Wilkins Chung
Any industry that has highly differentiated skilled labor and thrives on innovation requires a constant influx of top talent to remain competitive. We all know that this is true in software, where top developers outperform the average by orders of magnitude, and provide a multiplicative effect to a company’s growth.
A good way to identify companies that are likely to succeed or fail is by looking where the industry’s top new graduates are going. The top of the class is extremely good at recognizing upcoming trends in industry, identifying possible internal problems at companies (via co-op experiences) and are effectively advertising their insight to you (as they’ll have offers from almost all of the best companies).
Example: Blackberry (formerly known as RIM)
When I graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2005, RIM was not even close to being a company that the top of my class (Computer Engineering) wanted to go to (those honors went to Google and Amazon). Even though RIM performed well in 2005–2007, we all knew that the best developers and engineers didn’t end up there, and it was only a matter of time before innovation would be stifled by the lack of top talent. It certainly didn’t come as any surprise when RIM started collapsing in 2008.
Wilkins Chung. Wilkins is a co-founder at A Thinking Ape, a Y Combinator-funded mobile games startup. Wilkins previously worked as a software development manager and software engineer at Amazon where he focused on scalability solutions. Wilkins graduated from University of Waterloo in Computer Engineering.
