I'm firmly of the mind that there are Really Good People to be found all over the place, not just traditional "powerhouse" schools.
That said, at Fogbeam now we have one founder (me) who attended UNC-Wilmington and 3 different community colleges and never finished his bachelors, two UNC-CH grads (and one of those two has returned to school at UNC-CH to take graduate classes) and one guy with a community college degree in business administration who's now studying C.S. at UNC-CH. So UNC Chapel Hill is heavily represented among our team, and it's hardly a bad school. But I've always maintained that when we have money to start recruiting "real employees", I intend to recruit at places like NCCU (North Carolina Central University), NC A&T, Fayetteville State, UNC-Pembroke, St. Augustines, Meredith, Shaw, William Peace, UNC-Greensboro, Wake Tech, Durham Tech, etc.
Why? Well, because I believe that are good, smart, talented people to be found there, and with the bonus that we're less likely to be competing against Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. for talent there. And furthermore, I find that you sometimes find people from the less touted schools who have something of a chip on their shoulders, have something to prove, and are just plain hungry to achieve. And those are people I like working with.
Anyway, sure, if you have a chance to go to Stanford or Berkeley or MIT, go for it. Why wouldn't you? But by the same token, if you don't go to one of those schools for whatever reason, it hardly means you can't still have a great career and accomplish things.
Nah, there are a lot of other schools here: Western Carolina, UNC-Asheville, East Carolina, Appalachian State, Campbell, UNC-Charlotte, Elizabeth City State, Elon, Duke, Wake Forest, Winston-Salem State, etc. I wasn't trying to list them all, but trying to emphasize the ones that I perceive as being considered "less touted" in relative terms. NCSU is actually pretty highly regarded, especially the engineering programs and the veterinary program, so that's the only real reason I didn't mention them. Same for Duke, which is generally regarded as a fairly "elite" school as well.
Same here. I have plenty of friends from all of NCSU, UNC, Duke, etc... sports rivalries and what-not aside, I consider all of them to be - at a minimum - "Pretty Good" schools. UNC is widely considered one of the so-called "Public Ivys" and Duke is generally held up as "elite" if a step below "Ivy League" or whatever. And State definitely has a strong reputation, especially in certain areas like engineering and veterinary science. I think their MBA program is also ranked fairly highly as well.
Heh, fair enough. Was just thinking for a minute that you were suggesting you'd consider Wake Tech grads over NCSU grads and I started getting a little concerned about my school's image :).
No, nothing like that at all. But what I would be saying is that - as a resource constrained startup - I'd likely recruit at Wake Tech before NCSU, since it's more likely the NCSU guy or gal is going to also be talking to various $BIGCORPs that are seen as highly desirable places to work.
and I started getting a little concerned about my school's image
Well, the old joke does still stand:
Person A: Where are you going to school?
Person B: NC State
Person A: Oh that's great, once you graduate you can get a job at John Deere.
Agreed. I went to a decent but. It noteworthy state school (and the list of things it is known for does not include CS). But I've worked at more than one of the companies on that infographic, and have had a nice career so far. I don't feel that my lack of a brand name school has necessarily held me back (though I'd also agree that if I'd have known the career path I was going to take, and if I'd have been able to get into a top tier school, I would have).
Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my experience, there's not much difference between a top MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school. The difference is in the distribution: the best schools can pick amongst great applicants, and therefore have a better average student.
The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs, and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.
But to the extent that this turns into a bias against students from other schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as every other accredited program. Even the books are the same.
But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone else. More candidates for the rest of us.
As a former average engineering student at a top school who's befriended and worked with a good number of top students at good but not top schools (ex: students on full rides in state school engineering programs), top students at these schools are probably somewhat better than the average student at a top school.
Of course, this is just an anecdotal perspective. Your mileage may vary.
I spoke imprecisely -- I don't have enough information to make that kind of a claim about "average students" (hopefully obviously).
But of the people I've worked with, there's no difference at the high end. Good students are just as good at no-name schools as they are at MIT. I updated my comment to be more clear.
What you do get at the top schools are students who excel at being good/great "students" (ie excelling within a predefined system). Some companies probably want that sort of quality, and are okay with having a large number of false negatives with respect to technical talent.
I am firmly of the opinion that getting a high GPA in a degree program is a strong indicator of determination, focus and work ethic -- qualities that are essential to "technical talent", that people who complain the loudest about formal education often lack. Setting a high bar for academic achievement enriches your applicant pool more than most other signals.
So while I think that credentialism is bad when taken to an extreme, I do think that credentials still have value.
Actually Google found that GPA is a weak indication of how a person performs. Apparently, according to Google, the GPA is only weakly correlated with job success in the first year or two.
I didn't say that I believe in GPA as a stack-ranking score. I just believe it has value when you're comparing someone who barely graduated with someone who graduated with honors. Even Google uses GPA for new grads (so says the article), probably for similar reasons.
Also, as long as we're being pedantic: "success at Google" is not clearly related to "success in a small company", or even "success in the world". We don't even know what they mean by "success".
No one doubts if unknown schools have any good candidates at all. It's all about probability of finding number of good candidates.
Top schools are all about providing fat pipelines of possibly talented individuals with very high probability. And let's not kid ourselves that every school has very large pool of talent. No one turns down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State. The most likely reason person ends up at non top 5 schools is because they couldn't get in those.
This implies that pretty much every one wants to study at top school. So top school gets first cut at widest possible selection of candidates and left over goes elsewhere. So the talent is indeed concentrated at top 5 schools.
Again keep in mind probabilities (take a course! This is one of the most important subject to learn, IMO) - it doesn't imply that talent is non-existent in other schools. So the probability of hiring 100 talented candidates who can get through same grueling interview at Fayetteville State should be fairly lower than at Stanford or MIT.
No one turned down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State
Probably not, but my hypothesis is that there are people at, say, Fayetteville State, that could have gone to Stanford but never even bothered applying. Maybe they thought they couldn't afford it, maybe they didn't want to move so far from home, who knows. And I also believe there are people who "couldn't get in" to, say, Stanford, who would still have excelled at Stanford had they attended. Some people aren't good high school students for any number of reasons, but are much better college students, but they don't have the grades to get into the "elite" schools.
So sure, if you came from a family who emphasized getting into Harvard or Stanford, and drove you relentlessly to get great grades, and provided all the support you needed all through high-school, and you were well fed everyday and had after-school SAT training, etc,, etc., then you probably should have gotten a 1600 on the SAT and gone to Harvard. But a LOT of people were missing one or more of those elements in their upbringing.
Not to mention, some people (this was my story) basically just blow off high-school because they're bored senseless, resent being forced to attend, and aren't the people with the right temperament to be part of the cool clique and therefore despise huge swathes of their time at school. Of course, that same kid is probably going home and building Tesla coils and experimenting with high-voltage electronics, or writing code or something after school, but it isn't reflected in their grades, and it won't help them get into an "elite" school.
Also keep in mind that I'm not saying that a Fayetteville State or UNC Pembroke represents a "fat pipeline". But I am saying it represents a pipeline, and one where a resource starved startup is less likely to be competing against Google or IBM or Facebook or Yahoo, etc., for people.
Interestingly, merely applying to top schools seems a very strong signal of future earning potential – whether or not you're admitted. See for example the details here:
Well, I'm just an anecdote, but I think that's definitely true.
I never made less than an A in high school and I made a perfect score on the ACT. I feel pretty confident that had I applied at a "top school" I would have had a fair chance of getting in. Maybe not - I probably would have been weaker on the non-academic admission requirements. I ended up going to a local community college for free and then transferring to a state university where eventually I got my graduate degree. I received several awards while there for academic performance, had some papers published with my name on them, and had a 4.0 again.
Frankly it never even occurred to me to apply to other schools. I just wasn't interested and nobody talked about it. If you asked me now why I didn't, I couldn't really tell you. Looking back, I'm sure some of it was moving away from home. In retrospect I would have been worse off financially - the scholarship didn't hold past the CC, so I paid cash for the rest (I worked a _lot_) until I got a TA position and graduated debt free.
I think though some people in SV would still look at that in askance though, and see that as saying something - "hey, this guy's not as motivated" or "this guy wouldn't be as dedicate as much of his life" and maybe that's true. In terms of work performance, though, I don't see a difference and I've always received extremely positive reviews.
No doubt there are things I'm missing out on, like the kind of connections I might have made at a top school, but I'm doing pretty well for myself and I don't regret anything.
> No one turns down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State. The most likely reason person ends up at non top 5 schools is because they couldn't get in those.
I am extremely skeptical of this line of reasoning because it assumes that only important criterion for choosing a school is whether it's good or not (or, alternatively, whether it has brand recognition, depending on one's perspective).
There are a vast swath of other reasons that could rank more highly then whether a school is good or not. Two reasons easily in reach are geography and financial resources. I certainly restricted my choice based on those criteria well before whether the school was any good, and I don't regret it at all.
This isn't about an individual. Of course Really Good People can come from anywhere, but not with the same probability. And when you're recruiting, you want to hit schools with high
concentration of talents.
You'd be lying to yourself if you think schools like NCCU and Durham Tech have the same concentration of talents as MIT, Stanford, etc.
Interesting article. Although to say this is for 'Tech Companies' is a bit off. A lot of the schools on that list are likely only on there due to geographic location (Bay Area or greater California area). There are plenty of Midwest and East Coast schools that feed plenty of Tech Companies, just not necessarily the few big ones out in California used for this infographic. If this were better accounted for I'd imagine there would be more big name Midwest schools and Ivy's alike.
Pedigree is industry-specific. Bankers think of Stanford as a mediocre party school. (I'm not saying it is, but admitting Duplan and Speigel didn't help their case.) The Valley thinks of Yalies and Princetonians in similarly negative terms: third-rate artsy goofs. (Again, I'm not saying that it's an accurate perception.) Good-ol'-boy blue bloods (who still populate F500 boardrooms and attend Davos, but aren't relevant to any industry we care about) hold mediocre-but-rich northeastern schools in high regard, but don't think much of MIT (or, more accurately, they despise it).
School snobbery isn't rational and there certainly isn't a linear ordering (it being the parochial prejudice of pseudointellectuals too dumb to actually judge people as individuals). But the Yale and Princeton students (disliked by the Valley) can easily find good jobs outside the Valley, and do.
Usually, however, they go into something like management consulting, which means they come in a bit later and clean up the messes resulting from badly-architected California companies and a decade or so of man-child management.
Increasingly, the route seems to be shortening, with many of my classmates going the Finance (3-4 yrs) -> MBA (2 yrs) -> VC/PM/Mktg in tech as they burn out, whereas I think they used to arrive a bit later in their careers.
It seems strange that my school (University of Waterloo) shows no people going to Google. Especially since there is a large Google office less than 5km from campus.
Yeah. UW feeds a lot to the local Seattle Facebook and Google offices, not just Microsoft. But I guess those satellite offices are a small portion of the larger companies.
The top-5 cutoff really throws it off. For the non-tech roles that are a lot less selective, pedigree isn't that important and geography will dominate. Where the data is actually interesting is in high-level roles where the competitive frame (for companies and for people) is national.
They based this on an interestingly small amount of data. The 5,318 Google employees, for example, is a pretty small fraction of the 49,829 employees they had in Q1 of 2014.
If you look at the text between Microsoft and IBM, it seems to imply that the number 5318 is just the sum of the top 5 universities that feed to Google. They are only considering the top 5 feeder universities for each company.
Stats 101: Sample size alone describes only variance in measurement and I think even the sample size of 1000 would be pretty acceptable in this case. Whether these numbers are biased or not depends on if sample was drawn randomly (i.e. if it reflects actual distribution).
It doesn't really matter how many employees google has, if you just interview a few hundred-a few thousand chosen at random you will get good estimates of the fractions.
Interesting data, but the focus on the top 5 from each company isn't going to indicate much (too corrupted by geography) and the more informative question is what kinds of positions each school is feeding into. Especially if non-technical positions are included, the locality bias is exactly what we'd expect. Google doesn't demand elite degrees for its lower-level HR functions.
My observation is that school pedigree doesn't actually matter that much for getting in the door, but (rather disgustingly) has more of an effect once one is in. It's relatively easy to get a referral that bypasses the resume wall (as long as you're in the geographic area) and then interview performance trumps pedigree. However, pedigree matters a lot after getting the job, especially when it comes to project allocation. If you have pedigree, tech companies know you have other options and will give you decent projects. If you're from SJSU, you might be very good but they'll assume that you don't have other options and you're more likely to get grunt work.
Getting the job is the much easier battle in which pedigree doesn't matter much. Getting good projects once in the door is, in large tech companies where it's impossible to prove oneself in a meaningful way until already having favorable project allocation, very strongly influenced by pedigree. People who believe in "meritocracy" will argue that it's possible to succeed on the crap project and gain recognition, but in reality that only gets a person more crap work. This long-lasting and completely inexcusable pedigree effects is one of the dark, ugly secrets that few people will talk about. (People are, morally speaking, OK with the fact that Harvard resumes get more attention than SJSU resumes. The idea that pedigree would still matter among the pool selected for jobs, if better known, would inflame them.)
My experience was the opposite - the degree makes them take note of your resume, but once you're in nobody cares (or often knows) where you went to school.
FWIW, one of my interviewers went to SJSU. He wrote the JS styleguide, and was a key contributor to Closure and GChat (back when it didn't suck). Another of my interviewers went to UMich/AnnArbor and then toured around the country in a punk rock band; she was the Docs TL before doing a bunch of important work for Search Infrastructure and Chrome. Important work goes to people who seek it out and have a track record of delivering.
The problem is that in these large tech companies, the ability to "deliver" is not scarce. Almost everyone is good and the people on bad projects are hideously underemployed, so the rate of "delivering" is 98%. To get a good project, you need a track record of delivering on good projects. Otherwise, you just proved that you're a good grunt. That doesn't buy you anything.
Delivering on a bad project just gets you typecast, and that's in the good case where you do well. Then there are the bad projects that are bad (and might not be delivered) because they're impossible or pack the bad kind of challenge (i.e. hideous legacy code, which won't get the same respect as building a new system).
The luck of the first project determines everything in the types of companies that we're talking about. And a lot of it is luck: sometimes, as you've noted, people from less prestigious schools land well early on and kill it. However, pedigree is a variable that people (at least, in theory) have some control over. For example, if I wanted to go back and get a PhD, I'm sure I could, and I could probably get that pedigree. (PhD admissions are actually competitive, but I'm certainly smarter than 95+% of those getting into Harvard/Stanford MBA school.) But do I want to deal with an archaic, slow application process and pay 5 years of opportunity cost, given that I'd be 32 at the earliest point that I could start? Probably not, and I shouldn't be penalized for it.
Again, my experience was very different from yours, and I believe the difference was due to career choices we made and not strictly random chance.
All of the high-priority, high-visibility projects I got because I volunteered for them. My first task at Google was fixing unit tests; my second was writing a signup dashboard for my first project's internal dogfood. It took me about 8 months to end up on a highly-visible project [1], but when I did it got me exec attention, a reputation as someone who was an expert in the department, and a cameo appearance in BusinessWeek. 8 months after you had started at Google, you'd already left in a huff.
I know someone who spent 4 years working with the bowel's of Google's cluster management system and transferred successfully to Search, and now to Loon. I know someone who worked for 4 years doing all the grunt work for a project that got canceled; he transferred to Search and now leads a department. I know someone who built his entire career on refactoring "hideous legacy code" - actually, several someones, but the first one I thought of was reliably promoted, every 18 months or so, from SWE 3 to Distinguished, and the other ones are all around Staff or Senior Staff level.
Now, whether you're happy or not is a different question, and there are good reasons not to waste 4 years of your life doing something you find boring. But external constraints are not one of them. People judge you based on how well you perform relative to the opportunities in front of you, not what those opportunities are.
I'm guessing that the reason the percentage of CMU alums going to Google is high compared to say, MIT/Berkeley/Stanford is because CMU is predominantly a CS school while the latter group is a bit more balanced towards other engineering disciplines such as EE/ME?
edit: realized that this is because these firms don't hire nonengineers from CMU because the school is not local.
Wow. Employees tend to have gone to college nearby their employers' headquarters. Sources monitoring the unfolding pattern indicate that people also tend to enroll in universities near where they live. Film at 11.
Or perhaps all the commitment to "hiring the best" is just posturing and they really take whatever is available that happens to meet the arbitrary standard imposed on Tuesday afternoon
In high school, I didn't know there were such things as "top colleges". I knew Harvard and Yale existed and were good...but beyond that I honestly didn't even know MIT existed. It's probably because my family has been in America for only about 60 years now and my generation is the first to go to college (honestly just guessing here..)
So I applied to college and went to a pretty big state school (for my area).
I'm really blessed to end up where I've ended up after graduation. I know so many really really good classmates who have a lot of talent and never even get a glance when looking for jobs at some of these companies. It really just isn't fair sometimes...
It would be interesting to see this data broken down by geographical office for the larger tech companies. I would expect to see more students from northeastern schools at Google's NYC office than in the Mountain View office.
One thing I found weird about this was all the UT Austin people going to Facebook, since as far as I know there's no geographical reason (does FB even have satellite offices?). Can anyone explain why that occurs?
45 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThat said, at Fogbeam now we have one founder (me) who attended UNC-Wilmington and 3 different community colleges and never finished his bachelors, two UNC-CH grads (and one of those two has returned to school at UNC-CH to take graduate classes) and one guy with a community college degree in business administration who's now studying C.S. at UNC-CH. So UNC Chapel Hill is heavily represented among our team, and it's hardly a bad school. But I've always maintained that when we have money to start recruiting "real employees", I intend to recruit at places like NCCU (North Carolina Central University), NC A&T, Fayetteville State, UNC-Pembroke, St. Augustines, Meredith, Shaw, William Peace, UNC-Greensboro, Wake Tech, Durham Tech, etc.
Why? Well, because I believe that are good, smart, talented people to be found there, and with the bonus that we're less likely to be competing against Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. for talent there. And furthermore, I find that you sometimes find people from the less touted schools who have something of a chip on their shoulders, have something to prove, and are just plain hungry to achieve. And those are people I like working with.
Anyway, sure, if you have a chance to go to Stanford or Berkeley or MIT, go for it. Why wouldn't you? But by the same token, if you don't go to one of those schools for whatever reason, it hardly means you can't still have a great career and accomplish things.
and I started getting a little concerned about my school's image
Well, the old joke does still stand:
Person A: Where are you going to school?
Person B: NC State
Person A: Oh that's great, once you graduate you can get a job at John Deere.
(j/k'ing!!!!)
The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs, and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.
But to the extent that this turns into a bias against students from other schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as every other accredited program. Even the books are the same.
But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone else. More candidates for the rest of us.
So the average student at a top school is roughly equal to a top student at an average school?
Of course, this is just an anecdotal perspective. Your mileage may vary.
But of the people I've worked with, there's no difference at the high end. Good students are just as good at no-name schools as they are at MIT. I updated my comment to be more clear.
So while I think that credentialism is bad when taken to an extreme, I do think that credentials still have value.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...
Also, as long as we're being pedantic: "success at Google" is not clearly related to "success in a small company", or even "success in the world". We don't even know what they mean by "success".
Top schools are all about providing fat pipelines of possibly talented individuals with very high probability. And let's not kid ourselves that every school has very large pool of talent. No one turns down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State. The most likely reason person ends up at non top 5 schools is because they couldn't get in those.
This implies that pretty much every one wants to study at top school. So top school gets first cut at widest possible selection of candidates and left over goes elsewhere. So the talent is indeed concentrated at top 5 schools.
Again keep in mind probabilities (take a course! This is one of the most important subject to learn, IMO) - it doesn't imply that talent is non-existent in other schools. So the probability of hiring 100 talented candidates who can get through same grueling interview at Fayetteville State should be fairly lower than at Stanford or MIT.
Probably not, but my hypothesis is that there are people at, say, Fayetteville State, that could have gone to Stanford but never even bothered applying. Maybe they thought they couldn't afford it, maybe they didn't want to move so far from home, who knows. And I also believe there are people who "couldn't get in" to, say, Stanford, who would still have excelled at Stanford had they attended. Some people aren't good high school students for any number of reasons, but are much better college students, but they don't have the grades to get into the "elite" schools.
So sure, if you came from a family who emphasized getting into Harvard or Stanford, and drove you relentlessly to get great grades, and provided all the support you needed all through high-school, and you were well fed everyday and had after-school SAT training, etc,, etc., then you probably should have gotten a 1600 on the SAT and gone to Harvard. But a LOT of people were missing one or more of those elements in their upbringing.
Not to mention, some people (this was my story) basically just blow off high-school because they're bored senseless, resent being forced to attend, and aren't the people with the right temperament to be part of the cool clique and therefore despise huge swathes of their time at school. Of course, that same kid is probably going home and building Tesla coils and experimenting with high-voltage electronics, or writing code or something after school, but it isn't reflected in their grades, and it won't help them get into an "elite" school.
Also keep in mind that I'm not saying that a Fayetteville State or UNC Pembroke represents a "fat pipeline". But I am saying it represents a pipeline, and one where a resource starved startup is less likely to be competing against Google or IBM or Facebook or Yahoo, etc., for people.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...
I never made less than an A in high school and I made a perfect score on the ACT. I feel pretty confident that had I applied at a "top school" I would have had a fair chance of getting in. Maybe not - I probably would have been weaker on the non-academic admission requirements. I ended up going to a local community college for free and then transferring to a state university where eventually I got my graduate degree. I received several awards while there for academic performance, had some papers published with my name on them, and had a 4.0 again.
Frankly it never even occurred to me to apply to other schools. I just wasn't interested and nobody talked about it. If you asked me now why I didn't, I couldn't really tell you. Looking back, I'm sure some of it was moving away from home. In retrospect I would have been worse off financially - the scholarship didn't hold past the CC, so I paid cash for the rest (I worked a _lot_) until I got a TA position and graduated debt free.
I think though some people in SV would still look at that in askance though, and see that as saying something - "hey, this guy's not as motivated" or "this guy wouldn't be as dedicate as much of his life" and maybe that's true. In terms of work performance, though, I don't see a difference and I've always received extremely positive reviews.
No doubt there are things I'm missing out on, like the kind of connections I might have made at a top school, but I'm doing pretty well for myself and I don't regret anything.
I am extremely skeptical of this line of reasoning because it assumes that only important criterion for choosing a school is whether it's good or not (or, alternatively, whether it has brand recognition, depending on one's perspective).
There are a vast swath of other reasons that could rank more highly then whether a school is good or not. Two reasons easily in reach are geography and financial resources. I certainly restricted my choice based on those criteria well before whether the school was any good, and I don't regret it at all.
You'd be lying to yourself if you think schools like NCCU and Durham Tech have the same concentration of talents as MIT, Stanford, etc.
School snobbery isn't rational and there certainly isn't a linear ordering (it being the parochial prejudice of pseudointellectuals too dumb to actually judge people as individuals). But the Yale and Princeton students (disliked by the Valley) can easily find good jobs outside the Valley, and do.
Usually, however, they go into something like management consulting, which means they come in a bit later and clean up the messes resulting from badly-architected California companies and a decade or so of man-child management.
My observation is that school pedigree doesn't actually matter that much for getting in the door, but (rather disgustingly) has more of an effect once one is in. It's relatively easy to get a referral that bypasses the resume wall (as long as you're in the geographic area) and then interview performance trumps pedigree. However, pedigree matters a lot after getting the job, especially when it comes to project allocation. If you have pedigree, tech companies know you have other options and will give you decent projects. If you're from SJSU, you might be very good but they'll assume that you don't have other options and you're more likely to get grunt work.
Getting the job is the much easier battle in which pedigree doesn't matter much. Getting good projects once in the door is, in large tech companies where it's impossible to prove oneself in a meaningful way until already having favorable project allocation, very strongly influenced by pedigree. People who believe in "meritocracy" will argue that it's possible to succeed on the crap project and gain recognition, but in reality that only gets a person more crap work. This long-lasting and completely inexcusable pedigree effects is one of the dark, ugly secrets that few people will talk about. (People are, morally speaking, OK with the fact that Harvard resumes get more attention than SJSU resumes. The idea that pedigree would still matter among the pool selected for jobs, if better known, would inflame them.)
FWIW, one of my interviewers went to SJSU. He wrote the JS styleguide, and was a key contributor to Closure and GChat (back when it didn't suck). Another of my interviewers went to UMich/AnnArbor and then toured around the country in a punk rock band; she was the Docs TL before doing a bunch of important work for Search Infrastructure and Chrome. Important work goes to people who seek it out and have a track record of delivering.
Delivering on a bad project just gets you typecast, and that's in the good case where you do well. Then there are the bad projects that are bad (and might not be delivered) because they're impossible or pack the bad kind of challenge (i.e. hideous legacy code, which won't get the same respect as building a new system).
The luck of the first project determines everything in the types of companies that we're talking about. And a lot of it is luck: sometimes, as you've noted, people from less prestigious schools land well early on and kill it. However, pedigree is a variable that people (at least, in theory) have some control over. For example, if I wanted to go back and get a PhD, I'm sure I could, and I could probably get that pedigree. (PhD admissions are actually competitive, but I'm certainly smarter than 95+% of those getting into Harvard/Stanford MBA school.) But do I want to deal with an archaic, slow application process and pay 5 years of opportunity cost, given that I'd be 32 at the earliest point that I could start? Probably not, and I shouldn't be penalized for it.
All of the high-priority, high-visibility projects I got because I volunteered for them. My first task at Google was fixing unit tests; my second was writing a signup dashboard for my first project's internal dogfood. It took me about 8 months to end up on a highly-visible project [1], but when I did it got me exec attention, a reputation as someone who was an expert in the department, and a cameo appearance in BusinessWeek. 8 months after you had started at Google, you'd already left in a huff.
I know someone who spent 4 years working with the bowel's of Google's cluster management system and transferred successfully to Search, and now to Loon. I know someone who worked for 4 years doing all the grunt work for a project that got canceled; he transferred to Search and now leads a department. I know someone who built his entire career on refactoring "hideous legacy code" - actually, several someones, but the first one I thought of was reliably promoted, every 18 months or so, from SWE 3 to Distinguished, and the other ones are all around Staff or Senior Staff level.
Now, whether you're happy or not is a different question, and there are good reasons not to waste 4 years of your life doing something you find boring. But external constraints are not one of them. People judge you based on how well you perform relative to the opportunities in front of you, not what those opportunities are.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...
edit: realized that this is because these firms don't hire nonengineers from CMU because the school is not local.
So I applied to college and went to a pretty big state school (for my area).
I'm really blessed to end up where I've ended up after graduation. I know so many really really good classmates who have a lot of talent and never even get a glance when looking for jobs at some of these companies. It really just isn't fair sometimes...