[caffeine]

At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.

We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.

The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.

But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.

The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.

[Hermitian909]

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 working in the industry for a while they realized the thing holding back their work was bad software. Their response was to abandon a super senior technical role, take a massive pay cut, and work as a junior software engineer. They worked their way up to senior at a FAANG then jumped back into batteries. They're running a very exciting startup solving some very interesting and important problems.

The attitude that allows for people to both identify that they need to do some pretty unglamorous work to achieve their goals and then do it is what feels more common out of MIT or Caltech.

My experience is that Ivy schools impose more of an attitude of "you're the leaders of society, start solving problems now!" whether or not the students really have the know-how to be proposing solutions.

[geomark]

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 constantly but he could never get anything done. Week after week he was always two weeks from finishing his next milestone...and never did. Another guy told me that, as his boss, my job was to make sure he was happy to come to work every day. I told him we would both be better off if he did a good enough job to make me happy every day. And another said he didn't think there was any work worth his attention at the company, yet he was still there scraping by year after year. Small data set, but I was discouraged from recruiting there after going 0 for 3. I wish I had hired someone like you knew.

[Hermitian909]

This makes some sense, I've met or worked with easily 100 MIT grads, all of these failure modes feel within the band of the kinds of issues you have. The people who are duds on a purely productive level definitely fit the mold you describe and tend to burn out in low end jobs from what I've seen.

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.

[twic]

The Imperial kids also do a lot of internships and summer jobs, and are often the kind of alpha nerds who have serious side projects. I interview and work with a lot of interns and graduate hires from Imperial (and a few from Oxford and even other universities), and i'm highly dubious that the work they do during their actual course is whey they are learning to program.