I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice; whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correlation between the school they attended and their interview performance.
However, the pure research division at this company is totally different. There appears to be a very heavy emphasis placed on the school attended. I was a bit miffed one day because I overheard one of the AI researchers saying “everyone knows there is a huge difference in caliber between the students that attended Stanford and Berkeley for CS and those that attended Georgia Tech”. As someone who attended GT and has a research background, this rubbed me the wrong way. There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general. Even if there is a difference between the schools (at the graduate level), I would imagine the Bell curves can’t be that far apart from each other. It’s not like 90% of the students that attended Stanford are brighter than 90% that attended CMU.