “have it made” and wouldn’t lower themselves to compete for jobs at large corporations. My son had (elite school) classmates asking him to help them get an interview with the large corporation from which he accepted an offer. There are many college grads without jobs whether from Penn State, TCNJ or Brown. NOTHING is a sure thing anymore.
Disagreeing with the theory behind the alleged survey results doesn’t mean that one is putting down state school grads (I happen to be one myself).</p>
<p>The snobbishness towards corporate America is pretty funny. And sad. I’d be ashamed if I raised a kid like some of these who are apparently “too good” for corporate America.</p>
<p>^^Its shameful to feel too good for corporate America especially considering all the good they have done lately for our country.</p>
<p>i feel good about corporate America. When I fill up my tank at Chevron and they have gas to sell me, or go online with a Cisco router that performs flawlessly, or do my taxes with an affordable piece of software from intuit. And 100,000’s of good people work for these companies, doing the best they can. Corporations are just small companies who did a good job and got big, where’s the evil? all my neighbors work for large corps, they’re not evil. are your neighbors evil?</p>
<p>doct: you sound like a moron</p>
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<p>People understandably want something better than that. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the typical Fortune 50 or 500 company job ain’t that great. The pay is unremarkable, and the career advancement opportunities are unremarkable. </p>
<p>Let’s stylize what we’re really talking about. The #1 company on the Fortune 500 - and incidentally, the largest private employer in the entire country with nearly 1.4 million in the US alone - is Walmart. Let’s be perfectly honest - the overwhelming majority of jobs at Walmart ain’t that great. Most Walmart workers are shelf-stockers, cashiers, and other types of positions you could have obtained right out of high school. Who really wants those jobs? You take those jobs, frankly, because you have no better option. Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming a cashier at Walmart. </p>
<p>Now, obviously, there are a small fraction of jobs within that 1.4 million that are more desirable to the typical college graduate. Nevertheless, the point stands that the vast majority of jobs at Walmart - and within the Fortune 500 in general - aren’t that great. Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s, Safeway, and McDonald’s are also members of the Fortune 500, and they have plenty of cashier and general laborer jobs available. Does anybody grow up dreaming of flipping burgers at McDonald’s? Again, these are jobs you take when you can’t get anything better. {Full disclosure - I used to work at McDonald’s…when I was 16.} </p>
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<p>Wrong. Those guys were indeed hired. After dropping out of college and before founding Apple, Steve Jobs actually was hired and worked for Atari. Bill Gates worked (briefly) for Honeywell, along with future Microsoft co-founded Paul Allen (who had also dropped out of college). Larry Ellison, who I failed to mention, worked for Ampex after dropping out of college, and in fact, met his future Oracle co-founders Ed Oates and Bob Miner while working there. Larry Page doesn’t apply because he actually graduated from college. </p>
<p>But I certainly suspect that Apple would not hire Steve Jobs today, nor Microsoft and Bill Gates, or if they did, they wouldn’t stay long. These kinds of people don’t work well as regular corporate drones. </p>
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<p>Certainly, most will not. But they can make a fine living working for small startups, or founding them themselves. Obviously the vast majority of them will never become billionaires, but they don’t need to be. All they want is to be able to work on exciting ideas with the chance - however small - of becoming rich. Even if you never do make it big, you will still make a quite nice living. {For example, Facebook offers some of the highest engineering salaries in the Valley, and also offers the chance to become rich.}</p>