Don't Believe The Hype: Prestige/Rankings In Engineering Do Not Really Matter....

[sakky]

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And you are right in that job performance is hard to measure, but that is still what your future success will be based on. If you work for a big company, your success will be based on your superiors’ perception of your job performance. In most places, your performance will be fairly accurately quantified on most occasions. Are some of your good performances going to slip through the cracks and be unnoticed, sure. Are you likely to also get better reviews than deserved on some project once or twice. Probably. Regardless, your school is not going to play a difference in how your performance is perceived once you get to 5 years into your career, because at that point, everyone is judging you on your career.

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<p>I agree - but that means that it behooves you to find a job where you can leverage the brand name of your school to obtain the most exclusive job that you can. 15 years ago, the ‘high prestige’ employer in software engineering was probably Microsoft, recently it was (and to some extent still is) Google, now it is Facebook or perhaps Twitter. Those employers serve as gold-plated brand names in the labor market. So even if you are hired by Facebook and do mediocre work, you still can list Facebook on your resume. </p>

<p>Keep in mind that other employers won’t really know how well you performed in your past jobs. Nowadays, many companies are loathe to provide bad recommendations regarding former employees for fear of being sued. Furthermore, it’s usually hard to ferret out who exactly you as a prospective employer should be talking to in order to assess the worthiness of a particular job candidate. That candidate may provide you with the names of 3 references, but those are surely going to be 3 of his old friends or other such colleagues who he knows will sing a positive tune. </p>

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Consulting offers an obviously different set of circumstances, like you said, and you won’t get hired as a consultant most likely if you came from East Bufu State, but that is a very small subset of “engineering jobs.”

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<p>It is indeed a very small subset of all engineering jobs, but it represents a highly prominent subset of jobs available to students from the top-ranked engineering schools such as MIT and Stanford. See below.</p>

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Now I won’t proclaim to be an expert in consulting since I have only worked in more traditional engineering industry jobs and as a grad student, but I would imagine that you could get into consulting from one of these small schools if you supplement your school with several years of quality work experience. You can correct me if I am wrong on that of course, but I would think that if you worked as a successful project engineer at GE or something, that would look pretty good to consulting firms looking to hire.

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<p>No, it wouldn’t. The same is true of investment banking and other careers in high finance. If those are the jobs that you want - and that is indeed what many engineering students at the top schools such as MIT do want - you essentially have to join those companies right out of school, for that is where the hiring takes place. Seldom do firms such as McKinsey or Goldman Sachs conduct hiring outside of campus recruiting, which means that if you don’t join such firms right out of school - whether undergrad or MBA - you probably never will. That is why so many engineers who decide that they want to change careers to consulting or banking go back to school for their MBA’s, for they know that’s the only pathway they have to recruit at those companies. </p>

<p>In recent years, nearly half of all MIT undergrads who enter the workforce will take jobs not in engineering, but in consulting or banking. The numbers will surely dip now due to the recent travails of the banking industry, but I rather doubt that the combined fraction will dip much below 1/3. What that means is that one of the best -if ironic- reasons to go to MIT is not to get a job in engineering but rather to get a job in consulting and banking.</p>