The tech company I work for is listed on the NASDAQ and headquartered in Birmingham, a few minutes out of Detroit - originally it was in Rochester. There is a lot of money in Michigan. The main issue I can see is that you have to be in the right circles - there is definitely a class divide in the state, and it's pretty brutal.
At smaller shops it leads to a lot of hubris from management. I've worked at more than one shop where circles of UofM grads insist on outsourcing everything new and having in-house employees only do maintenance or minor features. If you didn't go to UofM your opinion is worthless.
Leads to incredibly toxic shops and terrible software.
Which is kind of funny since you're talking about UofM, not Stanford or MIT. It's a good school but there are literally hundreds of good schools in the US.
In my experience lots of folks educated at top top tier institutions are pretty humble about it, and acknowledge places where other institutions are as good or better than their alma mater. A coworker of mine recently got his MBA from Penn which is not only Ivy League but consistently ranked top 2-3 MBA programs in the country, and currently tied with Stanford for #1 according to USNWR. He never brings it up, doesn't really talk about it much when it does get brought up, and I don't think I've ever heard him criticize anyone's education or experience unfairly (we've sat on several hiring panels together).
The problem is when you go to a good-not-great school. If the top 10 schools for a particular program are considered "Tier 1" the people who went to #15 or #20 are going to be absolutely horrible to work with. It's like they think they need to prove they could have gone to a better school but didn't for whatever reason.
I avoided this trap by only going to small schools nobody has ever heard of.
I have refereed basketball at a very high level (think Div 1 College, NBA G-league/minor league), and in my earlier days I did a lot of junior high-level games, and I noticed very much the same, although more "vocal" with the parents than players. There seem to be three tiers:
1 - the low-level games, where it's fun, and no-one thinks it is more than it is, and everyone is generally chill.
2 - the very high-level games, where even the parents know that the last thing their kid or the team needs is them messing with the referees, etc.
But most of the issues came in between. The kids who were absolutely talented, but were never going to play professionally. But they were still well ahead of the first group. Those were the troubles, where parents, coaches, and players felt that they truly belonged in group 2, but the only thing holding them back was the referees or whatever else and had a need to prove themselves. Never has a quote been more appropriate from Top Gun, "Son, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash."
The basketball thing can be such a shit show. As a parent of a kid that fell in love with basketball, did travel AAU basketball and ended up playing for a D3 college, I've experienced parents at all levels showing their full ass.
Examples... Their coach at a rec league for 9 year olds was assaulted by the opposing team's coach at the end of the game. I've seen the cops being called to protect the refs and parents being escorted out of the game after threatening the refs. It goes on and on.
All that's to say that the steaks don't seem to matter. Folks are passionate in a disproportionate way when their children are involved.
> Examples... Their coach at a rec league for 9 year olds was assaulted by the opposing team's coach at the end of the game. I've seen the cops being called to protect the refs and parents being escorted out of the game after threatening the refs. It goes on and on.
Oh yes, I lost track of the number of times I was threatened with being met in the parking lot after a game.
We never had to call the cops to eject parents - usually all it took was "That's fine, we'll just end the game as a forfeit to the other team" before you got some poor beleaguered kid saying "Dad, just go to the car. Please."
I quit (and this was probably 20 years ago) when I reported a player for "attempted striking a referee" during a fight, when he swung a closed fist at the head of one of my partner referees, who instinctively pulled back. The league believed that calling it attempted striking (which had a potential ban of 5+ years) would be "excessive" and downgraded it to "attempted assault of a referee". My argument was that the player -was- attempting to punch the referee (caught on video and all) and that the referee's reflex in dodging the contact shouldn't downgrade the severity of the offence.
I think part of your experience with people from top schools is they know the stereotypes already exist and don’t want people outside the inner circle to use it against them.
I’ve known plenty of people from UofM who don’t talk about it either. I had a coworker get his degree from UofM. I’m not even sure how we found out, as he never talked about it, and even after getting the degree he just kept chilling in the entry level job he was comfortable in for years.
I've seen that kind of thinking by some grads of MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, too. I think it's a minority of them, but not-unusual.
My position is, if you want a lifestyle company (and maybe a self-congratulatory echo chamber), then maybe it's fine to be a "<school> shop". But if you want to hire the best people, and be informed by a d-v-rs-ty of perspectives and experiences, then you really need to not be so insular.
