I don't really think it matters. I grew up in government housing as a child, lived in a very violent city all the way through high school, in an area ranked the least educated in the US. I just worked hard, made the right choices, didn't do anything too stupid (or didn't get caught ;-)), and kept at it, studied, building skills. Got an undergraduate and graduate degree from UT Dallas. Started at Amazon shortly after, went from a junior dev to a senior dev in 3 years. Nobody ever cared which school I went to. Mostly I feel like I got lucky, but hard work, ritual, and repetition matter more than which particular school ones goes to, I think.
during those 3 years, did you continue learning mostly at work? Or outside? (ie programming languages, systems design, etc.)? Or was it basically "I never brought work to home."?
I mostly stayed focused on work... that's why I stopped working on http://ihackernews.com and other side projects.
I worked probably 60 to 80 hours a week -- because I wanted to, not because I was forced. Managers actually asked me to work less.
I learned at lot at Amazon (across retail and AWS) so I didn't feel the need to keep up the level of studying I did prior to working at Amazon. Reading code reviews and watching email lists is a great way to learn and Amazon has really good internal emailing lists.
3 years at Amazon practically makes you a piece of the furniture there! That puts you well into the top 10% of employees by length of employment. Good job in surviving what most can't!
