I folks, today I came across this interesting paper about the top ranked Engineers in the world. I found it very interesting since “proved” exactly my personals opposite thoughts on this topic (which BTW it is not focused on Security at all), and for such a reason I decide to post it here even if it is a total off topic post.
I don’t know why in my mind I always been believing that best Engineers (obviously I am referring to Computer Engineers ) where in Universities. In my personal ranking list there were something like Stanford, MIT and Berkeley Universities as places where some of the top Engineers were gathered. My logical flow was pretty clear, best universities produce best engineers this means that best University tends to be rounded by best Engineers. Well I was wrong. Best engineers , like most of the people out there, are attracted by good working positions, which include (but not limited to) good salaries, benefits and free time, and so they tend to “move out” from Universities that often (but not always) are not able to compete with big giants like Apple, Google, Oracle, Microsoft etc… According to this research the top ranked Engineers work for companies and not for Universities as shown in the following fancy diagram.
Personally I think it is normal, as said, often (but not always) Universities cannot compete with giants in terms of good job positions, so I don’t have to say that I agree or that I do not agree. It is a statistic.
As you might see from the above diagram Palantir seems to be the company with the top ranked Engineers. For sure Palantir interview processes are very hard and only a few percentage sees “the end”. This is not a surprise for me, Palantir works with “delicate” agencies such as secret services and high finance, they need for sure the top ranked Engineers. Surprisingly (for me) Dropbox engineers come in the second place while Google and Apple are respectively in the 4th and 6th position. Sincerely I was supposed to see Google and Apple in the top of this list. On the other side the first Universities in the list (with score 77) are Stanford University and MIT. If compared to the companies would be in the 6th position, before Apple and Twitter. This makes me reflecting a lot specifically for European companies and universities …
