If you just want to be a great web developer, MIT may not be the best place for you.
MIT best prepares people for those less well defined roles, such as designing the next era of web browsers. For that, you can never know exactly which skills will be needed, so it's probably best to have as many neighbouring skills as possible so you don't hit problems you can't solve merely because the knowledge required to see the best solution was in that topic your course didn't cover.
Who knows, maybe the next era of web browsers will browse the web for you, and then condense everything they learned from thousands of resources into a single paragraph for the user to see. And for that, they might need ML.
Of course if I browse linkedin MIT EECS grads, most are probably just doing bug fixing at FAANG or the latest unicorn and some small fraction are doing anything revolutionary. It's also likely that they would have done so without an MIT education. See e.g the Collison brothers.
Learning about those things aren't necessary for those jobs but they prove that you're capable of learning something, and as such is a part of the FAANG acceptance process.
Hmm I’m not sure I really agree with this. Does MIT (or any university) teach the creativity needed to envision the kind of thing you’re talking about? Or like most universities, is it just teaching some foundational skills coupled with whatever has condensed into “required reading” from industry over the last couple decades? Just with a higher pedigree and ostensibly better prepared student body.
Alright. You seem to feel pretty confident about this.
Having worked with quite a few MIT grads over the years, at least in my anecdotal experience, they were smart people who were no more or less likely than any of the other smart people working around them to stumble upon the next evolution of the web browser.
MIT best prepares people for those less well defined roles, such as designing the next era of web browsers. For that, you can never know exactly which skills will be needed, so it's probably best to have as many neighbouring skills as possible so you don't hit problems you can't solve merely because the knowledge required to see the best solution was in that topic your course didn't cover.
Who knows, maybe the next era of web browsers will browse the web for you, and then condense everything they learned from thousands of resources into a single paragraph for the user to see. And for that, they might need ML.