The cool stuff projects are never the right career move, the work/life balance doesn't exist, and even then you have to be on constant lookout for the right team to join.
"I'm willing to put up with insanity" is a more important criteria for working on cool projects than what school you went to.
Source: I've been on those cool projects, I've hired for them as well. End of the day, the questions "want to write an OS, work 70hrs+ a week and live under constant fear of not having a job when you come in tomorrow?" get asked, alma mater, not so much.
Of course at the end of the day, you get some great stories out of it. You also get literal grey hair, potential lost friendships (I lucked out there! Saw plenty of it around me though.), and an ongoing base level of stress that is very unhealthy.
I graduated from a state school over a decade ago. I'm working at a good company now doing things that some people would consider "cool". And I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what university a single one of my coworkers went to.
I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
And the farther out you are from college, the less and less it matters. In programming, past a certain number of years out, it may not even matter if you have a degree at all.
Well, my state school (rank #50+) is quite a bit different from yours in terms of quality (rank #25 or less) for starters. I didn't get anywhere close to an 800 on my Math SAT, whereas I'm sure a lot of people at UMD CS did (and a few at my school did too!).
>I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
Right, it's more of a correlation for inherent inferiority in my case more than anything else, but that's besides the point.
Ultimate accomplishment is driven more by hard work than by innate talent. I coasted on my talent in school through most of school and came into the working world unprepared to seriously go do cool stuff for quite awhile. It wasn't until much more recently that I buckled down and got better at applying myself that I really started to see an upward trajectory. And none of this has anything to do with what school you went to for undergrad awhile ago.
You're too hard on yourself. I know lots of people who went to elite universities and haven't done any really cool stuff.
More broadly, from an economic perspective, there are outliers, but most people only move one income quintile up or down from where their parents are (or don't move at all). So while we have some leverage over our futures, this suggests that we have less leverage than we believe. (So, for example, does the fact that 65% of millennials think they'll be millionaires by age 45, even though only 6% of Americans are millionaires.)
Certainly there's no reason to beat yourself up for not achieving things that are exceptional on an absolute scale (unless maybe you were born at the top and blew all your advantages).
Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.
I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it.
If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS.
Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare.
You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions.
Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.
No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics!
Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything!
> I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless).
For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things.
(FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)
Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not?
It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.
If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”.
Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.
That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.
A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.
