[irollboozers]

Lol, this is why I laughed to myself when reading this article.

There are tons, I mean tons, of great startups coming out of UW, but they are not coming from the CSE program. They are coming from math, physics, life sciences, and even the entrepreneurship program at the Foster b-school. All the kids who I've met making waves in the Seattle startup scene are informally trained hackers. Oh and by the way, did I mention they are all young and under 23-24, and not PhD/Master's students?

This article is all good for the image of the school and Seattle, but it fails to grasp the real movement of the scene. The movers and shakers, the ones at the crest of a huge potential tsunami in Seattle, are the young people who never got the silver spoon of CS programs, and thus will never be lured away to cushy $80k jobs as entry-level coder at Amazon.

[ken]

I think you're right about UW CSE, but I'd like to point out similar observations on a different axis.

I know lots of software people in and around Seattle, and I've worked at a couple startups here. A few are "informally trained hackers", but most are formally trained -- only elsewhere (mostly Stanford, or east coast schools you've heard of).

While everyone knows that UW has a good CS department, I don't think I know a single person who went there. I actually know more programmers who went to Whitman (one) than UW.

I don't know where they're going: maybe they leave town, or maybe they're getting hired by big companies, or maybe I'm just hanging out in the wrong circles (quite possible).

[seanmcdirmid]

It used to be that most UW CSE grads went down to Intel, these days many are off to Google; I'm sure some of them even make their way to Microsoft, but its not a large program so its not like you would see many around outside some otherwise obvious places.

Coolness about Whitman. Walla Walla doesn't get enough love.

[tylermenezes]

Most everyone I know from the CSE program who've graduated are now working for Facebook. They seem to be a major recruiter from there. They even opened a Seattle office fairly recently.