I think the tide has really turned against name-brand institutions, leaving people such as the author in a position where they feel they have to defend themselves and their "prestige." This manifests itself in some peculiar ways, as we can see from this piece...

agreed, university reputation matters a lot less nowadays than it did in the previous generation ... nowadays anyone with a good idea can start up a tech company and get rich. nobody cares about ur college name

fair enough, that does sound pretty elitist ;) sorry if i offended people with that language.

but the rest of that sentence says "... , I have seen a wide variety of personalities and egos amongst computer scientists and software engineers."

the point of that paragraph was to establish that i had experience in interacting with CS people from a variety of backgrounds, both from so-called elitist places and from less elitist places (i suppose i should've also listed the other lesser-known places where i've worked and gone to school, but since by definition they're not well-known 'elitist' places, you probably wouldn't have heard of them anyways)

wow, had i known that my article would someday be posted on a news aggregator site, i would've definitely been more politically correct in my word choice :)

No offense taken! I honestly didn't expect my comment to be voted up so high. Your point in that paragraph is valid.

I was just struck by the contrast between this and when you state later on that people who attend elite institutions generally do not share where they've worked ;-)

Your essay did make a nice point though, one that I did not previously consider!

An elitist disses people who he considers inferior to himself. Stating that you are Among the elites doesn't make you an elitist.

"Stating that you are among the elites" implies that everybody else is inferior to you. By definition, that is elitism.