On Elitism

I guess I was one of these guys too. I perceived striving for best grades as inefficient use of my time. I remembered interesting things automatically, I memorized things useful for applications of interesting things with bit of effort. With the rest, I didn't bother. For much effort on my side reward would be very little if any, so I was satisfied with any grade I got, as long as it was passing grade (it was not always easy to get, lack of interest and reputation in the subject sometimes makes getting passing grade really hard).

I believe that striving for best grades can have significant mental risk because some things depend only on chance and there is nothing more stressful than seeing how your hard effort becoming pointless by silly accident of teacher being in a bad mood.

That changed a little bit in college. There I was satisfied with grades that gave me grade average high enough to get highest merit-based scholarship, because I always liked getting money for something else than my time. With this strategy I ended up as one of 10 best graduates.

Along the way, when current school topics aligned with my interests I was getting highest grades. In case of C++ course after spending week on reading interesting half of Bjarne Stroustrup's book, on tests I was pointing out the mistakes in test questions, and providing two answers, one according to intention of the question writer and other according to exact erroneous phrasing of the question. The grade I got was something like A++ (no one else got it) and it was illegal so on later occasions it was counted as A+).

When topics diverged from my interests other people were doing better. I wasn't jealous of them because I was never interested in competing with them on their ground and I was pretty sure that on grounds that were important to me they could never be significantly better than I was. When I think of this now I never actually felt good about beating them in my domain. I felt that if they were as interested in these things as I was they could achieve similar results as I did.

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 :)

"Thus, I assert that given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one who did not go to a name-brand university will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery as a form of compensation for his/her lack of visible status."

i'm sorry that i didn't make it more clear up-front (and my intro about school grades wasn't the greatest choice), but the central tenet of my article is that i am comparing people "with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills". in other words, i'm asking you to compare identical twins, one who went to a well-known university and the other who went to a lesser-known university. i'm definitely not saying that one is smarter than the other :) quite the opposite, actually ... i'm controlling for intelligence/technical-skills

i really hope that i didn't write or imply any of what you accused me of writing, namely that i somehow feel that people who didn't make it into a well-known school are "not of the top intellect" ... if i did, please please point that out, and i will immediately take down the offending portions of that article. i don't want people mis-interpreting what was meant to be a simple statement.

1.) it makes people debate grades vs. intelligence vs. likelihood of eventual success, etc.

2.) it reminds hacker types of how schools only rewarded the teachers' pet kids who bothered doing inane homework and studying a lot for tests and didn't have proper incentives for people who liked hacking in their spare time rather than spending all their efforts trying to earn A+'s

3.) it makes people think that the point of my article is about intelligence, getting good grades, and being admitted into an elitist school

I think all of these detract from the main point of my article, which is to make a very simple claim, which i've observed to be true in my personal experiences:

"Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery."

i guess the moral of the story is that i should be more concise in my writing ... smaller attack surface ;)