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Comment by meta_ai_x | Hacker News Reader

Sundar Pichai got into IIT Kharagpur in the 90s (one of the toughest engineering/technical school to get into). So he has more technical chops than many self-proclaimed engineers that seem to diss on his McKinsey credentials

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Seems doubtful. His entire time at Google was doing project management stuff, so that is probably where all of his skills lie.

Can anyone with access to google3/ tell us if there is even a single commit by sundar@?

No, you can only access google3 by default if you are a T ladder FTE. This rules out almost everyone who isn't a SWE, SRE, PM or other affiliated technical role. There are exceptions, but ... they're exceptions.

A school being tough to get into due to an abundance of population (too many applicants) means little. There has been not one significant person coming out of those institutions (compared to the many figures coming out of the US, despite a population 5x smaller). I would not hire Sundar as a junior engineer in my team. Of course, you might see something in Google's current leadership which I do not see. Time will tell how performant the company will be long term. Again, I believe skills that make one successful in consulting rarely translate to success in the engineering field.

> There has been not one significant person coming out of those institutions

Of the IITs?

Co-founders of Sun Microsystems, Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Infosys, Zoho, HCL

The only one significant is Khosla of Sun. The rest are... rehashes of Western companies without a shred of innovation or doing anything novel.

Look at the sheer number of institutions and people, and now compare it to any US institution (Maryland). Despite how much smaller the population would be, the accomplishments speak for themselves. I would take an engineer with a bs from any R1 university over a graduate with experience from those institutions any given day of the week. But of course, there will be exceptions. I was responding to a defense of Sundar which rested on the institution he went to

> The current leadership of Google (especially Sundar) is mediocre and comes from a consulting background.

That was what you asserted. So the GP just simply pointed out that you were wrong. You were wrong because Sundai didn't come from a consulting background. A lot of people from consulting companies have engineering background.

So you could rephrase your original comment: "not one (of course with multiple exceptions)"

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