He freely admits that he wasted four years there just biding time until he started his career at one of the top computer/IT firms in the world. He said it was far more difficult to get into those schools than to stay there once you were admitted.
Personally, I never hire anyone in my STEM field from "top" universities. The graduates I've come across from those schools have less knowledge and common sense than the kids who were my high school peers.
I’ve worked with “STEM” people from both “top” universities and lower-tier universities. FWIW, here’s my observation.
In any technical field, whether it’s engineering, or science, or software, there’s “the thing,” which is whatever the invention, or idea, or technology, or product might be, and there’s “scaling the thing.”
You can’t “scale the thing” without “the thing,” and you can’t make money with “the thing” without “scaling the thing.”
The skills and mindset and attitude of scaling the thing are completely different from the skills, mindset, and attitude necessary to create the thing, whatever it is.
The middlebrow universities are more likely to produce the people who think up the thing, and the top schools are more likely to produce the people who scale up the thing.
There are numerous examples of this in the real world, the most obvious one that comes to mind is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He didn’t think of “facebook,” it already existed, although I believe it was called “the pigbook.” He just took the idea and scaled it up using software, computer, and networking technology.
But there are numerous other examples.
Steve Jobs was a rare example of a “scaler” who was able to do it with just a tangential involvement with a university, and it was a non-elite university to boot.
That’s in the world of today. In the past, a lot of important things came out of elite universities; I’m thinking of the laser and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, both invented by people at Columbia University.
Radar was invented by someone from a middlebrow school, as was cavity magnetron, which made it into a universal tool of the modern world.