Nobody will ever accuse David Heinemeier Hansson of being subtle. He’s brash and often profane. But like him or not, you can’t argue with his success. He’s a partner in 37signals, a New York Times best-selling author, the creator of the web-application framework Ruby on Rails, and the 2005 winner of Google and O’Reilly’s “Best Hacker of the Year.”
Here's his post from their company blog yesterday.
If I hear one more Silicon Valley type gush over a computer science graduate from CMU, MIT, or Stanford, I’m going to puke. Yes, yes, I’m sure these are mighty dandy nice schools, but you’re letting the stench of superiority and shallow whiff of superficial judgement pollute my airways.
The fantastic thing about programmers is that we don’t have to give a f*ck about where they were trained because we have something much better available: We can look at what they actually do! We don’t need the indirection of pedigree to guess at their skills, we can look at their code and know it.
Here’s a list of the top tier schools that helped shape the fine band of programmers we employ at 37signals:
Lawrence University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Brock University
Washtenaw Community College
California Institute of Technology
Copenhagen Business School
Brigham Young University”
There’s truth to what he says no matter what career you may want after college. Just going to college—famous or not—and getting a degree isn’t what’s going to get you a job. Employers want to know, “What can you actually do?” If you attend the right college for you, you’ll have four years of virtually unlimited opportunity to find an answer to that question. See my June 2011 post for more on that if you're interested.