I haven't officially started work at Palantir yet (and will be in Palo Alto for training once I do), but Palantir is hiring engineers aggressively for its brand-new office in New York City.
The exclusivity was also emphasized by everyone knowing it had come out of Harvard at the very beginning, which had and has a social cachet that Google Plus won't.
I remember an old article, probably from Wired, floating around a few years ago. I think it had something to do with a single operator seizing control of a stolen credit card number cache or marketplace. Either way, one of the takeaways was that 'hackers' (using the term in the mainstream way) are typically pretty soft-shelled themselves. All offense no defense.
I don't really have much to contribute on the story itself, but I suddenly realized that my former CS472 Artificial Intelligence project partner and friend from Cornell works for Silver Lake, which has led me down an interesting path of daydreaming now that I'm starting work with a Valley-based company in a few weeks.
It would actually make for a great short story or novelette to see former classmates on opposite sides of a deal like this. A lot of very smart engineers go straight into jobs in technology sector investment banking, private equity, etc. soon after college that could eventually put them on a collision course with erstwhile friends.
I could speculate on any number of reasons. A large number of my relatives work in defense contracting and you see the same videos passed around there as well. I admit that I feel slightly unnerved by the videos sometimes, but if you're an engineer working on gunships or a former soldier for whom this was a part of daily life for a while, I don't think there's anything really blameworthy in finding videos from the war interesting on some level.
There's a great applicable quote from Nikola Tesla here:
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”
I occasionally do Topcoder SRM's and Marathon Matches.
It's partly for fun, partly to keep myself in practice since I don't feel my current job pushes me as hard intellectually. The pressure and problems are also good interview practice--though, as a caveat, I feel that some of the ways they structure problem inputs locks you into a certain way of thinking. Though, that might be my own fault and means I should just switch languages randomly during SRM practice to broaden my perspective.
Dude, the normal career path of pretty much everyone is over by 35-40. Lawyers that haven't made partner, traders that haven't made been made head of their desk, engineers in general that haven't made it to management, teachers that haven't moved into administration.
It's not like they take all the programmers over 40 out behind the cubicle farm and shoot them or something. I also feel compelled to point out that "programmer" as a career is a fairly new option and information technology is still growing rapidly, so the field in general will indeed look a bit younger.
And, finally, I think your real point is just that going to a school with a worthless Java-lego-blocks program for CS is well..worthless. Dismissing everything but the top 4 schools is just inflammatory and obscures the real point..and, admittedly, I couldn't keep down my gut reaction of inflammation as an alum of one of the schools usually mentioned as a contender for #5.
That's not been my observation for engineers outside of software (there's some truth to it, certainly GM plays that game) and certainly not for teachers. Nor is it true for scientists. Don't know about mathematicians. Certainly not true for doctors.
They may not "shoot them or something" but they do stop hiring them. I have some interesting personal anecdotal experience here:
I look much younger than I am (at 49, until a few months ago when I started getting a few gray hairs, I was routinely mistaken for an early '20s college student (this is a family trait, no one thinks my 77 year old father is beyond his early '60s)), so it's trivial for me to not let on to my age until I slip and e.g. mention working on PDP-11s (had one interviewer exclaim "How old are you?!?!!!" that time :-).
Starting about when I turned 35 I found it increasingly difficult to find work in the D.C. area ... until in the middle of one job search I scrubbed my resume of all the info that signaled my age, most especially when I attended college. Bam, it was like night and day, in that job search and in future ones.
Anyway, I believe that the nature of the field of software development rewards experience in terms of quality ... but we all know that most suits are interested in playing as little as possible, even if this results in technical debt or outright project failure that kills the company (one problem is that non-programmers just don't understand the field and its constraints and so on).
To finish, I'm not dismissing all but the top 4 schools, I'm saying that if your goal is to continue programming past age 35-40 attending any other is going to put one more obstacle in your path and by no means will attending 1 of these 4 make it easy anyway. Since you don't believe in that goal I'm not addressing you or your career or whatever.
I doubt this is actually what happened, but I can picture Zed finishing a post suggesting that students take some time to learn about culture while at university.
Then he decided that he wasn't going to piss off and fire up his usual quota with just that so he added an opening and closing attacking a CS education. I'm in pretty decisive disagreement with him on what he says about CS here, but there's a valuable point in here.
CS students, and engineers in general, are a little too dismissive of the liberal arts. There are some genuine reasons for this, but Zed is right in that it's supreme arrogance to think we have nothing to learn from thousands of years of human achievement in the arts. Ultimately, culture is how humanity expresses itself with the time and energy we've bought for it by making life easier with technological progress. Taking some time to understand the human condition through culture before we transform it would be a good thing.
Plus, on a personal level, meeting people who aren't fellow engineers is generally a good thing. Guys, there are a lot more girls outside of CS than there are therein... Hell, girls, that goes for you too if you just want to talk to another girl for once.
The impression I got was that not even the scholars knew what digital media was. However, I did acquire a large pool of information of what this grouping of similar people were up to. They were a great source of inspiration and if art is one thing, it's building upon the works of others and the humanities offers a larger pool for you to build upon.
However, when it comes to better understanding how people react to their environment, I turn to the social sciences for a more concrete explanation. My naive understanding of the humanities is that it's based upon assumptions and opinions, but I bet a wiser scholar can show me differently.
BTW, depending on where you go, a CS degree can be more of a liberal art education than a technical one.
Your best bets are electronic trading at a bank or hedge fund or realtime market data work at a place like FactSet or Bloomberg. I don't know of anything non-finance related though. All the startup people I've talked to around here are Ruby or PHP enthusiasts.
http://www.palantirtech.com/
I haven't officially started work at Palantir yet (and will be in Palo Alto for training once I do), but Palantir is hiring engineers aggressively for its brand-new office in New York City.