School Ranking and Tech
04/19/21
How substantial of an impact does school rank have on your CS career prospects? Originally, I asked this question with a far more elitist goal in mind – to rank top CS universities by how successful their alumni were. I scrapped LinkedIn (I may write about the methods I utilized in the future) and created my own metric to answer the question above. I considered how many U.S.-based employees with computer science degrees each company employed, how many alumni with a CS degree from a particular top 25 CS school (based on this very flawed list) worked at said company, and then factored in data such as the company’s market cap. After waking up, I realized this ranking system was unhealthy, pointless, and so pretentious that I could not believe I had started working on it in the first place. As such, I quickly switched gears to a more productive topic: analyzing how picky top CS companies were towards the top 25 CS schools as a group.
”Top CS Company” is very arbitrary and subjective. For me, it was a combination of the “FAANG” companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), other highly market-capped tech companies (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc), top post-IPO unicorns (Uber, Airbnb, etc), and other pre-IPO but highly evaluated unicorns (Robinhood, Reddit, etc). Again, this list is more what I consider to be top tech companies than anything else. Oh, and all of the companies need to be U.S. companies, so no Shopify or ByteDance. Anyways, after gathering the data on LinkedIn, I posted my results to Reddit here. You can also download the raw data in Excel here. I would format the data and display it here, but I am lazy and short on time. Just for kicks, I have decided to also include the partial data I collected for my original post here. Try not to laugh at my efforts too much.
As for analyzing the results, as always, I leave it up to you, reader. My personal take is while some companies care far more about where they hire from than others, it is still very possible to break into Big Tech without attending an elite university. The Reddit post contains solid discussion as well, so read through the comments there. Until next week!