"there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent."
I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.
I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?
Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]
The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.
[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.
> or all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet.
> The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works.
The fact that assignments are similar isn't evidence that "it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons" is inaccurate. Perhaps the assignments are easy, and nobody cares about the quality of the program so much as the quality of the students.
"Perhaps the assignments are easy, and nobody cares about the quality of the program so much as the quality of the students."
That sounds like a rationalization to justify arrogance rather than a claim you have any sort of evidence for. I'd say I've got abundant evidence to the contrary.
The Silicon Valley arrogance sure is on full display today. In another thread on the homepage we have people expressing shock and surprise that yes, there are in fact ways to put a roof over your head in Topeka for $100K.
This may sound weird to you, but I don't live in Silicon Valley because I don't want to. I didn't go to one of the elite colleges (which I most likely could have qualified for) because I didn't want to. My house is bigger, my yard is bigger, my commute is better, I like the people better, my student loans were paid off years ago and I have a realistic prospect of owning my house before I'm 40 without having had to go to Money Mustache levels of frugality, and in some ways it's easier to hire here than in the Valley. I know, I've been to the Valley many times.
But I suppose the net effect of the number of people currently getting out of SV is evaporative cooling, so SV will be left with an ever-increasing portion of the population who Truly Believe that just outside of the comforting mountains is a horde of barbarians with sloped foreheads who can't quite seem to figure out this "fire" thing. For your own sake and sanity, you might want to escape that massive filter bubble and have a look around at your options, which you may discover are nowhere near as monolithic as you think. It's always good to have an escape route, as evidenced by the many people availing themselves of it.
I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.
I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?
Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]
The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.
[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.