Easy. The educational aspect is pretty awful. And after you get through that, the big companies treat you like a leper unless you went through a few chosen schools.
I went to a big state school in the 90s. The first two years were a hazing, with a brutal curve designed to drop class size from 1000+ (CSI 200) to about 80 graduates.
It was sink or swim and awarded grit. The only major worse was biology where organic chemistry weeded out the frat boys from premed.
"I went to a big state school in the 90s. The first two years were a hazing, with a brutal curve designed to drop class size from 1000+ (CSI 200) to about 80 graduates."
Is your "CSI 200" a general-interest course? I went to a fairly large university's computer science program, but even the intro course for the majors was probably only about 200 people/semester, which at this particular institution, meant taking the "200" level courses as a freshman. The 100-level courses were the courses the department taught to the rest of university for general requirements of other degrees. Those were easily in the thousands, but they were not majoring in CS. The gulf between a 100 and 200 course was still fairly large, but it wasn't a "hazing", it was similar to the difference you'd see in any department offering general courses and specialist courses like biology or physics.
I don't we particularly had "hazing", but just like any other major, it isn't for everyone, and there is a certainly baseline you're going to need to be able to succeed. This is not unique to computer science, or even engineering. If your school had a music program, did you ever ask them what they were expected to do? I minored in music and I was grateful for how much free time I had relative to the ones majoring in it.... and CS was no slouch with the homework, obviously.
In my school, CSI 2xx was the entry point for majors. There were two courses (Intro and a logic class) with just under 1000 enrolled.
The 3xx entry point class was 400 people, the next 3xx mandatory class was 250 and the 400s were typically 20-50 students.
I think one issue was they didn’t gate by GPA or other metrics. So you had many students who just couldn’t hack the math or didn’t have the drive early in the cycle. That decision tainted the professors... you were an idiot until proven otherwise.
I dual majored in history and it was night and day. Similar workload, but a totally different outlook. I still exchange Christmas cards with a couple of my history professors.
I agree with the GP. I had a similar experience at SUNY Buffalo in around the same time.
I terms of working for a FAANG, in order to pass the interview, you have to first get the interview. If you attend Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc, FAANG's will have career fair booths, and lots of other opportunity for internships and networking. You will be at the top of the pile and you're almost guaranteed a look.
Contrast that to attending a school like SUNY Buffalo. FAANGs don't generally recruit from schools like that. When I worked for Google, I offered to help with recruiting from SUNY Buffalo (which they called a "long tail" school). Their response was, rather than send people to the school, they set up a giant hangouts/meet video chat with auditoriums of kids from 4 different schools. The especially irritating thing to me was that my alma mater was not even included in the session that I led.
I think this sucks because I went to SUNY Buffalo because they offered me a much, much better deal financially than the "elite" schools did. I could have attended one of the favored few, but decided that I'd rather graduate without massive debt. Some of the smartest people I know I met there. They definitely weren't the rule, but a lot went on to get PhD's from places like Stanford and Caltech. So its not like big state schools have no qualified candidates. Its just hard to get the FAANGs to see that.
> Some of the smartest people I know I met there. They definitely weren't the rule, but a lot went on to get PhD's from places like Stanford and Caltech. So its not like big state schools have no qualified candidates. Its just hard to get the FAANGs to see that.
If you evaluate candidates yourself, you don't need to be interested in their credentials.
That's not the point of an interview. The problem isn't that SUNY has no qualified candidates, it's that the hiring process doesn't distinguish the qualified ones from the unqualified ones.
I'll counter that I went to SUNY Stony Brook and have not felt that I was shut out of any interviewing at any company because of it. At this point, my degree from 14 years ago is not nearly as important as the connections I've made with co-workers since.
Actually my anecdotal observation is that it's a little bit worse than that: they rank CS graduates from the top-10 schools at the very top, the next tier are the "gritty, self-taught boot-camp graduates" and after that are the graduates from any of the other thousands of universities. So if you don't get into MIT or CMU, you're actually better off skipping college entirely, at least if you're considering programming.
I went to a big state school in the 90s. The first two years were a hazing, with a brutal curve designed to drop class size from 1000+ (CSI 200) to about 80 graduates.
It was sink or swim and awarded grit. The only major worse was biology where organic chemistry weeded out the frat boys from premed.