[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.