[rando001111]

You're talking like Oxford is some school for shitdogs now.

I went to an unranked school here in Canada for electrical engineering and graduated this year. I did a couple co-ops, won a couple engineering competitions and had my EIT job lined up for me after graduation. Started work a week after classes ended.

Rankings are not the end-all be-all for uni.

[nine_k]

On one hand, fair. On the other hand, an MIT or Stanford graduate is more likely to be immediately hired by Google, or NVidia, or Barclays, or something else top-notch, without having to make intermediate career steps.

[saghm]

My perception is that the further you get from the time of graduation, the less it makes a difference where someone went to school. A year or two, I felt like where I got my degree might have made a difference in terms of my ability to find jobs, but coming up on a a decade since I graduated (which is a pretty small portion of what I expect will be a decades-long career), it might as well be entirely irrelevant. Amusingly, I said something similar to one of my colleagues recently when we were discussing the level of stress their teenager was having around their upcoming college applications, and they agreed, mentioning that no one cared that they didn't even have a degree, which was clearly true since I had absolutely no idea that was the case! It never came up in the past despite us chatting fairly regularly about our personal lives because it ultimately just didn't matter to either of us, and while it affected their initial attempts to break into the software industry, it pretty quickly stopped mattering even to their prospective employers compared to their actual work experience.

Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.

[nextos]

DeepMind and top firms from the City of London have recruiters chasing Oxbridge students in CS, Math, and Statistics before graduation, sometimes even a year or two ahead. You hear more about MIT or Stanford because you are based in the US. Ranking or prestige-wise, in case that matters (I think it's just a lazy filter), they are indistinguishable: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025

[rando001111]

My counterpoint is that those companies you listed do more harm than good anyhow. Advertising and data gathering, helping LLM companies train models that use more electricity than many countries, and charging outrageous interest and practicing usury.

Why would you want to work for those places?

Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.

[wyclif]

You're talking like Oxford is some school for shitdogs now

A rather crude way to express it. But I don't think that pointing out that Oxbridge isn't always a first choice implies, um, "shitdog" status, whatever that is.

[ionwake]

im so confused whether a shitdog is a good thing or bad thing, Im too in love with the term to look it up. Its like a schrodingers cat of words.