Yep. A lot of the Big Ten schools along with universities like Washington, Texas, Florida, etc. have been the drivers in overall production of engineers.

I think what they probably meant talent pools for some companies in the tech industry, or something similar.

I came to the comments say the same thing. I’ve hired and worked with many engineers and the overwhelming majority did not attend MIT or Stanford. Some of the best didn’t attend college at all!

In your experience how do you filter candidates without a degree? Portfolio? Do you review their code?

I filter based on experience. Previous jobs, roles, projects. Degree is a weak predictor and I consider it mostly for candidates with less than 3 years of experience.

I guess my question transitions over to: If a candidate has less than 3 years experience and no degree, where does that fall on your radar? Genuinely curious as it falls into the "need experience to get experience" job meme many people find initially.

Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer: Listing whatever experience you can (high-school jobs, sites created for friends, college jobs) alongside interesting personal projects is a huge leg up for getting through recruiting. If you're early in your career, find a few small-time jobs somewhere in tech that'll hire you, and learn as much as you can as fast as you can. MSPs are desperate for people with a little coding background. They'll chew you up and spit you out with long hours and terrible pay, but they're a great place to cut your teeth on getting things done.

Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.

In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.

> Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer

That's interesting, and somewhat rankling - as both times I interviewed at the G in FAANG, not a single interviewer gave a nickel about any of my experience, or projects I had worked on.

It's such a joke that the keys to a golden line on your resume and a giant salary are gated by the luck of which 7 people get picked to grill you that day, how busy they currently are, and what their pet question is.

Not to justify it the way things are but to share a bit of my philosophy:

Job hunts are a campaign. If you're pretty good you'll land a job but you might not land every job.

While this varies from company to company generally resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs.

Even if you have a 95% pass rate for any one interviewer, you're at like 77% for passing a 5 person panel. Good but hardly a guarantee.

But if you have even three job interviews, the chance that you'll get atleast one is 98.7%. Not so bad!

Sure it's a bit hand-wavy but I hope it takes the edge off this interviewing business for you the way it does for me.

Cheers!

If a candidate has less than 3 years of experience AND he has nothing to show AND he has no degree... he will not pass the filter.

Moreover, I'm not really interested in "years of experience". Previous titles don't really matter, too.

What does matter for junior and middle developers: personal projects, specific products or features developed by them or their team, accounts on Upwork, GitHub or StackOverflow, recommendations from other people, a personal website or a blog.

We are talking about the initial screening filter, so _anything_ proving you are a real developer is fine.

Isn’t that how you review all candidates?

Not to mention the extremely large foreign born workforce who usually also obtain significant education at home.

Agreed - University of Maryland is a huge tech feeder to public sector orgs, believe it or not.

All the DC area computer science programs feed right into the NSA and defense.

Which is funny because Silicon Valley companies won't think candidates from those schools are that interesting, while simultaneously thinking that the intelligence and defense has better programmers. People are people.

Who in Silicon Valley thinks that? I've never heard anyone say it in my 30+ years here (until now).

Very odd statement indeed. I have never heard anything even remotely corroborating this. In fact (highly anecdotally, take it as entertainment at best), I have read that public opinion holds NSA's technical capabilities in high esteem but in reality, the talent is vastly below that of the top consumer tech companies because most tech employees would never contribute to the type of work the government does.

I hear you, and appreciate your caveat ("highly anecdotally"). But consider a couple of data points:

-- KH-11 satellite, and presumed successors

-- Stuxnet

-- Utah data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)

-- The rather enormous intelligence budget that allows all kinds of creativity

The above indicates that there must be some corners of these agencies that are extremely technically skilled, and able to do real stuff with breathtaking ambition. Given the budget, these "corners" might be pretty big, and attract some excellent talent.

Those that know, aren't talking, and those talking (ahem!), don't know.

KH-11 is Lockheed.

Stuxnet was probably mainly Mossad.

The Utah data center was a pretty run of the mill data center, but apparently plagued by technical issues.

And yeah, they have a huge budget which allows them to buy a lot of toys for a bit above normal price.

Their mathematicians are top notch though from what I've heard.

I can assure you that there are programs with insane skill requirements, many of which have fed the executives and senior Security and IT staff at FAANG. They're not likely being overt about their previous jobs, choosing to instead make them sound less sexy so to speak, but they're 100% there. I would also note that you're over estimating 2nd party contributions to all the above.

You're right on the money for math though, crazy smart mathematicians.

How does the fed pay these programmers more than the normal federal compensation schedule? Is the compensation uncapped if they work through a contractor? If they dont, why do these programmers choose to work there?

If you got a Ph.D. in some field and wanted to do R&D in it without trying to go tenure-track, then the national labs, and occasionally the contractors, used to be a decent compromise. Bell Labs was gone, Google wasn't yet running its moonshot factory, and Softbank had yet to open its pocketbook. Depending where in the country you want to be it still might make a little sense.

But if you're a programmer without a scientific speciality, then there's less reason.

The contractors have some freedom to pay as they see fit -- they pay more than the national labs in my experience -- but they still have to justify their rates to the government during contract negotiations, and the government can push back. The pay is "ok", but has been falling increasingly behind "Tech". So now there's brain drain, particularly among programmers.

I have limited first-hand experience, but yes, contractors can be paid independently of government pay scales as far as I know, and far more than you'd think (in terms of breadth of jobs) is done by contractors. I remember reading that the people who do security clearance investigations largely are, or were, contractors.

My impression is that if you do work directly for federal or state government, you also are likely to be alongside a substantial number of contractors.

Reality Winner was a contractor, by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

That was the common transition where I worked. Do gov stint, get into a great office, establish a name for yourself and get the right access. Then transition to contract, bounce between them as they contracts are merged / transfered etc. but still make multiples greater than as a Civilian. Some billets were GS 9-13. Only difference was education background, same work same tasks. Same contract could be making 135k base plus profit share or guaranteed bonuses. The sky was the limit for some specific people (though not everyone got these offers, just like most won't get a FAANG job).

Multiple programs were built to fix the compensation for military members whom were paid even less than civilian counterparts in the same offices. It's why the churn rate is so high. Even then, the majority of cleared jobs still aren't commensurate with external salaries.

Can't do anything but agree. The intelligence budget, as you said, is enormous so there will certainly be things that come out of it that would be shaky business decisions to even attempt in the private sector.

For one, GPS was created by the DoD and I am still blown away that it is so good, accessible, and free for consumer use.

If Facebook were allowed to stuxnet the hell out of Apple/google/Twitter etc, who knows what would happen:)

I’m not disparaging the nsa etc talent, but it’s very hard to arrive at fair comparisons in this area.

The sec teams at faang are just not tasked with stuff the nsa does.

You should have ended your post with "<mike drop>".

Pretty hard to argue with that list.

A friend of mine (who went to NMSU) worked for NASA. He wrote the code that determined what angle the solar panels need to be at to get the right amount of sun to power the ISS. Crazy number of edge cases, and people die if you have a bug.

Was pretty impressive to hear the things he had to do and the processes they had for minimizing the risk of someone dying. I'd put that on par with many things, too (although Stuxnet has its own place for genuflection).

> most tech employees would never contribute to the type of work the government does

I don't even think it's ideological. The reason the defense industry lacks top tier talent is because it's quite literally the most stifling and frustrating place to work possible. You're mired in endless bureaucracy, incompetent management, arcane rules and regulations surrounding secrecy, and some of the world's least flexible working arrangements. It ends up being a great place for people who want to punch a clock and get a reliable paycheck, but a deadend for anyone trying to make their mark.

Government service also pays substantially less than SV.

I thought the dominant public opinion is government agencies are staffed with mediocre engineers. Not even because of any moral concerns, just because of bureaucracy and low pay.

Agreed, but we still think of the CIA and NSA on a technical level as being capable of unparalleled surveillance, crypto cracking, and other general hackery and engineering to maintain its power. Perhaps that's part of the propaganda. With that said, I imagine much of that is possible with backdoors to mass consumer data like Facebook which is actually collected via ingenious (but unethical) talent in Silicon Valley.

I learned from Snowden's book that the real way to make money working for the government is to quit and become a contractor.

Silicon Valley really loves some formal education it seems. Both of my Si Valley interviews, where they were willing to fly me out and accommodate me, involved an older gentleman having a sit-down with me about university, and how I should have gone.

Allow me to rephrase, people believe the NSA has superior technology with mystical capabilities. Who do you think that develops that stuff, where do those people come from?

To be fair, I think the general opinion is they are created by private contractors with government oversight

contractors

who are also heavily consolidated in certain markets, who also recruit from the same state schools that Big Tech can't figure out even exist

I think the more accurate perception is they have relatively unlimited budget and interest in attacking computer security, along with special powers like doing basically secret illegal shit that make them difficult to beat in security matters.

Not that any specific set of their employees are super geniuses.

While SV still has to run a profitable business while trying to care about security.

Yes, that is the reality

Along with sovereign immunity to CFAA and other laws

They are the leading bodies for taking credit for it, however.

Laughable, because a large number of tech workers in SV are from India, and a large percentage get their undergrad degrees in India, most come here for Masters degrees, but a majority go to engineering schools all over the US.

This. Anecdotally one Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) senior Professor told me that normally the best achievers of their undergraduate students go to US for work or further studies after graduation, the middle achievers work in India and the bottom achievers mostly continue their study at IIT with India govt's sponsorship. According to him even the bottom achievers are actually still good students since they graduated from IIT.

Since there are currently 23 IITs, the numbers that go to US (and SV) every year can be very significant. The long term effect of this phenomenon can be observed from the increasing number of US (and SV) tech companies CEOs are from India education background.

> the majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc.

These schools are very good btw. Berkeley is tied with Stanford for example, UI #5, Washington #6, UT is #10.

Conversely Harvard is ranked #15, but that's the things about rankings: they're often used to prune out people who don't "know someone", and when the metrics do not match someone's perceived "elite" status, they are ignored.

All of the schools you mention are attended by elites and commoners, produce talented people and untalented people, jerks and kind folks, and all the permutations of that.

I just wish we'd focus more on competent and kind, and less on connections or wealth - companies that do this will prosper IMHO, and companies that rant about "meritocracy" will wither as they drive away half the population.

Women are just as capable of coding well - creating a toxic culture is reducing your talent pool by half, something people obsessed with "facts and logic" should think more about. Insisting on "elite" schools when the good ones are public will also harm you long term if you're doing more cutting edge stuff.

Yeah, it's honestly insulting copy, and ignores other North American schools like Waterloo that make up a disproportionate part of big tech.

(should have included all the great Canadian universities in the list too, my apologies ... not that I included all the great US universities)

You said "much larger [than Stanford/MIT], public schools", which definitely includes the top Canadian universities, so you're good

I had to lookup the school. Maybe it's better known in some regional markets? It's behind a few names I was familiar with in Canada. [0]

[0] https://cwur.org/2019-2020.php

NCSU isn't on this list regardless.

Can you be explicit about your point? It sounds like a complete non sequitur

And CMU

In order of ranking and total enrollment (sourced from us news)

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3,130

2 Stanford University 3,444 ' 3 University of California--Berkeley 2,337

4 California Institute of Technology 536

5 Carnegie Mellon University 4,112

6 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor 3,247

7 Purdue University--West Lafayette 3,428

8 Georgia Institute of Technology 4,252

9 University of California--San Diego (Jacobs) 3,141

10 University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign 3,736

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...

These are graduate school enrollment numbers. Without breaking down CS/EE versus most other engineering disciplines, are MS/PhDs the "primary" talent source for the tech industry?

For comparison, GATech claims 61% of their students get engineering degrees and an enrollment of 14,142, thus ~8,626 undergraduate engineering students.

https://coe.gatech.edu/about/facts-rankings

Other school's engineering enrollment:

UT Austin claims 6,003 undergraduate and 2,101 graduate.

https://www.engr.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-rankings/program...

Berkeley claims 3,746 undergraduates and 2,357 graduates.

https://engineering.berkeley.edu/about/facts-and-figures/

MIT claims 2,451 undergraduates.

https://engineering.mit.edu/about/facts-and-figures/

Stanford claims 1570 undergraduate and 3603 graduate.

https://registrar.stanford.edu/everyone/enrollment-statistic...

I think the parent comment is correct to say there are many larger engineering schools than MIT and Stanford.

Also Berkeley has two CS programs. One in the school of engineering, the other in Letters and Sciences.

https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate/eecs-cs-co...

I went to Georgia Tech, majored in Architecture, and even I somehow ended up in tech.

Correction: swap #1 with #4