231–237 of 237 posts
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It is quite the claim to be making without providing any details. I feel it does not strengthen your argument to do so.
A personal anecdote isn't an argument.
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This all makes sense though for clarity I think I'm discussing something a little different. I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative. One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After wo…
I read comments like yours with interest because I used to be a hiring manager at a big aerospace company where I ran a department doing some cool stuff - signal processing, novel computer architectures, VLSI and WSI chips. We always recruited at top schools and got a few engineers from MIT. They were brilliant, but good grief they were lousy engineers. One guy was obviously a genius and generated great ideas constan…
The attitude problems are common enough that managers used to recruiting out of these schools learn strategies specifically for handling them. I've regularly heard comments like "So-and-so is great but they're very green and just... very MIT" and everyone knowingly nods their head and commiserates. Things usually get better once they've been out of school for 4-5 years (though also, some are great straight out of school).
Graduates with none of these problems generally get snapped up by super prestigious positions so you're less likely to interview or hire them if that's not you.
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... and in fact: www.epfl.ch (my undergraduate) "The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia) It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government. I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and th…
What's interesting is that, from my experience, they are one of the few schools that don't recruit from the same "pool" of talent as everyone else. If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).
There's plenty of other engineering schools in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole#Engineering_...)
And, ironically, one of things the EPFL did to improve its quality is teach partially in English (see https://www.epfl.ch/education/studies/en/rules-and-procedure...). This makes it easier to recruit both students AND faculty.
The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia started in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment [1]. As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage. 1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
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That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. 3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.
A good senior developer makes 70-90K in London (which is not even close to 80% of Bay Area), a place where a 2-bed flat cost 2K a month and nursery cost 1.5-2K. A junior dev making 50K in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg is much richer, let alone what’s going on in Zurich or Silicon Valley. Italians and Spaniards are better off going to Germany or the Netherlands. Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable…
For Google/FB difference in comp by location is there but not as dramatic as difference in average salary for all engineers per location may suggest.
To enjoy social life in Paris, Rome, Berlin or Hamburg you need to speak local language (otherwise you just meet the same expats) which is not problem in London as everyone speaks English.
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That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. 3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.
> London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich Citation needed. I've seen London attract Europeans but a lot more people are trying to jump from London to the Bay Area than the opposite. > compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. Ironically, there are two prominent Bay Area schools listed in the special interest list from the UK government…
Both Stanford and Berkley are isolated from areas they are located in and you have to be student to enjoy cultural life inside. You may visit art gallery/museum in Stanford (it's nice!) but that's pretty much it.