1. The people providing the reviews are other students. How qualified are university students to decide if someone has the potential to be best in the world at anything? That classification is both highly subjective and would generally be expected to require some expert-level knowledge of the field the person is being judged in (which an undergraduate student is unlikely to have).
2. The students only seem to come from a small collection of schools, which unfairly disadvantages skilled students from schools not on the list.
3. The site entirely lacks filtering options, so I am unable to see the top people in the algorithms category, for instance. Furthermore, the listing order seems to be completely static, obscuring students who do not happen to get top placement.
In essence, this is a selection of students from select universities, chosen as the "best" through dubious methods, and then displayed in a static order that greatly advantages some of them over others.
I see a lot of 3s and 4s, which according to the key means "High Potential to Be Among the Best in the World" and "Currently Among the Best in the World". Maybe I'm just ignorant or jealous, but I have a hard time believing that all those young people could already be called "among the best in the world" in any field, at least not without serious evidence to back that up.
But I think the problem is mostly that the scale from 1 to 4 makes it seem that 2 or 3 is the average, which it's obviously not judging from the description. I think that causes people to greatly inflate the ratings. Also the aim seems to reach 10 which must skew the distribution upwards some more.
Is this type of ranking new or is it just the first time I encounter it? I ask because there is an other story mentioning "10x" in the frontpage right now, I don't know if the two are related however.
There will be surely some great engineers coming out of schools, but I seriously question the peer review model, at such an early stage of their careers.
Just thinking back to when I was in college, I would not trust the college version of myself of my opinion of the absolute strengths of others. For relative strengths, maybe, but even then, I was heavily biased by my peer group, so you would need to make sure you have a well-connected rating graph and do some kind of spectral ranking. Definitely wondering about the methodology here.
I am sorry but please do not call this list "The best or among the best in the world". This is a list of students from only 3 schools.
Also the first students in the list are all from Corn, giving to them a significant advantage for no apparent reason. They do not score higher in skills and the list is not alphabetically listed, it seems very biased.
Good luck to all the kids, most of them are already heading to awesome and fulfilling careers :)
1. I was not aware this was public.
2. I was told that all rankings should be taken in context compared to others in the 2015 graduating class. Clearly none of these people are any contender to be best in the world at anything.
The people I know on the list are certainly some of the smartest people I know, but take this with a grain of salt.
> As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people.
It was for the most part an interesting article. I doubt, however, that software development will ever become a low-skill domain. It will perhaps become more like carpentry -- a medium where people across a range of ability will be able to work in. Some are master carpenters, and some are content to make a bird feeder, and the barriers to doing the latter are low.
Clearly not representative. Seems like attempt for someone to start a recruiting service. Bias on schools to CMU Cornell and UPenn. Not other majors present.
Females only make up about 10% of the CS program enrollees, I highly doubt the females in this list are as good as their male counterparts. 5 out of 100 is good, you are getting only the top 5% though. 5 out of 1000 is better, since you are taking that top 5% and taking the top 10% of that.
In 2010, 18% of graduating CS & Information Science students were female. You can't even get your numbers right.
This is actually a shocking state of affairs, given that in 1985 this number was 37%. That blatantly suggests (to me at least) that there's no gender-related skill differential in this field, and instead women are being discouraged for other reasons.
Your math doesn't even make sense. 10% of the enrollees should result in 10% of the top 5%, aka 10% of the entire list. Never mind whether your numbers are even correct.
Or maybe the relatively few female that persevere in a field that is biased against them are going to be better on average ?
At my university in engineering and applied sciences ( weird but that's the official translation in English ), one of our teacher was the first woman to graduate. She was very good, she had to be better than the average to prove that the school did not make a mistake in letting her in.
Given the low overall enrollment, it wouldn't surprise me if the ones who "bother" to join the CS program are more driven and intrinsically motivated than the average. Given that drive and intrinsic motivation are likely highly correlated with excellence within their peer group, it seems well within reason that a minority group overall would be over-represented in the elite set.
> Given the low overall enrollment, it wouldn't surprise me if the ones who "bother" to join the CS program are more driven and intrinsically motivated than the average.
But that's true about the guys too. People who don't like programming get weeded out pretty quickly from CS.
