Sending alums back to top tier schools is also part PR too for the companies. "Hey look Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are on our campus today. Great companies at great colleges gets great news coverage".
Diversity has departed from it's root meaning. Or else is currently being used in in a more limited context. For example: Lesbian is diversity. Appalachian accent or over 50 is not diversity but poor cultural fit.
Totally agree, but as another commenter suggested it is difficult to measure socioeconomic status. I think the bigger issue is -- why are negative points applied to Asian applications on my affirmative action schemes, rather than negative points evenly distributed against the entire non-preferred pool? Is anyone seriously arguing that Asian applicants have it easier than caucasians?
Having grown up quite poor in NYC, I was always dismayed by not being able to take advantage of affirmative action programs...but getting selective negative points is just plain unfair.
I imagine this is a huge can of worms, there is no one answer, and any answer I give will be a broad and imperfect generalization. That said, i'll provide my viewpoint as an Asian-American born and raised in NYC. I'm comparing to others in NYC (obviously there is the broader USA where poverty abounds and knows no color.)
No, most asians of my generation did not have it easier. We rarely had an uncle at a hedge fund or lawfirm suddenly drop an internship in the middle of Junior year high school to beef up our college applications. Few had legacy connections or friends at the investment bank who could write a great recommendation. I went to a top-3 science high school in NYC and by and large, the Asians I saw succeed did it through sheer, soul-crushing hard work. In many cases we had slave masters (our mothers usually, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_mother) ensuring success at any cost.
Sure, most of my friends and I got into ivy league schools in droves, but in many cases it was almost a pyrrhic victory. I honestly wish I could have normal fun and social development in high school. Instead I was forced to maximize one and only one objective function -- getting into an Ivy League school.
So to answer your question: No, we Asian-Americans dont have it easier, most of us simply overcompensated at great personal cost.
These are all gross generalizations circa 1994-1997 based on my highly diverse high school graduating class of ~800 and another thousand people I know from my neighborhood, civic organizations, summer jobs, etc. I'd value other perspectives.
>> Again, statistically. On average, people of all colors don't have an uncle at a hedge fund...
Huge numbers of people I went to undergrad with had uncles at hedge funds or big law firms. Those are the people I was competing with for entrance. You're absolutely right, I was never competing with many people in the Midwest (of all races) who had it worse than me because large populations amongst the Ivy League schools come from ~2 dozen high schools. My high school was proud to produce 71 (i think, something around that) students who proceeded into Ivy League schools from our graduating class (for whatever that is worth.) It is even more with 5 other NYC schools and a couple on Massachusetts.
Finally, You dont need to believe my anecdotes -- you can read hundreds of first-hand accounts online. When the "Tiger Mom" NY Times article and book came out, you chould see the outpouring of condemnation of some of this NY (and broader) Asian subculture -- a lot of it was from Asians like myself.
I encourage you to read the comments section of that famous article as well as the dozens of offshoot conversations and heated debate that ensued over the persoanl/emotional/psychological cost of success at any cost mentality.
>>> Huge numbers of people I went to undergrad with had uncles at hedge funds or big law firms.
Yes, in a top school in NY.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for "penalising" or "rewarding"
anyone for their skin color. I hope you didn't get that message from me.
I am way more into personalised life experience reward/penalty system. And that should be limited to scholarships based on socio economic situation, not test scores.
Well that is sort of my point...When Asians compete for spots at top universities, they arent really competing against the entire united states, they are competing against the applicant pool.
Ivy League schools get more valedictorian applications than there are seats. Some get more perfect SAT scores than there are seats, so they end up using other factors like sports, well-rounded-ness, speaking ability, unique experiences, etc.
A lot of the folks in that applicant pool have all sorts of unique experiences -- summar safaris in africa, a performance at Lincoln Center, summer internship at a major law firm, internship at some Congressperson's office, etc, etc.
Those types of non-academic admissions factors disfavor most minorities (they espcially disfavor those of African descent given the lack of diversity in most of those fields, which is why i can appreciate affirmative action for clearly underpriviledged groups.)
Now, things are getting better for Asians, Indians, etc and are certainly better than what they were in 1996 when I applied to college. People always tend to point at Nadella, Pandit, Pichai -- but seriously -- how much of the real power base in the US is actually diverse?
Looking beyond technology into the broader economic, cultural, media, and political base of the US, can anyone really argue that Asians are so well represented that they deserve Negative application points relative to all others?
Organizations are somewhat damned if they do and damned if they don't with affirmative action. In particular the onus of proving that an e.g. university is not being discriminatory rests on them. But diversity quotas such as at least 10% of all accepted applicants will be green, 15% blue, etc are illegal. It puts organizations in a situation where they cannot have diversity quotas, but my run into issues if their results do not look like diversity quotas. This same issue is faced by larger corporations as well.
Consequently, you end up with affirmative action that is based on equality of result instead of equality of opportunity. There are a large number of extremely well qualified Asian applicants so in order to constrain the amount accepted (keeping in mind that acceptance is a zero sum game) they are substantially penalized. I think there's a more fundamental problem with this beyond just fairness.
The whole point of affirmative action was to combat widespread overt racism and other discrimination in hiring/acceptance. Equality of opportunity is extremely important. In times past it's entirely possible the talent in individuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson would not have been allowed to be cultivated because of the color of their skin, and that would be a great tragedy. The problem is that systems that end up de facto equality of result face the exact same problem as we did when overt racism and discrimination was so widespread. You end up viewing certain people as less meritorious than they are, because of the color of their skin. This is something that should never be tolerated, no matter how benevolent the reason may be.
This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your expectations of your employees have to be so much lower.
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
That's why we're really proud of what we do at interviewing.io. All students have to go through a series of practice interviews, so by the time they talk to companies, we know they're great, and so far, most of the students we've presented have gotten offers, independently of their backgrounds.
With our model, we free up companies from having to worry about exactly what you described because we incur the vetting.
Do I understand correctly that on the candidate side the person can go through a sequence of interviews without the possibility of actually meeting a hiring company? Also that you only work with students?
The people using Interviewing.io are typically using it as a means of practicing interviews in a low-pressure setting. Their goal isn't to get offers from companies, but if it leads to that, I'm sure they don't mind.
Also, they don't just work with students. I've used them, and I've worked professionally for several years.
We have 2 pools: a practice pool and then a pool where you get guaranteed interviews with employers. If you do well in practice, you can book real interviews with any number of top companies who've come to trust in the quality of our users.
This goes for both senior engineers, and more recently, students.
Do you have stats on how many of your customers are in their 30's and 40's? I would think that demographic would find practicing very useful since they have been out of touch with algorithms for a while.
>>All students have to go through a series of practice interviews
Interviewing is supposed to be hiring people who work everyday, to do everyday jobs.
If people have to practice to clear your interviews. You are either hiring the wrong people, or people who want to get in to only game the interview. In both the instances you are hiring the wrong people.
Put in other words if even ordinary perfectly qualified candidates have to practice to clear a company's interview. The company is likely asking wrong questions.
I'm not sure I understand your argument here. If we cut through the clutter, you're essentially advocating that you hire people on an individual basis and shouldn't weight at all what school they come from. No?
No, they are advocating hiring from the big 5 and then saying that it's just a coincidence that all the employees they've hired on 'on [their] own merit' are from there.
FYI OP posted alongside you in their own words. What I got from it is "No shit Harvard is better than UPhoenix South Campus" but if we came up with a good way to measure skills and learning capacity independent of rote programming quizzes/etc., hiring from a lower tier school would be less risky.
I know someone who dropped out and is now making plenty of money at a software development gig. I also know CS grads who can't think about anything outside their little realm to save their lives. Point is: some schools legit don't filter well for learning capacity.
Harvard is no MIT. One generally goes to harvard because they are rich vs smart. You may be surprised by the quality of UPhoenix grads. One has to be motivated to be a UPhoenix grad while other things are more important at Harvard.
Where does GP advocate for this? As I read it, he is saying that there are some potential bad hires from lower tier schools that should be avoided. I don't think this involves 5 schools or GP's hiring history.
They said that there 100 bad hires for every good hire while by omission claiming that every Stanford hire is a good hire... But also that you should definitely be hiring talent 'on it's own merit'.
The argument is that if you're hiring a student from Stanford you can assume some baseline level of competence (only approximately true, I'd bet). If you're hiring from elsewhere, maybe you have to interview 10 people to find someone with similar knowledge/skill/misc. It's a bigger time investment in the hiring search, and gauging technical skill in a job interview is still an unsolved problem.
If you find an efficient + effective way to compare all the applicants, that would make it easier to put everyone on the same footing regardless of school. But that's hard to do and it's easy to be risk averse and just hire the Harvard grad.
A Harvard grad presumably costs you more, but they keep doing it that way because 1) it's simple, and 2) if you try to hire more broadly but misjudge and make a bad hire, that's potentially much more expensive.
Good luck convincing Google (or Netflix / Amazon / Microsoft / any other major company) that anything they do is 'just a CRUD application'. Even when it's true, they'll never admit it.
It's pretty easy to make a bag of garbage; it's non-trivial to make 100M bags of garbage.
Even if they're making CRUD apps, making tons of high-availability CRUD apps that work against dozens of services your team doesn't own that can serve huge fractions of the globe requires non-trivial coordination and skill. (Not that all those companies do is CRUD apps, but even if.)
I'm not sure it's as jard as those companies make it out to be -- but it's not "just CRUD apps", it's the logistics of CRUD apps spanning the globe.
Are CRUD projects really the most guilty of only hiring from "elite" schools?
Sure, there are software jobs where you're setting up wordpress blogs, but there are plenty that require you to think about algorithms and how your database actually works in order to do them well.
Forget CRUD applications. Most of the work at most companies, including the usual Big Ones, simply isn't that complicated for anyone with just about any technical degree. On your scale most of it, almost all of it, tops out at like 50-60.
These companies set the bar at 70+ for a number of reasons. Their own egos ("I only work with 'the best' so therefore I'm also 'the best' and don't want to water that down"), status signalling for the companies, to keep bright young talent from starting a competitor, etc.
As someone that went to podunk state and was recruited by all kinds of companies (went to work at Arthur Andersen in the 90s for my first job because I wanted to learn which side I was more interested in, software/computers or finance/accounting). I found that hiring for potential and attitude goes much farther than hiring for skill in new/recent graduates.
Having worked all over the United States and even the "mecca" of San Francisco, the quality seemingly is more tied to their experience than their "talent".
When surrounded by other excellent workers/engineers and great processes, you can become great. When you work with and for mediocre, that tends to be what you know.
As one of those kids to never went to school, I'm going to agree with you. Most people can't program, however, better schools are only slightly better in outputting people who can.
I find fizzbuzz and other coding challenges much more effective in hiring.
It's hard to do but showing actual code from your codebase with an actual real bug is a much better indicator of whether someone will be successful than anything else.
Although educating people can be done in any decent school (or no school at all) better schools do a better job of filtering people, i.e. the key tasks of ensuring that (a) that the less capable people don't get a degree from you, either because they're pushed to drop out or you filter them out during the application process, and (b) that the top cohort of capable people actually apply to your school (in many schools, their degree is an uncertain but strong indicator that you weren't good enough to get into a better school).
"there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent."
I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.
I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?
Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]
The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.
[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.
> or all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet.
> The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works.
The fact that assignments are similar isn't evidence that "it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons" is inaccurate. Perhaps the assignments are easy, and nobody cares about the quality of the program so much as the quality of the students.
"Perhaps the assignments are easy, and nobody cares about the quality of the program so much as the quality of the students."
That sounds like a rationalization to justify arrogance rather than a claim you have any sort of evidence for. I'd say I've got abundant evidence to the contrary.
The Silicon Valley arrogance sure is on full display today. In another thread on the homepage we have people expressing shock and surprise that yes, there are in fact ways to put a roof over your head in Topeka for $100K.
This may sound weird to you, but I don't live in Silicon Valley because I don't want to. I didn't go to one of the elite colleges (which I most likely could have qualified for) because I didn't want to. My house is bigger, my yard is bigger, my commute is better, I like the people better, my student loans were paid off years ago and I have a realistic prospect of owning my house before I'm 40 without having had to go to Money Mustache levels of frugality, and in some ways it's easier to hire here than in the Valley. I know, I've been to the Valley many times.
But I suppose the net effect of the number of people currently getting out of SV is evaporative cooling, so SV will be left with an ever-increasing portion of the population who Truly Believe that just outside of the comforting mountains is a horde of barbarians with sloped foreheads who can't quite seem to figure out this "fire" thing. For your own sake and sanity, you might want to escape that massive filter bubble and have a look around at your options, which you may discover are nowhere near as monolithic as you think. It's always good to have an escape route, as evidenced by the many people availing themselves of it.
I've worked with great engineers and most of them have degrees from state schools. I've found the biggest difference between the large tech companies and other places from having talked to people is that the big places have a lot more money to blow on stuff.
The problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent.
So your implication is that the ratio of "competent" : "completely incompetent" for students coming from these schools is roughly... 2:100?
I know you can't possibly mean that. But your language clearly implies that ratio. The only question is why you're making such a bizarre implication.
I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State
Was the original article suggesting that your company hire "primarily" from Podunk State? Or simply that you probably don't want to hire near-exclusively from the Top 5?
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools. Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
Which is exactly what the original article was advocating - a "completely blind, skills-first approach". In particular, it was definitely not arguing that one should "focus extra" on state schools.
> So your implication is that the ratio of "competent" : "completely incompetent" for students coming from these schools is roughly... 2:100?
the parent can be correct with a ratio closer to 1:10 or 1:20, assuming the top schools churn out many more students than 2nd/3rd tier schools. Which is certainly the case depending on how to define 2nd/3rd tier.
For ex parent's observation is probably spot on if you're comparing MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley to an arbitrarily chosen regional state campus. But is more absurd if you're comparing those places to Michigan/Wisconsin/North Carolina/Washington/...
> Which is exactly what the original article was advocating
To be clear, the original article is a long-form advertisement for a product. What the article is advocating is giving interviewing.io money :)
> But I don't see anything like a 1:100 ratio of "better", by any metric... So again, while it's not like school "tier" doesn't matter - this 1:100 ratio is just silly.
I think you misunderstood my point. Parent's observation may be accurate because of a combination of quality disparity and disparities in raw numbers.
The elite CS programs are relatively large compared to many Podunk States. So it's not just that there's a modest 1:10 or 1:20 or 1:5 or whatever quality ratio, but also that Podunk State graduates 20 or 30 students a year while the elite schools are churning out hundreds. So there's a 1:10 quality ratio but still a 1:100 yield ratio. Or whatever.
Again, inaccurate for the large state flagships, but very believable for the regional comprehensives.
(This isn't idle speculation. My observation is that larger schools tend to get more attention from recruiters, even setting aside quality, and I think this numbers game has something to do with it.)
Exactly - it's the "whatever" part I'm having trouble working with.
I'm seeing the basic point about population samples you're making. But even so, both logically and numbers-wise, the original commenter's argument was just extremely handwavy. Which is, how to put this nicely... strange, coming from someone dissing an entire class of people (Podunk U graduates) as not just lacking rigor... but 99% likely to be, in their words, "completely incompetent".
I was an undergraduate at a no-name university for various personal reasons. A Google, Microsoft and other big tech co offices were nearby. Throughout my undergrad, not a single event, talk or recruiting opportunity emerged. I understand this: the top people are the same everywhere but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people.
I am now at a world famous grad school and there are talks, events, opportunities every week. I would say the best 5% at the undergraduate school were approximately at least as good as the average undergraduate here.
Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.
How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
It really isn't that expensive to send a couple of engineers to a school if you're hoping to hire a couple of talented students, and maybe some interns. You really only need one event a year.
Except that there are hundreds of schools that fit this description. Sending recruiters to any one of them isn't that expensive, but sending recruiters to all of them is quite expensive.
Which isn't to say that there aren't students there worth recruiting.
What about putting those schools in a pool and selecting from them randomly, eventually weighting them by historical success if/when you have enough data?
If recruiting is a competitive advantage, why not be innovative and data driven about it? If it's not a competitive advantage, then why spend time and energy on it?
Maybe companies could leverage this "internet" thing to reach the great students systematically? Maybe put these lectures online?
Continue with projects like codejam, though ideally come up with one that is less reliant on obscure math (or OEIS) and more reliant on problem solving.
I recently moved from St. Louis to New York City. The number of recruiting emails I receive has probably quadrupled (or more). In all things, it helps to be where the people you want to find you are looking.
Also: protip for people in the South or Midwest who are open to relocation: change your online profiles to say you're in the new location.
I would second this advice, and be ready to "put up" when people ask you to fly out. Be prepared to have a plan to get to interviews if you plan on fibbing about your current location.
I wouldn't recommend lying (or imagine you'd ever have to). If anyone asks, just be honest about your current and preferred locations.
There's nothing weird about signalling that you'd prefer to live/work somewhere else. ("I'm currently still in St. Louis, but want to field offers in New York," seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.)
As a data scientist living in the South, I have no problem relocating to San Francisco or San Jose, but how do I signal this without letting my existing employer know? Changing my LinkedIn location from <tiny city> to San Francisco would raise some uncomfortable questions.
Maybe it's ok to let your employer know? It's not as if the desire to relocate could be solved by your current company if all of their operations are local. I suppose it depends on your manager, but hopefully if you said "Boss, I want to move to San Francisco. The growth opportunity there is too great to ignore." they might be supportive. Obviously if you think that conversation could go very badly then you might have to be a bit more low-key. Maybe try to reach out to a recruiting firm in San Francisco instead of changing your LinkedIn.
> How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
Maybe it's better that these great students at "unknown schools" DON'T get hired by google/facebook/amazon/microsoft ?
Maybe their talents are best directed at small-ish companies where they can contribute, grow, and do interesting stuff outside of monstrously large companies with cut-throat competition?
Having ALL the "top" candidates vacuumed up by the "top" employers just seems wrong to me. I feel it's more healthy to have the best students spread out all over the place rather than concentrated in the top 5 or 6 employers in Silicon Valley. After all, there are more employers than there are colleges.
> Having ALL the "top" candidates vacuumed up by the "top" employers just seems wrong to me.
In my experience, "top" employers are employers that pay the best. I'd probably be happier at a small and scrappy company, but they so far have offered worse compensation.
Well, sure, but they can do that with or without recruiting events sponsored by the top-5 at their schools.
I guess I am also trying to say that these students should not feel so deprived if google recruiters aren't easily accessible, there's plenty of great places to work.
This is exactly what we're solving at interviewing.io. We open up our practice platform to all students, and the best performers rise to the top, completely independently of school/geography. We're really, really proud of this.
I think you encapsulated the issue if you flip your statement: half the students equal the top 5% at your undergraduate. Much harder to find the needle in the haystack.
> but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people
Google and Microsoft makes about $200k/year profit per employee, Facebook 4x that. The problem, I suspect, is that you probably don't net anywhere near 1-2 hires per couple of events at these schools.
Same five schools. How about we first even just address the stunning level of group think that comes from 90+% of faculty being Liberals. Some here in particular may make excuses for that, but I can tell you that if that issue is not fixed ... if it's not even already too late ... it will crater our university system as "online" universities become better over time.
The age of kleptocratic administrative layers at Universities importing communist and muslim subversive faculty and foreigners being given preference over Americans due to "diversity" needs to come to an end before it totally brings the USA to collapse, and with it, so would also go the rest of the world. This is a lagging effects type of situation here. You have to be able to project effects into the future. If you had your pulse on matters in the past, you would see that things have progressed even worse than ever anticipated back just 15 or 20 years ago. The tea leaves do not look good at all right now.
>interviewing.io evaluates students based on their coding skills, not their resume. We are open to students regardless of their university affiliation, college major, and pretty much anything else (we ask for your class year to make sure you’re available when companies want you and that’s about it). Unlike traditional campus recruiting, we attract students organically (getting free practice with engineers from top companies is a pretty big draw) from schools big and small from across the country.
Sweet pitch and of course a genuine problem. But companies have very limited resources and they use them at elite schools which have already stringent requirements to get in. Alternatively, I now see most companies are giving a hackerrank test as a start irrespective of your school. I guess this is a starting point to avoid the bias towards top schools.
like "oh, one of your parents was a student here? here, you're in".
Harvard is one-third legacy[1].
> at five Ivy League schools, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown, as well as 33 other colleges, there are more students from families in the top one percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
stringent requirements, sure, but certainly not the right kind.
That alone doesn't get you an admission. When 2 students has equal test scores, GPA and everything else, your family association definitely helps. This doesn't mean, they accept not so smart people because their parents went to the same school.
Having one-third legacy isn't really that strong evidence of a bias - legacy can be easily explained by (a) the fact that people who can choose between the top schools are likely to prefer Harvard for legacy reasons; and (b) the fact that academic success in general (and thus the ability to perform well in any school) is highly hereditary - all three of nature+nurture+socioeconomic status are strong influencers, and all are highly hereditary; so we should expect that a much higher proportion (compared to average) children of Harvard graduates have the innate qualities that would allow to choose among top schools even if there was no legacy bias.
If I can hire cheaper from candidates not in the top 5 the money could be used to recruit better/same talent at lower costs plus generally a longer employment term.
Agreed. As someone who recently graduated from a relatively good (2100 median SAT score) school that ISN'T a top five CS school, it was absolutely insulting how often I was completely ignored by companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I understand that the median of talent is probably worse at my school than at, say, MIT or Stanford, but the top quarter of my CS year was full of brilliant people who had an unnecessarily difficult time getting hired by top tier tech companies for no good reason.
These companies could definitely improve their hiring quality by drawing top-tier students at lesser schools instead of hiring below-median talent from target top schools.
My experience is that there’s almost always some top tier talent no matter what school you’re in. Particularly when young, the school one goes to is often more a choice of circumstance and randomness than of deliberate thought and Oracle-like forsight on the school’s behalf.
I would bet significant amounts of money that if you looked at people based on their in-job performance blinded to background you'd find insignificant contributions from education.
Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlation with school or even undergrad degree for people with any experience at all.
Right. The only reason I didn't go to Georgia Tech is because I didn't' live in Georgia at the time so I would have had to pay out of state tuition. But since then, I've had the opportunity to work with graduates from Georgia Tech. I was expecting to be humbled by their technical skills when in reality, they're just like any other programmer from any other school I've worked with.
I can see this being true if the people work at the same company (and already passed the same filter).
I doubt it would be true over the entire university CS populations. If the only thing you know about two applicants is their university, then the student from a top tier university will on average perform much better than the student from a low tier university.
I've worked on a few teams at my job that only seemed to hire from GA Tech, MIT or Purdue (engineering), though I was the odd one out in coming from a non-engineering background (math) from a state school. Intellectual inbreeding is a big problem in some areas. New ideas tend to emerge when folks with separate (or even seemingly disparate) perspectives find ways to address a common problem. This can describe multidisciplinary teams, but also teams with folks who learned the same subject in different ways.
That said, I do agree that I've always been impressed with prospective hires & the students we've mentored from top-tier schools. But I also know that a great student could come from anywhere, and if they also happen to be local it can be a real value multiplier.
This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems.
A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development. A company seeking the latest AI talent will never find it at a school that trains students on the latest web middleware. And once companies realize they're getting a lot of well-prepared candidates from a particular program, of course they're going to focus on those schools. It would be a waste of time and scarce resources to do otherwise.
Im sorry, but this is where you need to check your own biases at the door.
For example, your statement "A company like Apple has little use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development.".
Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail infrastructure is a Java backend ( i believe webobjects moved to Java, then was deprecated as an outside project, but kept for internal use, my knowledge is dated on this). Take a look at their jobs site[1]
Now my point wasn't about apple and java. But our own biases that we bring, at every level. We all have biases, but most direct way to effect biases in hiring, is to close your pool down. You need a really wide opening at the beginning of your sourcing funnel to have diversity ( and i mean diversity at every level ).
I work at one of the "big 4" and went to an ivy, but guess what, some of the smartest people I have ever met, had to go to schools based on what their parents could afford. Thats a HUGE selection bias.
So yes, widen your funnel, and recognize your biases ( that we all have, and that basically boil down to having less knowledge ).
Bias also comes from having knowledge. Statistical racial profiling and stereotyping based on facts are examples of this.
Morally I still haven't figured out what to think about this. Generally stereotyping people is considered okay unless its about something outside of their control (race, etc). e.g. its okay to stereotype about rednecks or Californians, because they could choose to move, etc.
But generally I don't believe in free will - nothing is a choice when you consider all the circumstances. You'll find plenty of articles on Washington post that follow this line of reasoning about the circle of poverty, etc.
So if you don't believe in free will, you're not allowed to judge anyone for any reason - which sounds ridiculous.
So in short, I have not figured out how the morality of stereotyping works, and that bugs me. Has anyone figured it out?
And even if they didn't have so much Java, they'd quite possibly still be interested—plenty of major places are more interested in your problem solving skills than your knowledge of any given language.
Firstly, for the most part CS schools don't train students on "IT-focused Java" or "web middleware", whatever that is. Most schools try to teach the fundamentals.
Secondly, a developer that masters and shows proficiency in any complex software ecosystem, including Java and web middleware, is going to have transferable skills valuable to any software company.
You're making an assumption that graduates only know what the curriculum teaches.
In an industry where 60% of the workforce hasn't learned the field through a traditional degree[1], and where a nontrivial fraction of these are self taught, I think that's a pretty bad assumption.
Besides, this argument would hold more water if companies actually tested for this stuff. Most companies seem to be interested in testing algorithms and puzzles, which ultimately aren't actually that useful (sure, algorithms are useful, but not the culture of hyperoptimizing-by-big-O; when n is rarely huge O(f(n)) doesn't matter). Yeah, for an AI job they'll test AI as well, but large companies continue to test with an overwhelming bias for this. I don't think they get to say they want to choose the skillset of their pool by choosing colleges if they do that.
Also, all the large companies (Google, MS, Facebook, etc) hire-first-ask-questions-later; they don't hire college grads for a specific position, they just hire them and work out the position later.
I'm pretty sure that there is almost no difference in terms of talent between someone who graduated from MIT vs someone who graduated from any other decent university around the world. They share more or less the same curriculum. The main difference is that MIT has more reputable professors and the children have richer parents.
Reputable professors are not necessarily the best teachers... Especially at the undergrad level.
Having attended an average-at-best school for my undergraduate degree and a name-widely-recognized-as-one-of-the-best school for my graduate degree, and teaching several classes at both:
The top students at both schools were quite close in ability, drive, motivation and talent. There may have been a couple a very little smarter at the name school, but not many, and not enough to make a material difference.
But the mid and bottom students at the average school were quite a bit worse than the mid and bottom students at the name school. And it wasn't even close.
So, in my experience at least, there are definitely students worth hiring at both places, but you have to sift through quite a bit more students at the average schools.
I went to a state school. Most of my professors also taught at a larger name school across town. My classes were half the cost with half the number of students. I believe I got the same education for less and probably got a lot more face to face time with my professors in the process.
The name of the school means very little to me as a result of my experiences. Especially now that I interview a lot of people and have a really hard time seeing any differences between them based on education.
Hats off to the folks who got the great education at a discount. In a way they may have made the smarter decision.
> The main difference is that MIT has more reputable professors and the children have richer parents.
Harvard, maybe. MIT? Their undergrads are great — of the interns we get, MIT and Cal Tech undergrads are leaps and bounds above those from other schools.
A good CS education teaches common core concepts, and more importantly how to learn and adapt to new frameworks/environments quickly.
Apple just doesn't want to deal with 2-4 months of ramp-up when they can have someone with expertise in a specific subject. Wealthy institutions see that, and teach certain frameworks as part of their graduates' education. Why else would you see core courses in languages like Objective C?
Any graduate can learn it fairly quickly, but a common theme among employers these days is that they will invest nothing in employees.
> CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems.
This might be true for graduate level programs, but between decent state schools and Ivies, the difference, so I have found having been in both "types" of universities, in the curriculum is far, far less than you would lead us to believe. From having met and interviewed a number of people from both, the talent of the individual seems to shine through regardless of the school they attended (if it was at least reasonably decent, i.e. most research-oriented state schools).
>"A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development."
I find it odd that you have chosen to respond to an article on diversity with comments that display a knee-jerk bias. Also "IT-focused Java development" is not even a real term. I can only imagine you mean Enterprise Java Development.
I can assure you a quality engineer with great problem solving skills, CS fundamentals and real-world experience working on large important projects with real deadlines and bottom line impact can be of great use to a company like Apple.
New grads are never hired for a particular skillset. No one is an expert on the unix kernel or hardware design or iOS internals out of college. Apple hires smart people and teaches them these skills. Same with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and every other large tech company.
"CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems."
No, they don't. At least, not at the undergraduate level.
I went to an unknown undergraduate CS program. Later, I did a PhD at one of the top schools in the country. For my career, I have worked with graduates from all of the elite programs. There's no difference in training. The big-name schools may attract "better" high-school students, but even that advantage is overrated.
Undergraduate programs are largely identical. It's only when you get to graduate school that the resources of a top-tier program start to become relevant.
Most CS courses aren’t really vocational courses; graduates don’t come out experts in a particular area, normally. Which is just as well, really; most of the technologies are transient.
The problem is that it is hard to hire, and if you can pick a criteria up front that makes at least some sense then it can help a lot. Justice Scalia explained why he only takes people from the Ivys:
“I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest.”
In this way you are just taking advantage of the hard work that some college admissions committee put in to sorting your candidates.
Of course my current employer has even less diversity. Out of the 50 people in the IT department here I am one of two that didn't go to school here. When I pointed out that fact my boss defended herself and said that she doesn't consider herself to be from here either because she didn't come to to U-M until grad school. That is what qualifies for an outside hire here.
When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR (sorry, "people ops") folks and a SWE or two talking over Google Hangouts to auditoriums full of kids at FIVE different schools which they called "Long Tail". (and UB wasn't even one of them)
I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc).
Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.
I ended up at a no-name school because I got a terrible financial aid package at an elite school that I'd applied to early decision. So bailed and went to a state school for almost free.
I can't find the link but I recall reading (via Freakonomics or Jeff Selingo?) a study that showed that once you control for SATs and income, attending an elite school doesn't confer as much benefit as merely applying to one.
Absolutely a great way to do it. I got paid to attend a great state school (above and beyond room and board), had several travel grants, and was sent to 20 countries and Antarctica! I've never had any student loans and it really helped me take some riskier career moves earlier on.
Hey, at least you got a response. I got no return mail, not even a rejection letter. 3 tracked mails sent, 3 money orders totaling $120 (a princely sum for 1987), and no return mail. It was like a torture session picking up the mail at the box everyday (I had a break between high school classes, so I was the mailbox keyholder). Luckily, I also applied at the state school and got a pretty good package. Would have been better if my high school had filled out the paperwork on time. Makes me wish I didn't spend so many months studying the SAT & ACT because I was worried that we didn't have the classes that would cover the material at my high school.
Oh well, the local community college classes were only like $15 per credit hour for high school seniors (paid by the high school), so I started college as a sophomore. Gotta take the good with the bad I guess.
>the local community college classes were only like $15 per credit hour for high school seniors
One of the beautiful things about softwars tech is that it has offered people opportunities to self-teach and build a portfolio of their own credentials, by their own determination. This has given ordinary people the opportunity to build things that benefit others.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have privileged rich kids attending Harvard, many of whom go on to work in finance or consulting, and who knows what they produce that is useful in the world.
I would really love to see the idea that we need to open up on the limitations of world-class educations and credentials become part of the mainstream discussion.
There is almost no reason the first two years of, which are often filled with gen-ed requirements often taught in laughably huge lecture halls by uninterested staff, not be open to everyone in the world. We need a new model that promotes this--Harvard classes should be open to everyone and that includes the tests and credits as well.
And why not? The War on Poverty in America has spent trillions of dollars with little to nothing to show for it in terms of reducing poverty. Of all this money spent, one of the first things I would have done would have been to ensure everyone has the greatest opportunities available to them. There's no good reason to hold them hostage, unless you care about profit or prestige more than increasing opportunity and reducing inequality.
I've had a different one contact me repeatedly every 6 months like clockwork for the last 5 years. Of the ~10 I've had one that listened to WHY I wasn't immediately interested and factored that into his future communications. The rest of them came off exactly as the parent comment to yours described.
edit: to clarify what happens, every 6 months it's a new recruiter, and they always ping me multiple times until I respond and tell them what I've told all of them, and they usually (with 1 exception so far) keep pinging the same way.
To clarify, I meant that the person doing the tech interview shouldn't care what school you went to and definitely shouldn't be throwing shade since that just distorts the evaluation.
The early part of the recruitment process is basically a process to get possibly qualified candidates to interview. What it's good for: if you ever want try interviewing at Google again, you can get an interview. I wouldn't expect anything more from it than that; it's pretty impersonal. :-)
> To clarify, I meant that the person doing the tech interview shouldn't care what school you went to and definitely shouldn't be throwing shade since that just distorts the evaluation.
Of course they shouldn't. (I know plenty of people at Google, I've gone through the process a few times, I have an idea.) But...that doesn't mean it doesn't happen and that it isn't cultural.
I second this, but most google recruiters are pretty terrible. Some are so disrespectful that I have to tell someone to put my profile into google blacklist so they don't bother me anymore.
I don't know what the deal is with some recruiters--I mean, in general. I attended a recruiting event from the US gov near graduation, approached one booth and introduced myself. A friend came over and inquired about a job to which she said "oh, well that's for the creme de la creme" and turned away without asking him anything about himself!? I found that incredibly rude.
Geeze, I wish I had her psychic powers /s.
Personally I think it has to do with the problems of giving people power and authority over others...
In the first year after graduation, I get emails from (different) google recruiters pretty much every month. One thing I see multiple times is they include a "best work place ranking" link and google is ranked #1. One time, after I said I'm not interested, the recruiter replied something like "why don't you give this a try? Best case scenario you work at the best company in the world. Worst case scenario you stuck at your current position." I remember she did use the word "stuck" and that just triggers me.
Google's interviewing process is incongruously uneven compared to the rest of the company, which is top-notch. I recommend giving it another thought. (Disclaimer: ex-Googler.)
Google can't offer me anything I want anymore. They could have when I was less experienced, but I have enough in my toolbox that ending up stuck in a Google ecosystem for years and losing my edge would be a net negative.
(I guess there's always the wheelbarrow of money, but they don't really even do that anymore, at least here in Boston.)
Why is that I have worked for a big multi national tech company and unless you had passed a 3 day course you where not allowed to interview candidates.
I would have thought that googles Hr would have a better proccess
My theory: Google started by hiring only new grads from Stanford and then a few other top schools.
1. They're only interested in new grads, so experienced people are treated funny; they're outliers.
2. They're only interested in top schools, which act as a pre-filter. Anyone interviewed is probably a good hire anyway, so it doesn't matter whether your process is goofy.
3. We are talking Google. Anyone under the age of 30 is slobbering all over themselves to work for them.
Keep this up for a few generations and their hiring process is permanently wacky.
Yeah, that ride is over. Google's rep is fucked with a lot of top schools anymore. Don't get me wrong; it's still a good company to work for, but getting a job at Google in 2017 is like getting a job at Microsoft in 2007. And the recruiting process is so stupid that the best candidates don't bother.
There are plenty of other great big tech companies that don’t have as terrible of an interview process and comparable pay.
I don’t know if I’ll ever try applying to Google again, especially after landing at one of their largest competitors & the company investing heavily in the area I am working in.
I'm curious how you reconcile these two facts, given that the rest of the company presumably joined via the interviewing process. Does this uneven process produce consistent results or do you simply weed out the less-than-top-notch hires quickly after hiring them?
I wonder if there is a competitive advantage to be had there? UMaine is a pretty good system. When I retired, I taught math at UMF for a little while, so I got to see the system from the inside.
UMF has one of the best teaching programs in the country. They even have a CS path that is judged well.
Maybe recruiting at the small State universities is a potential edge?
Not really. We don’t operate in an insanely overpriced metro, so a grossly underpaid person probably takes Home more than the average tech company person out of college.
Nobody is making the big money that elite engineers make though.
maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call
Urgh, this a hundred times over. I get a form e-mail every six months or so from a Google recruiter that says something along the lines of "sorry we missed each other! Find a slot in the attached Google Calendar for us to set up a call"
...no. That attitude straight off the bat makes me not want to go anywhere near the process of applying for a job at Google.
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school
Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?
On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.
Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.
I’ve worked for startups where nearly all of the early employees were from one university, because it’s easier to recruit that way for a small startup. But they grew out of it after a few years. It’s stranger to be still doing much the same thing decades down the road.
Another variation is when a significant cohort comes from another company. Similar to how people from the same school speak the same language, people from the same previous company speak the same language.
This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.
This "hire a batch from one company" works in small cases but doesn't scale. A great manager can cherry pick 5 or 6 top talents, but a B level manager won't. It also can create cliques in the company.
I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.
> Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.
An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent.
Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible.
If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.
Of course, this means outsourcing the decision back in time, too. You're basically hiring for "the best students by <questionable metric> from four years ago" the moment you factor the college into the question.
Not 'intelligence', but 'capability'. There are plenty of intelligent-but-not-capable people out there, and plenty of capable-but-not-highly-intelligent folks as well.
If I can't reinforce my bias to show, no prove I am amazing, then what do I have to live for? I cannot afford to be objective, I be normal or even worse, normal.
That's a very noble view. I'd say the point of education is primarily money: for the teachers/profs who teach and the students who study. Academics in the humanities in particular like to claim that listening to them lecture for a few years will grant someone a better soul and make them intellectually superior for life, but there's no evidence of that and indeed, I sometimes suspect it's the opposite.
It isn’t just about finding “good” candidates. It’s about finding a diverse set of candidates.
Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.
I’m a current UB student. There are some more visits from the top here, but only Bloomberg has any real recruiting events... I think google and Facebook appear sometimes but more to give talks and in smaller/tucked away areas. It’s quite hard to get seen by anyone.
I work at Google and have done some university recruiting (not a ton, but some) and I have not had this experience. Recently I saw a list of hundreds of schools of all sizes and locations that we were committed to sending reps to, so I think Google is actually way out ahead of the field when it comes to not only looking at Ivy League / Stanford / MIT.
I attended a state school where we had presentations each semester from Google recruitment, including advice from alumni Google employees on how to schedule your classes and choose extracurricular activities if you wanted to be a strong applicant. I don't doubt that top school folks have some resources that others may not, but Google had some presence at my school (East coast state school with quite strong mathematics department and a relatively strong CS department).
>They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons
why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?
Yes and google would be better off. I would employ a community college programmer over an average harvard grad. More experience and more focused brings better results.
The odd thing is, the university I went to, not in the US, is ranked a bit higher than UB in the international rankings, but definitely the same general area. And it gets lots of attention from Google recruiters and those from similar companies, I believe. The interviews are still fairly hard work, I hear, but they seem less fussy about universities outside the US.
Rankings do not fairly represent quality of students when compared internationally. Very very few people will go to UB if he/she was accepted to Harvard/MIT so very few top students in US ends up in UB. University of Country (ranked the same as UB internationally but the best in that country) gets almost all smart students from that country.
Quality of education itself is mostly irrelevant - difference is small and it's good enough pretty much everywhere now.
I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to).
State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).
School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.
Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.
This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went.
I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up.
Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.
Things ended up working for me overall but I can relate to this post so much ...
The assumption that it's 'obvious' that knowledge of how the system works is widespread is just wrong. It's only recently that I clued in to how the industry works, if I had all this knowledge handy years ago, if somebody told me, I don't know what position I would be in right now.
This even goes for high school counselors. I grew up in a suburban family with all of that knowledge of the system. My wife went to a similar high school, but is a first generation college student. She found out that she was supposed to take the ACT from a fellow student mere days before the deadline. Her counselor told her to ask her mom about college visits.
Thanks for writing that. Sounds very similar to my experience in Europe.
I started high school at 15 and it didn't even cross my mind (and would not have been financially possible) to look for one outside of my town, while I had a reasonable one 5 min walk away from my place. There was one school known to be the top in the state, in a big city 50 km away, but it had a reputation of people going on meth to be able to keep studying 24/7 - not so great.
Then I started the local university at 18 - I happened to go to CS because I didn't see anything matching my skills better, but I didn't even write a line of C before that (did a bit of webdev and PHP though). No one in my family and none of my friends had anything to do with CS before me.
Since then I moved country twice for study/work, but I still don't see myself changing country or even state back then at 18. (At that time, I barely started having fixed internet connection at home, didn't even know something like MIT exists, and what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley).
> If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this.
Absolutely. The number 1 reason I'm in tech is that my dad was a programmer. The reason he's in tech is that his dad was high enough up at an insurance company to swing my dad a job back when computers were new and nobody knew what to do with them. And that probably worked out because the generation before that was reasonably well off due to some lucky choices.
But I still grew up with little idea how to play the elite educational game. My family valued learning a great deal, but the jockeying for social advantage was never given much consideration. It's a very specific set of knowledge and skills.
Yep! I chose a local state school over my top choice.
State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt.
I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?
This was my experience as well. I knew and admired schools like Berkeley as the home of Berkeley UNIX, but didn't recognize that the people who went there were considered the upper crust or that colleges were widely categorized into tiers until later on. As none of my family had gone to college, the goal simply seemed to be to get into a "4 year school".
I can appreciate now that these schools offer stellar educational opportunity in contrast with many others. It's just that this should still be seen in the context that a person attends for a brief time when they're young and that perhaps it's not the be-all and end-all of intellectual ability that cultural attitudes (especially seemingly here in New England) might suggest.
it’s not a function of having gone to college. my parents and other family members have stem-related graduate degrees from state schools but were entirely ineffective in educating me on how the social aspect works. they just had no idea how the ruling class / managerial swath of society really works.
I didn't get in to MIT, but if I had, it's unlikely I would have attended, due to financial reasons. I went to a state school, and had a handful of scholarships to help me out.
In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.
I don't know when you applied but my understanding is that MIT http://news.mit.edu/2008/tuition-0307 this is from 2008 presumably that number has gone up (stanford is now free for families earning under 125k for instance)
It would have been around 1994 and 1995. Historic data say that my 4-year (sticker price) total would have been just a bit over $90k (equivalent to $133k in 2017 dollars) for tuition alone. I don't have the receipts, but I think my parents only had to pay about a quarter of that, including non-tuition expenses, to a markedly less prestigious school.
I would assume that schools like RPI also have a lot higher concentration of peers who are applying to places like Google, carrying around copies of Cracking the Coding Interview, returning from internships, and sharing knowledge of the industry and how to prepare for your career. Whether that actually makes someone better prepared to do the job is an open question, but it certainly seems like it would make people appear better prepared to do the job, since they'd know what interviewing companies value.
Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).
One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT.
There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.
(of course, there are other reasons to not go to RPI, but that's a different conversation)
EDIT: I just noticed that you referenced RPI as "slightly more selective". At the time I was there (mid-80s) it was ranked as most selective. I'm aware that its reputation has slipped a bit. While it's not that big a deal to me, as my 30 years experience outweighs all that, I wonder what effect changing reputation has on past students.
I toured it in ‘99. I don’t remember the exact stats but the avg HS GPA at the time was around 3.3, it’s SAT’s not very high, and admission % decidedly higher than everywhere else I applied.
> The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching.
There's no guarantee that the less selective schools are any better at teaching. From what I've seen CMU and Stanford both had smaller class sizes and better teachers than RPI, but that was just from quick touring.
There are some schools with a strong focus on teaching (Harvey Mudd), but that seems to be unusual. I think in most cases if you get into a super selective school you should go if you can.
Most of the best professors I have had were researchers teaching they favorite subject. Most of the worst were "CS education" types who should have been good teachers.
I had professors at my school that taught their pet research topics. They all sucked at teaching, partly because their research areas were utterly irrelevant for undergrads who were still struggling to learn programming. RDF, anyone?
The best profs were the ones who had been working developers in industry. They found ways to make the classes engaging and fun, vs just lifelessly reading their notes out loud (often in impenetrable accents).
1. Actually know something about, and be interested in, what they are teaching.
2. Being able to explain the subject without making a complete hash of it.
3. Being able to explain the subject without leaving me comotose in my desk-thing.
Extra credit for including tips and tricks that don't get covered in textbooks and are only known to people involved in the field. Plus, background and amusing stories about how the goofy nomenclature and such got the way it is.
On the other hand, when and where I was an undergraduate, if you were "still struggling to learn programming" after the first couple of semesters of programming and data structures (taught by aforementioned "CS education" people), then you were pretty thoroughly hosed. (There were, however, 1-course hour classes in individual programming languages, if you couldn't pick up those yourself.)
> There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.
One of the points of going to good research universities is to immerse yourself in exactly that environment: research. Good students probably don't need good teachers to learn. The reason to go to a top research university is to get involved in exactly that research. Especially in computer science and engineering, this is part of the pipeline to the really interesting jobs in industry.
I completely missed this when I was in school, and I regret it.
> This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
It is the diversity angle, considering many smart students of minority groups choose to go to public school because many come from families that cannot pay for tuition of the top 5.
Top 5 universities (and elite private schools more generally) are usually much cheaper than public universities for students with limited means because they have deep pockets for need-based financial aid while public schools have little if any additional campus aid.
Now, awareness of this fact may be not widespread enough, skewing the applicant pool toward the outcome.you describe because of perceived cost, but it's much more likely that a student wouldn't be able to afford a public college than an elite private one.
No. They're cheaper for people with nearly no means.
The people with some means (aka the "middle class") can stretch their budget to afford state school.
Most states also have transfer programs that let you go from a 2yr at a CC into the equivalent 4yr at state school which takes a huge chunk out of the cost.
Then you should look at the actual university policies outlined on their website. At top of line elite schools (Stanford, Princeton level), if your family income <$65-75K, both tuition and housing are free, and <$125K tuition is free.
I know for a fact that state schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA aren't that generous with housing.
>> Just look at the make up of study body at the top 5 schools.
Students from wealthier backgrounds tend to have more access to academic and educational resources and are thus more qualified and more likely to be admitted.
Not a judgement suggesting that a less fortunate child would not succeed in a similar environment; many of them just don't have one.
That reflects more the effects of family educational background and socioeconomic class on pre-collegiate academic achievement and, even with good achievement, inclination to even bother to apply to elite schools (in part, again, because of lack of awareness that headline price isn't the whole affordability story.)
No, the 'diversity' angle is frequently tied to things like skin color, sex, ethnicity, heritage, etc. You can have two people that match in all of those categories but one chose to go to a state school because of a family issue and then they will be ignored by Google.
This is not something any diversity program I know of in the big companies is trying to address.
Meh, I got into CMU SCS, and chose Tufts, because I was equally interested in comp sci and music, and Tufts had a much superior music program.
Early on in my career I'd get questioned about my CS degree from Tufts, and I'd jokingly mention "I'd gotten into CMU SCS, but I preferred to be a well rounded individual. I can send you the acceptance letter if you'd like."
I think people choose schools for all manner of reasons.
Unrelated, but please remember that not everyone here is a native English speaker. It is hard to make head or tails of your comment with all these abbreviations
as someone who grew up in Texas, I was wondering WTF UB meant and how so many people seemed to know what it was. RPI I knew because I they sent me literature while I was in high school 30 years ago.
Interesting point - referral schemes are almost always cheaper than using professional recruiters, but they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone. They'll miss a lot of clusters who never get that first Googler in the door, but past that point they're a highly efficient fix.
> they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone
Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
Yes, certainly - I think the thing I mean doesn't conflict with the thing you mean.
Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great.
Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades.
But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.)
So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.
When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking
Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM).
I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.
The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.
I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on.
Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate
hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had
learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.
I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use.
I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that
would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
I believe they did -- from what I've read back in the day it was quite common for Google to demand college transcripts from all applicants, even seasoned professionals.
That would be to check that the degree is real. There are people who pretend to have one while they don't. It's normal due diligence, assuming it's after you are hired.
I never gave my high school transcripts to my Google recruiter. I worked there for four years as an SRE (2010-2014), without having graduated college.
I'll admit I was an outlier - Most people around me had fantastic college resumes (And I was very lucky to have them to learn from to shore up places where I had weaknesses). There may also have been a different hiring track and bar for SREs. I didn't find it a problem then - But, given the known fickleness of HR (At my office, our best recruiter was forced out because she spent too much time hanging out with engineers outside after-hours) and the way Google has gone downhill since then, I'd not be surprised if this was now the case
...our best recruiter was forced out because she spent too much time hanging out with engineers outside after-hours...
What might be the rationale for that? At every company I've worked at, the best results came when people worked across divisions between boundaries. I once asked a VC what grassroots indicators they looked at inside of companies, and they said a collaborative environment without a lot of silos. I'd never heard of companies actively punishing this kind of thing, but I totally believe you that it happens. Why would they do that?
Politics. The HR Lead didn't like that she was technically competent and friendly with engineers. This was even cited - She was written up for taking up engineers time.
I know it's water under the bridge in your case, but if anybody else happens to read this, there are some protections in place for employees. Coordinating with other employees might be protected by your local labor laws, so talk to a local labor agency office. I know someone who was fired illegally for talking to other employees about things like their employment conditions, and the employer was required to compensate them.
Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population.
When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews.
Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day.
I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given.
Then they attempted to recruit me for the same position for the next four years on three separate occasions.
I told them the story of my first experience, and then they'd say "yeah let me check..." then get back to me and say "sorry, we wont interview you for this position", again, no reason given.
Then they called me one more time, for same damn position. I told them "Ill make this simple, just give me the damn job or stop freaking calling me"
Warms my heart to know that I was not the only person/startup given this treatment.
I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures).
Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup.
I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no response. No negative, no waiting, no request for more information. Just a cold dead silence.
Very demoralizing.
Screw this logic. Ok the company who is one of the biggest data--based companies in the world is trying to "make the world a better place" - and we are all one big family blah blah gives no data back, so as to literally stomp on some dream rather than to foster growth.
So, to the VCs out there, you have a moral obligation to tell people why you don't want to invest/work-with or hire.
Otherwise you stick the idea of "vulture capital" aren't helping people get better.
Look at some from the ashes type teams, like WhatsApp - might find more of them if you weren't to crush them out early.
Its not the outcome which matters. The outcome is what it is, you move on. Its the way the outcome is communicated which is a complete disregard of social norms. Its considered impolite to flat out ignore someone. You only do that if you seriously dislike that person, and want to burn your bridges to them, or if you lack communication skills. Consider you might have an appointment with a possible customer on Thursday at 2 PM at Starbucks, but you'd verify it because you are also busy. You never follow up on it. They phone you at 1 PM, but you don't pick up. You don't reply to the missed call either. Now, consider how your potential customer felt at Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. They wonder what's up. They'd like to plan their time as well.
I know, I know, corporations are psychopaths [1], but a hint of humanity or compassion would've at least kept the façade somewhat up. Actions like these can harm your faith in corporations and humanity, and that might very well be the goal. It can be extremely demotivating, and if Google doesn't buy the startup its generally in Google's interest the VC doesn't get bought by the competitor. So from that PoV it makes sense.
But we are talking about real humans here, with startups, with limited resources, and a lot of stress. Is it too much to ask for a response you've been declined preferably also with a honest mention of "because of reason X or Y"?
I've had the worst interviewing experience with google. It seems like they just don't give a shit about the people they're trying to hire. In my phone interview, my interviewer never came. I got rescheduled. In my next interview, the lady thought I was someone else and was reading someone else's resume. She apologized and then I did a binary tree search problem in google search.
The recruiter wanted to do a full on-site panel. I had already offers from several companies at that point. Google was just so bad and careless that I decided to there was no point moving forward. I called it off and chose another company with a sane hiring process.
Google is big and has an insane amount of money in the bank. They can have the shittiest interview process but the input to the pipe is so large that their hiring funnel still works out.
Although I am convinced the reason why google has such a bad male:female ratio of engineers compared to Microsoft is possibly due to their hiring process.
I went and did the phone screens and in person. Took 2 weeks to reject me. I don't really mind a rejection, I thought the interview was pretty meh on my part.
Decided to try again a while later. They had me start at the phone screen stage again, then wanted me to do a second. Almost did it, called it off because I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.
I've been rejected by other places but google just really annoyed me. I think it was the overwrought, slow, unpleasant process which produces high false negative rates but that they are also seemingly extremely proud of. Only place I wen to where they told me multiple times about how common it is to interview 2-3 times before getting in. I'm sure that happens at other places but they seem to treat it more as a flaw then a feature.
Anyway, I hate jumping through hoops. I'm hoping next job I can leverage people a bit more and maybe move through things a bit more quickly.
If they have enough candidates it makes sense to not care much about false negatives, only about false positives. Anyway, the way a company treats applicants strongly correlates to the way they treat staff, so a bad interview process is a red flag. It can be tough, but it must be respectful.
Interesting. When I pushed a bit at (well-known tech company), I managed to get a couple of high-GPA CS students from my state university into the internship interview pipeline. These students were personally recommended to me by the school's top (IMO) CS professor. I was particularly excited for one of them, who had a 3.9-something GPA, and who seemed pretty solid technically when I spoke with him on the phone. Unfortunately, he didn't pass the online coding test in order to proceed to the next step. The others did miserably on this test.
Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been.
My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies.
On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.
Or the top schools prepare their candidates for the test. I think I’m a pretty decent coder, thank you very much, but I suck on those blackboard interviews. I could see that being fixed with practice though, and maybe the big schools format their classes and labs such as to practice for that?
Companies too realize that the process is a highly imperfect proxy for overall developer capability.
But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities.
Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.
I went to a top 5 school.. sorry to say there is no secret sauce the school gave us, no interview prep classes, and not a lot of TA sessions either - at least not with small sizes.
Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
What did help me and some of my friends more than anything was just grinding interview questions - going through CTCI 3-4 times until I could solve it in my head, doing random questions off glassdoor etc..
People love to paint rosy pictures of easy lives for top 5 candidates. The truth is college was insanely hard, many people were extremely stressed/depressed, we worked our asses off and sacrificed a lot. Ultimately to learn a lot more in 4 years than someone else, you have to put in a lot more time - there is no way around it.
>the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your point, but: doing small team group work with supervision that leads to being effectively able to solve problems sounds like a thing that makes someone actually a good candidate, not just good at interviewing.
I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc).
And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.
My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students.
So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts.
It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).
Like many people on HN, I've been through the Google recruitment cattle grinder a few times - the usual observations about absurd process that leads to terrible fit apply. I'm even open at the beginning about various conditions of employment if they want to move forward...such as a desire not to move. They always move forward anyways and then at the end ask if I'd be willing to move to whatever office location has the position.
At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly.
I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.
They understand perfectly. They are hoping for rich, well connected kids from rich families that can bring in money and power into the organization. They may have tried some "ordinary" people before and were befuddled when it did not bring in $100 million dollars and several political contacts.
> No company, not even the tech giants, can cover every school or every resume submitted online.
Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.
But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.
Not CS/Engineering related, but I went to a pretty mediocre design program in my country (top of my country but compared to others world wide, not that exceptional), yet studying with designers who ended up being far better than some of the designers I worked with in NYC who graduated from notable (and more expensive) institutions like RISD and Parsons.
I feel there are money ball like opportunities worth millions of dollars per year here. You essentiall have tons of presumably similarly skilled workers who are not getting the attention from big companies. A smart company that knows about hiring should be able to pick from this overlooked group of workers and find the ones that would make their company punch "beyond their weight class".
That is to say, a purely capitalist solution is to hire all of these overlooked workers at a discount and have their output be competitive with the big companies.
Tech companies rightly or wrongly (the article doesn't make that strong of a case against) are just outsourcing part of their recruiting to elite universities.
Figuring how much investment flows from tech companies (through the companies and the employees as alumni donators) to these elite universities, it may be a worthwhile investment.
It probably is one of the few reliable signals at scale. Sure, you can pluck out a few smart people from your local podunk uni who for various reasons really are that smart but, didn't get into an elite school but, if you need to hire 200 really smart, really capable engineers this year to feed your growth pipeline Stanford, Harvard, et al isn't that bad.
Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.
Just tacking a question on here - when creating a student account, should I be setting my location to where I’m attending school or where I’m planning on being after graduating?
Looks like interviewing.io is tackling a big issue. :-)
What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?
If that's the case you really should concentrate on hiring under-represented folks for your CRUD ... excuse me... SaaS company: they tend to be cheaper.
gotta love people spreading fake news. there is no fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for stockholders. if there were people would be legally penalized for failing to do so. but then admitting that would destroy your narrative now wouldn't it?
> What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?
What if I told you that diversity hires were paid significantly less? Do you really think all that Silicon Valley PR is out of the goodness of the heart?
Someday, people will realize that diversity on its own doesn't solve anything and that people are people. Some are capable problem solvers and some aren't. Some have great technical or leadership skills and some don't.
Hitting some kind of magic ratio won't on its own create better outcomes. If it did, you could just fire your entire company, hire based on gender and ethnicity ratios and performance would improve.
It turns out that companies aren't taking that approach...
In my experience, major companies are aware of this problem, and would love to find a solution.
Frankly, the problem is that, ultimately, they want to hire the best people. Most of the time, the best people are sourced from the top-tier schools.
On the other hand, in my experience, they pride themselves on finding great people from outside of that small circle. When they do find such a person, it's not uncommon for he or she to excel.
It's totally legit to ask you what your definition of the 'best' candidate is, because you made a claim: that the best people come from the top schools.
How are we to conclude that your argument has any worth whatsoever when you aren't able to even define the components of the claim you are making?
We all know that "best" is subjective, and defined by each company.
Google is fairly vocal about their efforts to apply a somewhat scientific approach to comparing their hiring decisions to the subsequent performance of the candidates they ultimately hire. Here is an article, titled "Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People": https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/
No, it isn't. Their entire argument was predicated on "these companies need to hire the best." So they need to define what "best" means in this context. Cause so far, for the likes of Google, it's "Went to an expensive school, and can do whiteboard problems."
I'm glad my metrics are "great to work with" and "huge upside potential" instead of "can whiteboard an algorithm well" and "middle-upper class in appearance"
If jobs were screened entirely by competency and personality/fit, with interviews/resumes somehow conveying those aspects of a candidate without any other identifying information revealed about the applicants (no school, age, sex, name, ethnicity, etc), how different would the end result of hiring be? That would make for an interesting study in a variety of industries and fields, if one hasn't been done already.
That's what were trying to achieve at Vervoe. Our hiring software is designed to assess candidates primarily via task-based simulations created by experts - that means interview questions that help the Employer assess your skill and judge the candidates based on their answers mostly.
When I myself was hired by Vervoe, I didn't submit any resume, because as our CEO says, resumes are documents about past and don't necessarily show how the candidate will perform now and in future. I only submitted the skill assessing questions. My school (I have none), age, sex, ethnicity, location didn't matter.
I am glad that articles and comments like this exist, shows we're not alone on our mission to show that diversity works better :).
This is true not just for engineering hires. I recently experienced this with more evolved roles such as PM and PMMs.
Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain.
Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boilerplate response without even talking to anyone. Some sleuthing revealed this big tech firm tends to recruit heavily from McKinsey. Most people at the role had this trajectory BA at Ivy League --> 2 yrs work exp --> MBA (Top 10) ---> Big Consulting ---> Big tech.
This seems to bode well who could afford either an ivy league education and an expensive MBA. Leaves little room for folks with street experience. On the other side, maybe it calls for long-term gorilla marketing tactics to really sell your personal brand.
PM and PMM at big companies are effectively middle-management. Business manager hiring leans toward the trajectory you describe because 1) its the largest, traditional low-volatility career path for top performers out of good schools 2) it ensures the candidate has passed through a number of relatively rigorous admission filters on pedigree, culture, diligence and performance, and 3) at successful large companies the senior managers/execs are mostly MBA grads and they themselves are biased to hiring younger versions of themselves as reports.
Real diversity is like fine art: you hold some attributes constant and vary other attributes.
For instance, you can keep a similar texture and color palette and use unexpected patterns and geometries; or keep the structure of a symphony but use unexpected instrumentation.
If you stick to expectations too much you will be boring. If you vary too many attributes, it will be chaotic and meaningless.
Similarly, if you choose a random collection of people from around the world and try to make a business, it won't go anywhere. But if you hire all people who followed a prescribed life path, you probably won't be very innovative.
Interestingly, even a single person can be diverse in their ideas. Consider Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
"Diversity" is such a loaded political word now and lost all meaning. It's just cover to whitewash lazy thinking in political correctness. It's common now, in the same breath, to want both diversity and equality of outcomes, which shows how ridiculous our politics have become.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadThe official term for this is "distance traveled", and there's a bit more about it here: https://medium.com/kapor-the-bridge/dear-investors-so-you-wa...
Having grown up quite poor in NYC, I was always dismayed by not being able to take advantage of affirmative action programs...but getting selective negative points is just plain unfair.
Statistically speaking, don't they? Isn't that the reasoning for these "penalties"?
No, most asians of my generation did not have it easier. We rarely had an uncle at a hedge fund or lawfirm suddenly drop an internship in the middle of Junior year high school to beef up our college applications. Few had legacy connections or friends at the investment bank who could write a great recommendation. I went to a top-3 science high school in NYC and by and large, the Asians I saw succeed did it through sheer, soul-crushing hard work. In many cases we had slave masters (our mothers usually, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_mother) ensuring success at any cost.
Sure, most of my friends and I got into ivy league schools in droves, but in many cases it was almost a pyrrhic victory. I honestly wish I could have normal fun and social development in high school. Instead I was forced to maximize one and only one objective function -- getting into an Ivy League school.
So to answer your question: No, we Asian-Americans dont have it easier, most of us simply overcompensated at great personal cost.
These are all gross generalizations circa 1994-1997 based on my highly diverse high school graduating class of ~800 and another thousand people I know from my neighborhood, civic organizations, summer jobs, etc. I'd value other perspectives.
Again, statistically. On average, people of all colors don't have an uncle at a hedge fund...
>>> So to answer your question: No, we Asian-Americans dont have it easier, most of us simply overcompensated at great personal cost.
In NY... The irony...
And that's if you're anecdotes are true.
Huge numbers of people I went to undergrad with had uncles at hedge funds or big law firms. Those are the people I was competing with for entrance. You're absolutely right, I was never competing with many people in the Midwest (of all races) who had it worse than me because large populations amongst the Ivy League schools come from ~2 dozen high schools. My high school was proud to produce 71 (i think, something around that) students who proceeded into Ivy League schools from our graduating class (for whatever that is worth.) It is even more with 5 other NYC schools and a couple on Massachusetts.
Finally, You dont need to believe my anecdotes -- you can read hundreds of first-hand accounts online. When the "Tiger Mom" NY Times article and book came out, you chould see the outpouring of condemnation of some of this NY (and broader) Asian subculture -- a lot of it was from Asians like myself.
I encourage you to read the comments section of that famous article as well as the dozens of offshoot conversations and heated debate that ensued over the persoanl/emotional/psychological cost of success at any cost mentality.
Yes, in a top school in NY.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for "penalising" or "rewarding" anyone for their skin color. I hope you didn't get that message from me.
I am way more into personalised life experience reward/penalty system. And that should be limited to scholarships based on socio economic situation, not test scores.
Well that is sort of my point...When Asians compete for spots at top universities, they arent really competing against the entire united states, they are competing against the applicant pool.
Ivy League schools get more valedictorian applications than there are seats. Some get more perfect SAT scores than there are seats, so they end up using other factors like sports, well-rounded-ness, speaking ability, unique experiences, etc.
A lot of the folks in that applicant pool have all sorts of unique experiences -- summar safaris in africa, a performance at Lincoln Center, summer internship at a major law firm, internship at some Congressperson's office, etc, etc.
Those types of non-academic admissions factors disfavor most minorities (they espcially disfavor those of African descent given the lack of diversity in most of those fields, which is why i can appreciate affirmative action for clearly underpriviledged groups.)
Now, things are getting better for Asians, Indians, etc and are certainly better than what they were in 1996 when I applied to college. People always tend to point at Nadella, Pandit, Pichai -- but seriously -- how much of the real power base in the US is actually diverse?
Looking beyond technology into the broader economic, cultural, media, and political base of the US, can anyone really argue that Asians are so well represented that they deserve Negative application points relative to all others?
Consequently, you end up with affirmative action that is based on equality of result instead of equality of opportunity. There are a large number of extremely well qualified Asian applicants so in order to constrain the amount accepted (keeping in mind that acceptance is a zero sum game) they are substantially penalized. I think there's a more fundamental problem with this beyond just fairness.
The whole point of affirmative action was to combat widespread overt racism and other discrimination in hiring/acceptance. Equality of opportunity is extremely important. In times past it's entirely possible the talent in individuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson would not have been allowed to be cultivated because of the color of their skin, and that would be a great tragedy. The problem is that systems that end up de facto equality of result face the exact same problem as we did when overt racism and discrimination was so widespread. You end up viewing certain people as less meritorious than they are, because of the color of their skin. This is something that should never be tolerated, no matter how benevolent the reason may be.
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
With our model, we free up companies from having to worry about exactly what you described because we incur the vetting.
Also, they don't just work with students. I've used them, and I've worked professionally for several years.
This goes for both senior engineers, and more recently, students.
Of course, all "practice" interview companies make their money by referring their top users to companies and getting the referral fee.
I looked at your webpage & FAQ for employers. (https://interviewing.io/employers)
Can you say how much your service costs?
This is our first season doing university stuff, so pricing is flexible.
Interviewing is supposed to be hiring people who work everyday, to do everyday jobs.
If people have to practice to clear your interviews. You are either hiring the wrong people, or people who want to get in to only game the interview. In both the instances you are hiring the wrong people.
Put in other words if even ordinary perfectly qualified candidates have to practice to clear a company's interview. The company is likely asking wrong questions.
I know someone who dropped out and is now making plenty of money at a software development gig. I also know CS grads who can't think about anything outside their little realm to save their lives. Point is: some schools legit don't filter well for learning capacity.
I feel pretty comfortable with my interpretation.
If you find an efficient + effective way to compare all the applicants, that would make it easier to put everyone on the same footing regardless of school. But that's hard to do and it's easy to be risk averse and just hire the Harvard grad.
A Harvard grad presumably costs you more, but they keep doing it that way because 1) it's simple, and 2) if you try to hire more broadly but misjudge and make a bad hire, that's potentially much more expensive.
Even if they're making CRUD apps, making tons of high-availability CRUD apps that work against dozens of services your team doesn't own that can serve huge fractions of the globe requires non-trivial coordination and skill. (Not that all those companies do is CRUD apps, but even if.)
I'm not sure it's as jard as those companies make it out to be -- but it's not "just CRUD apps", it's the logistics of CRUD apps spanning the globe.
Source: work at one of those companies.
Sure, there are software jobs where you're setting up wordpress blogs, but there are plenty that require you to think about algorithms and how your database actually works in order to do them well.
These companies set the bar at 70+ for a number of reasons. Their own egos ("I only work with 'the best' so therefore I'm also 'the best' and don't want to water that down"), status signalling for the companies, to keep bright young talent from starting a competitor, etc.
Having worked all over the United States and even the "mecca" of San Francisco, the quality seemingly is more tied to their experience than their "talent".
When surrounded by other excellent workers/engineers and great processes, you can become great. When you work with and for mediocre, that tends to be what you know.
I find fizzbuzz and other coding challenges much more effective in hiring.
It's hard to do but showing actual code from your codebase with an actual real bug is a much better indicator of whether someone will be successful than anything else.
I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.
I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?
Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]
The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.
[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.
Any school lower on the perceived status hierarchy than the school they went to, most likely.
> The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works.
The fact that assignments are similar isn't evidence that "it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons" is inaccurate. Perhaps the assignments are easy, and nobody cares about the quality of the program so much as the quality of the students.
That sounds like a rationalization to justify arrogance rather than a claim you have any sort of evidence for. I'd say I've got abundant evidence to the contrary.
The Silicon Valley arrogance sure is on full display today. In another thread on the homepage we have people expressing shock and surprise that yes, there are in fact ways to put a roof over your head in Topeka for $100K.
This may sound weird to you, but I don't live in Silicon Valley because I don't want to. I didn't go to one of the elite colleges (which I most likely could have qualified for) because I didn't want to. My house is bigger, my yard is bigger, my commute is better, I like the people better, my student loans were paid off years ago and I have a realistic prospect of owning my house before I'm 40 without having had to go to Money Mustache levels of frugality, and in some ways it's easier to hire here than in the Valley. I know, I've been to the Valley many times.
But I suppose the net effect of the number of people currently getting out of SV is evaporative cooling, so SV will be left with an ever-increasing portion of the population who Truly Believe that just outside of the comforting mountains is a horde of barbarians with sloped foreheads who can't quite seem to figure out this "fire" thing. For your own sake and sanity, you might want to escape that massive filter bubble and have a look around at your options, which you may discover are nowhere near as monolithic as you think. It's always good to have an escape route, as evidenced by the many people availing themselves of it.
So your implication is that the ratio of "competent" : "completely incompetent" for students coming from these schools is roughly... 2:100?
I know you can't possibly mean that. But your language clearly implies that ratio. The only question is why you're making such a bizarre implication.
I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State
Was the original article suggesting that your company hire "primarily" from Podunk State? Or simply that you probably don't want to hire near-exclusively from the Top 5?
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools. Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
Which is exactly what the original article was advocating - a "completely blind, skills-first approach". In particular, it was definitely not arguing that one should "focus extra" on state schools.
the parent can be correct with a ratio closer to 1:10 or 1:20, assuming the top schools churn out many more students than 2nd/3rd tier schools. Which is certainly the case depending on how to define 2nd/3rd tier.
For ex parent's observation is probably spot on if you're comparing MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley to an arbitrarily chosen regional state campus. But is more absurd if you're comparing those places to Michigan/Wisconsin/North Carolina/Washington/...
> Which is exactly what the original article was advocating
To be clear, the original article is a long-form advertisement for a product. What the article is advocating is giving interviewing.io money :)
I'll readily concur that students from top-tier schools are on average better than students from Podunk schools.
But (based on a wide sampling of data points) I don't see anything like a 1:100 ratio of "better", by any metric.
I think you misunderstood my point. Parent's observation may be accurate because of a combination of quality disparity and disparities in raw numbers.
The elite CS programs are relatively large compared to many Podunk States. So it's not just that there's a modest 1:10 or 1:20 or 1:5 or whatever quality ratio, but also that Podunk State graduates 20 or 30 students a year while the elite schools are churning out hundreds. So there's a 1:10 quality ratio but still a 1:100 yield ratio. Or whatever.
Again, inaccurate for the large state flagships, but very believable for the regional comprehensives.
(This isn't idle speculation. My observation is that larger schools tend to get more attention from recruiters, even setting aside quality, and I think this numbers game has something to do with it.)
Exactly - it's the "whatever" part I'm having trouble working with.
I'm seeing the basic point about population samples you're making. But even so, both logically and numbers-wise, the original commenter's argument was just extremely handwavy. Which is, how to put this nicely... strange, coming from someone dissing an entire class of people (Podunk U graduates) as not just lacking rigor... but 99% likely to be, in their words, "completely incompetent".
I am now at a world famous grad school and there are talks, events, opportunities every week. I would say the best 5% at the undergraduate school were approximately at least as good as the average undergraduate here.
Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.
How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
Which isn't to say that there aren't students there worth recruiting.
If recruiting is a competitive advantage, why not be innovative and data driven about it? If it's not a competitive advantage, then why spend time and energy on it?
Continue with projects like codejam, though ideally come up with one that is less reliant on obscure math (or OEIS) and more reliant on problem solving.
Also: protip for people in the South or Midwest who are open to relocation: change your online profiles to say you're in the new location.
I would second this advice, and be ready to "put up" when people ask you to fly out. Be prepared to have a plan to get to interviews if you plan on fibbing about your current location.
There's nothing weird about signalling that you'd prefer to live/work somewhere else. ("I'm currently still in St. Louis, but want to field offers in New York," seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.)
That'll work at getting more calls, but won't the increase in calls just mean more offers for work without relocation packages?
Maybe their talents are best directed at small-ish companies where they can contribute, grow, and do interesting stuff outside of monstrously large companies with cut-throat competition?
Having ALL the "top" candidates vacuumed up by the "top" employers just seems wrong to me. I feel it's more healthy to have the best students spread out all over the place rather than concentrated in the top 5 or 6 employers in Silicon Valley. After all, there are more employers than there are colleges.
In my experience, "top" employers are employers that pay the best. I'd probably be happier at a small and scrappy company, but they so far have offered worse compensation.
I guess I am also trying to say that these students should not feel so deprived if google recruiters aren't easily accessible, there's plenty of great places to work.
Google and Microsoft makes about $200k/year profit per employee, Facebook 4x that. The problem, I suspect, is that you probably don't net anywhere near 1-2 hires per couple of events at these schools.
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-pro...
If only a tech company could figure out a way to use computers to scale up processes so that they work for more people.
The age of kleptocratic administrative layers at Universities importing communist and muslim subversive faculty and foreigners being given preference over Americans due to "diversity" needs to come to an end before it totally brings the USA to collapse, and with it, so would also go the rest of the world. This is a lagging effects type of situation here. You have to be able to project effects into the future. If you had your pulse on matters in the past, you would see that things have progressed even worse than ever anticipated back just 15 or 20 years ago. The tea leaves do not look good at all right now.
Sweet pitch and of course a genuine problem. But companies have very limited resources and they use them at elite schools which have already stringent requirements to get in. Alternatively, I now see most companies are giving a hackerrank test as a start irrespective of your school. I guess this is a starting point to avoid the bias towards top schools.
like "oh, one of your parents was a student here? here, you're in".
Harvard is one-third legacy[1].
> at five Ivy League schools, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown, as well as 33 other colleges, there are more students from families in the top one percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
stringent requirements, sure, but certainly not the right kind.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-o...
If I can hire cheaper from candidates not in the top 5 the money could be used to recruit better/same talent at lower costs plus generally a longer employment term.
These companies could definitely improve their hiring quality by drawing top-tier students at lesser schools instead of hiring below-median talent from target top schools.
Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlation with school or even undergrad degree for people with any experience at all.
I doubt it would be true over the entire university CS populations. If the only thing you know about two applicants is their university, then the student from a top tier university will on average perform much better than the student from a low tier university.
I'm like 99% sure it's zero information. Most hiring processes don't falsify the null hypothesis :P
That said, I do agree that I've always been impressed with prospective hires & the students we've mentored from top-tier schools. But I also know that a great student could come from anywhere, and if they also happen to be local it can be a real value multiplier.
A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development. A company seeking the latest AI talent will never find it at a school that trains students on the latest web middleware. And once companies realize they're getting a lot of well-prepared candidates from a particular program, of course they're going to focus on those schools. It would be a waste of time and scarce resources to do otherwise.
> scarce resources
haha
For example, your statement "A company like Apple has little use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development.".
Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail infrastructure is a Java backend ( i believe webobjects moved to Java, then was deprecated as an outside project, but kept for internal use, my knowledge is dated on this). Take a look at their jobs site[1]
Now my point wasn't about apple and java. But our own biases that we bring, at every level. We all have biases, but most direct way to effect biases in hiring, is to close your pool down. You need a really wide opening at the beginning of your sourcing funnel to have diversity ( and i mean diversity at every level ).
I work at one of the "big 4" and went to an ivy, but guess what, some of the smartest people I have ever met, had to go to schools based on what their parents could afford. Thats a HUGE selection bias.
So yes, widen your funnel, and recognize your biases ( that we all have, and that basically boil down to having less knowledge ).
[1] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=112907897&openJobId=112...
Morally I still haven't figured out what to think about this. Generally stereotyping people is considered okay unless its about something outside of their control (race, etc). e.g. its okay to stereotype about rednecks or Californians, because they could choose to move, etc.
But generally I don't believe in free will - nothing is a choice when you consider all the circumstances. You'll find plenty of articles on Washington post that follow this line of reasoning about the circle of poverty, etc.
So if you don't believe in free will, you're not allowed to judge anyone for any reason - which sounds ridiculous.
So in short, I have not figured out how the morality of stereotyping works, and that bugs me. Has anyone figured it out?
Not only this, but most new grads are hired in a pool and not for specific skills.
Secondly, a developer that masters and shows proficiency in any complex software ecosystem, including Java and web middleware, is going to have transferable skills valuable to any software company.
No, they don't. Read as many thousands of resumes from across the planet as I have, then get back to me.
In an industry where 60% of the workforce hasn't learned the field through a traditional degree[1], and where a nontrivial fraction of these are self taught, I think that's a pretty bad assumption.
Besides, this argument would hold more water if companies actually tested for this stuff. Most companies seem to be interested in testing algorithms and puzzles, which ultimately aren't actually that useful (sure, algorithms are useful, but not the culture of hyperoptimizing-by-big-O; when n is rarely huge O(f(n)) doesn't matter). Yeah, for an AI job they'll test AI as well, but large companies continue to test with an overwhelming bias for this. I don't think they get to say they want to choose the skillset of their pool by choosing colleges if they do that.
Also, all the large companies (Google, MS, Facebook, etc) hire-first-ask-questions-later; they don't hire college grads for a specific position, they just hire them and work out the position later.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/unlocking-trapped-engineer...
If you are "someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development" that apparently we don't want at Apple, my email is in my profile.
Reputable professors are not necessarily the best teachers... Especially at the undergrad level.
The top students at both schools were quite close in ability, drive, motivation and talent. There may have been a couple a very little smarter at the name school, but not many, and not enough to make a material difference.
But the mid and bottom students at the average school were quite a bit worse than the mid and bottom students at the name school. And it wasn't even close.
So, in my experience at least, there are definitely students worth hiring at both places, but you have to sift through quite a bit more students at the average schools.
The name of the school means very little to me as a result of my experiences. Especially now that I interview a lot of people and have a really hard time seeing any differences between them based on education.
Hats off to the folks who got the great education at a discount. In a way they may have made the smarter decision.
Harvard, maybe. MIT? Their undergrads are great — of the interns we get, MIT and Cal Tech undergrads are leaps and bounds above those from other schools.
Apple just doesn't want to deal with 2-4 months of ramp-up when they can have someone with expertise in a specific subject. Wealthy institutions see that, and teach certain frameworks as part of their graduates' education. Why else would you see core courses in languages like Objective C?
Any graduate can learn it fairly quickly, but a common theme among employers these days is that they will invest nothing in employees.
This might be true for graduate level programs, but between decent state schools and Ivies, the difference, so I have found having been in both "types" of universities, in the curriculum is far, far less than you would lead us to believe. From having met and interviewed a number of people from both, the talent of the individual seems to shine through regardless of the school they attended (if it was at least reasonably decent, i.e. most research-oriented state schools).
I find it odd that you have chosen to respond to an article on diversity with comments that display a knee-jerk bias. Also "IT-focused Java development" is not even a real term. I can only imagine you mean Enterprise Java Development.
I can assure you a quality engineer with great problem solving skills, CS fundamentals and real-world experience working on large important projects with real deadlines and bottom line impact can be of great use to a company like Apple.
No, they don't. At least, not at the undergraduate level.
I went to an unknown undergraduate CS program. Later, I did a PhD at one of the top schools in the country. For my career, I have worked with graduates from all of the elite programs. There's no difference in training. The big-name schools may attract "better" high-school students, but even that advantage is overrated.
Undergraduate programs are largely identical. It's only when you get to graduate school that the resources of a top-tier program start to become relevant.
“I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest.”
In this way you are just taking advantage of the hard work that some college admissions committee put in to sorting your candidates.
Of course my current employer has even less diversity. Out of the 50 people in the IT department here I am one of two that didn't go to school here. When I pointed out that fact my boss defended herself and said that she doesn't consider herself to be from here either because she didn't come to to U-M until grad school. That is what qualifies for an outside hire here.
I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.
Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.
Oh well, the local community college classes were only like $15 per credit hour for high school seniors (paid by the high school), so I started college as a sophomore. Gotta take the good with the bad I guess.
One of the beautiful things about softwars tech is that it has offered people opportunities to self-teach and build a portfolio of their own credentials, by their own determination. This has given ordinary people the opportunity to build things that benefit others.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have privileged rich kids attending Harvard, many of whom go on to work in finance or consulting, and who knows what they produce that is useful in the world.
I would really love to see the idea that we need to open up on the limitations of world-class educations and credentials become part of the mainstream discussion.
There is almost no reason the first two years of, which are often filled with gen-ed requirements often taught in laughably huge lecture halls by uninterested staff, not be open to everyone in the world. We need a new model that promotes this--Harvard classes should be open to everyone and that includes the tests and credits as well.
And why not? The War on Poverty in America has spent trillions of dollars with little to nothing to show for it in terms of reducing poverty. Of all this money spent, one of the first things I would have done would have been to ensure everyone has the greatest opportunities available to them. There's no good reason to hold them hostage, unless you care about profit or prestige more than increasing opportunity and reducing inequality.
edit: to clarify what happens, every 6 months it's a new recruiter, and they always ping me multiple times until I respond and tell them what I've told all of them, and they usually (with 1 exception so far) keep pinging the same way.
The early part of the recruitment process is basically a process to get possibly qualified candidates to interview. What it's good for: if you ever want try interviewing at Google again, you can get an interview. I wouldn't expect anything more from it than that; it's pretty impersonal. :-)
Of course they shouldn't. (I know plenty of people at Google, I've gone through the process a few times, I have an idea.) But...that doesn't mean it doesn't happen and that it isn't cultural.
I don't know what the deal is with some recruiters--I mean, in general. I attended a recruiting event from the US gov near graduation, approached one booth and introduced myself. A friend came over and inquired about a job to which she said "oh, well that's for the creme de la creme" and turned away without asking him anything about himself!? I found that incredibly rude.
Geeze, I wish I had her psychic powers /s.
Personally I think it has to do with the problems of giving people power and authority over others...
(I guess there's always the wheelbarrow of money, but they don't really even do that anymore, at least here in Boston.)
I would have thought that googles Hr would have a better proccess
1. They're only interested in new grads, so experienced people are treated funny; they're outliers.
2. They're only interested in top schools, which act as a pre-filter. Anyone interviewed is probably a good hire anyway, so it doesn't matter whether your process is goofy.
3. We are talking Google. Anyone under the age of 30 is slobbering all over themselves to work for them.
Keep this up for a few generations and their hiring process is permanently wacky.
I don’t know if I’ll ever try applying to Google again, especially after landing at one of their largest competitors & the company investing heavily in the area I am working in.
UMF has one of the best teaching programs in the country. They even have a CS path that is judged well.
Maybe recruiting at the small State universities is a potential edge?
You get great talent that big tech companies won’t interview!
No insult intended, I would rather they benefit and not you.
Nobody is making the big money that elite engineers make though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball
Urgh, this a hundred times over. I get a form e-mail every six months or so from a Google recruiter that says something along the lines of "sorry we missed each other! Find a slot in the attached Google Calendar for us to set up a call"
...no. That attitude straight off the bat makes me not want to go anywhere near the process of applying for a job at Google.
Think of all the extra brainwashing needed.
It's way cheaper to start with a kernel than expand from there.
Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?
On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.
Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.
This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.
I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.
An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent.
Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible.
If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.
I would not buy that for a second.
Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.
Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.
How many of those schools have you never hired anyone from, vs how many are hired every year from Stanford?
why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?
Quality of education itself is mostly irrelevant - difference is small and it's good enough pretty much everywhere now.
State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).
School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.
Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.
This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up.
Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.
The assumption that it's 'obvious' that knowledge of how the system works is widespread is just wrong. It's only recently that I clued in to how the industry works, if I had all this knowledge handy years ago, if somebody told me, I don't know what position I would be in right now.
I started high school at 15 and it didn't even cross my mind (and would not have been financially possible) to look for one outside of my town, while I had a reasonable one 5 min walk away from my place. There was one school known to be the top in the state, in a big city 50 km away, but it had a reputation of people going on meth to be able to keep studying 24/7 - not so great.
Then I started the local university at 18 - I happened to go to CS because I didn't see anything matching my skills better, but I didn't even write a line of C before that (did a bit of webdev and PHP though). No one in my family and none of my friends had anything to do with CS before me.
Since then I moved country twice for study/work, but I still don't see myself changing country or even state back then at 18. (At that time, I barely started having fixed internet connection at home, didn't even know something like MIT exists, and what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley).
No idea.
Absolutely. The number 1 reason I'm in tech is that my dad was a programmer. The reason he's in tech is that his dad was high enough up at an insurance company to swing my dad a job back when computers were new and nobody knew what to do with them. And that probably worked out because the generation before that was reasonably well off due to some lucky choices.
But I still grew up with little idea how to play the elite educational game. My family valued learning a great deal, but the jockeying for social advantage was never given much consideration. It's a very specific set of knowledge and skills.
State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt.
I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?
I can appreciate now that these schools offer stellar educational opportunity in contrast with many others. It's just that this should still be seen in the context that a person attends for a brief time when they're young and that perhaps it's not the be-all and end-all of intellectual ability that cultural attitudes (especially seemingly here in New England) might suggest.
In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.
One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT.
There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.
(of course, there are other reasons to not go to RPI, but that's a different conversation)
EDIT: I just noticed that you referenced RPI as "slightly more selective". At the time I was there (mid-80s) it was ranked as most selective. I'm aware that its reputation has slipped a bit. While it's not that big a deal to me, as my 30 years experience outweighs all that, I wonder what effect changing reputation has on past students.
There's no guarantee that the less selective schools are any better at teaching. From what I've seen CMU and Stanford both had smaller class sizes and better teachers than RPI, but that was just from quick touring.
There are some schools with a strong focus on teaching (Harvey Mudd), but that seems to be unusual. I think in most cases if you get into a super selective school you should go if you can.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-great-research-meets-grea...
Can't get behind the paywall now, but it was a lot in line with your arguments.
I had professors at my school that taught their pet research topics. They all sucked at teaching, partly because their research areas were utterly irrelevant for undergrads who were still struggling to learn programming. RDF, anyone?
The best profs were the ones who had been working developers in industry. They found ways to make the classes engaging and fun, vs just lifelessly reading their notes out loud (often in impenetrable accents).
1. Actually know something about, and be interested in, what they are teaching.
2. Being able to explain the subject without making a complete hash of it.
3. Being able to explain the subject without leaving me comotose in my desk-thing.
Extra credit for including tips and tricks that don't get covered in textbooks and are only known to people involved in the field. Plus, background and amusing stories about how the goofy nomenclature and such got the way it is.
On the other hand, when and where I was an undergraduate, if you were "still struggling to learn programming" after the first couple of semesters of programming and data structures (taught by aforementioned "CS education" people), then you were pretty thoroughly hosed. (There were, however, 1-course hour classes in individual programming languages, if you couldn't pick up those yourself.)
Mathematical logic class taught by logician? Awesome
Automata class taught by expert in complexity theory? Fantastic
Rudin class taught by PDEs expert - amazing
The worst class I had was an introductory algorithms course taught by someone who specialized in teaching.
One of the points of going to good research universities is to immerse yourself in exactly that environment: research. Good students probably don't need good teachers to learn. The reason to go to a top research university is to get involved in exactly that research. Especially in computer science and engineering, this is part of the pipeline to the really interesting jobs in industry.
I completely missed this when I was in school, and I regret it.
That is literally the diversity angle.
Very much a diversity issue.
Now, awareness of this fact may be not widespread enough, skewing the applicant pool toward the outcome.you describe because of perceived cost, but it's much more likely that a student wouldn't be able to afford a public college than an elite private one.
The people with some means (aka the "middle class") can stretch their budget to afford state school.
Most states also have transfer programs that let you go from a 2yr at a CC into the equivalent 4yr at state school which takes a huge chunk out of the cost.
They usually weasel word the scope of their generosity, treat loans as gifts, etc.
The sticker price is always negotiable, but state schools are usually ahead.
Since I personally experienced it, I'm pretty sure it's not.
Then you should look at the actual university policies outlined on their website. At top of line elite schools (Stanford, Princeton level), if your family income <$65-75K, both tuition and housing are free, and <$125K tuition is free.
I know for a fact that state schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA aren't that generous with housing.
>> Just look at the make up of study body at the top 5 schools.
Students from wealthier backgrounds tend to have more access to academic and educational resources and are thus more qualified and more likely to be admitted.
Not a judgement suggesting that a less fortunate child would not succeed in a similar environment; many of them just don't have one.
This is not something any diversity program I know of in the big companies is trying to address.
A person with a family issue probably still has a family issue incompatible with working for a corporation across the country.
Ever think their process of selecting unencumbered elitists might be by design and super effective?
Probably? That seems to be an expansive assumption, to be charitable.
Early on in my career I'd get questioned about my CS degree from Tufts, and I'd jokingly mention "I'd gotten into CMU SCS, but I preferred to be a well rounded individual. I can send you the acceptance letter if you'd like."
I think people choose schools for all manner of reasons.
It’s a pretty hostile environment for many people.
I admit I'm heavily biased, but I'd say it is demanding. If universally demanding excellence is 'hostile,' then I guess I can agree with you.
BS = Bachelor of Science
MS = Master's of Science
HR = Human Resources
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo
RPI = Rob's Pairing Interview
I understanding wanting to avoid the former, but the latter is pretty good.
Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?
Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great.
Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades.
But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.)
So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.
I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.
The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.
I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.
I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
Google's interviewing process used to be extremely absurd. They have reformed it somewhat since around 2013.
I'll admit I was an outlier - Most people around me had fantastic college resumes (And I was very lucky to have them to learn from to shore up places where I had weaknesses). There may also have been a different hiring track and bar for SREs. I didn't find it a problem then - But, given the known fickleness of HR (At my office, our best recruiter was forced out because she spent too much time hanging out with engineers outside after-hours) and the way Google has gone downhill since then, I'd not be surprised if this was now the case
What might be the rationale for that? At every company I've worked at, the best results came when people worked across divisions between boundaries. I once asked a VC what grassroots indicators they looked at inside of companies, and they said a collaborative environment without a lot of silos. I'd never heard of companies actively punishing this kind of thing, but I totally believe you that it happens. Why would they do that?
It's a sad story, but what can you do?
When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews.
Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day.
I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given.
Then they attempted to recruit me for the same position for the next four years on three separate occasions.
I told them the story of my first experience, and then they'd say "yeah let me check..." then get back to me and say "sorry, we wont interview you for this position", again, no reason given.
Then they called me one more time, for same damn position. I told them "Ill make this simple, just give me the damn job or stop freaking calling me"
They finally stopped calling me.
I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures).
Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup.
I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no response. No negative, no waiting, no request for more information. Just a cold dead silence. Very demoralizing.
So, to the VCs out there, you have a moral obligation to tell people why you don't want to invest/work-with or hire.
Otherwise you stick the idea of "vulture capital" aren't helping people get better.
Look at some from the ashes type teams, like WhatsApp - might find more of them if you weren't to crush them out early.
I know, I know, corporations are psychopaths [1], but a hint of humanity or compassion would've at least kept the façade somewhat up. Actions like these can harm your faith in corporations and humanity, and that might very well be the goal. It can be extremely demotivating, and if Google doesn't buy the startup its generally in Google's interest the VC doesn't get bought by the competitor. So from that PoV it makes sense.
But we are talking about real humans here, with startups, with limited resources, and a lot of stress. Is it too much to ask for a response you've been declined preferably also with a honest mention of "because of reason X or Y"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)
The recruiter wanted to do a full on-site panel. I had already offers from several companies at that point. Google was just so bad and careless that I decided to there was no point moving forward. I called it off and chose another company with a sane hiring process.
Google is big and has an insane amount of money in the bank. They can have the shittiest interview process but the input to the pipe is so large that their hiring funnel still works out.
Although I am convinced the reason why google has such a bad male:female ratio of engineers compared to Microsoft is possibly due to their hiring process.
Decided to try again a while later. They had me start at the phone screen stage again, then wanted me to do a second. Almost did it, called it off because I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.
I've been rejected by other places but google just really annoyed me. I think it was the overwrought, slow, unpleasant process which produces high false negative rates but that they are also seemingly extremely proud of. Only place I wen to where they told me multiple times about how common it is to interview 2-3 times before getting in. I'm sure that happens at other places but they seem to treat it more as a flaw then a feature.
Anyway, I hate jumping through hoops. I'm hoping next job I can leverage people a bit more and maybe move through things a bit more quickly.
I was straight out of uni and the interview was a three-part, month-long process.
At the end, HR called me and gave me an offer, "welcome to the team" included and so on.
I was just told to wait a week for the CEO's formal approval, which was to be "standard procedure" for every new hire.
A week became two weeks, then another two weeks, then another. During that I was still assured the job was coming.
In the meantime, I found another job, a pretty good one.
A month later, I got a call from HR at Wikia saying that maybe I should start looking for a different job.
At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.
Always this. And don't stop interviewing and applying until it happens.
Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been.
My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies.
On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.
But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities.
Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.
Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
What did help me and some of my friends more than anything was just grinding interview questions - going through CTCI 3-4 times until I could solve it in my head, doing random questions off glassdoor etc..
People love to paint rosy pictures of easy lives for top 5 candidates. The truth is college was insanely hard, many people were extremely stressed/depressed, we worked our asses off and sacrificed a lot. Ultimately to learn a lot more in 4 years than someone else, you have to put in a lot more time - there is no way around it.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.
I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!
And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.
My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students.
So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts.
It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).
Dropping out of that place was still one of the best decisions I've ever made though.
At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly.
I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.
If I'm reading it right, the X-axis is backwards from normal convention (origin in lower-left), but the axis isn't really labelled.
Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.
But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.
That is to say, a purely capitalist solution is to hire all of these overlooked workers at a discount and have their output be competitive with the big companies.
Figuring how much investment flows from tech companies (through the companies and the employees as alumni donators) to these elite universities, it may be a worthwhile investment.
It probably is one of the few reliable signals at scale. Sure, you can pluck out a few smart people from your local podunk uni who for various reasons really are that smart but, didn't get into an elite school but, if you need to hire 200 really smart, really capable engineers this year to feed your growth pipeline Stanford, Harvard, et al isn't that bad.
Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.
How was the experience using interviewing.io?
I tried signing up some 2 years ago, it said they are in a private beta and they have been there ever since.
Looks like interviewing.io is tackling a big issue. :-)
What if I told you that diversity hires were paid significantly less? Do you really think all that Silicon Valley PR is out of the goodness of the heart?
Hitting some kind of magic ratio won't on its own create better outcomes. If it did, you could just fire your entire company, hire based on gender and ethnicity ratios and performance would improve.
It turns out that companies aren't taking that approach...
Frankly, the problem is that, ultimately, they want to hire the best people. Most of the time, the best people are sourced from the top-tier schools.
On the other hand, in my experience, they pride themselves on finding great people from outside of that small circle. When they do find such a person, it's not uncommon for he or she to excel.
It's totally legit to ask you what your definition of the 'best' candidate is, because you made a claim: that the best people come from the top schools.
How are we to conclude that your argument has any worth whatsoever when you aren't able to even define the components of the claim you are making?
Google is fairly vocal about their efforts to apply a somewhat scientific approach to comparing their hiring decisions to the subsequent performance of the candidates they ultimately hire. Here is an article, titled "Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People": https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/
Here's an article about how Steve Jobs wanted to "Hire the Best" http://recruitloop.com/blog/steve-jobs-top-hiring-tip-hire-t...
My personal definition is "high probability of excelling at the work that is outlined in the job description."
When I myself was hired by Vervoe, I didn't submit any resume, because as our CEO says, resumes are documents about past and don't necessarily show how the candidate will perform now and in future. I only submitted the skill assessing questions. My school (I have none), age, sex, ethnicity, location didn't matter.
I am glad that articles and comments like this exist, shows we're not alone on our mission to show that diversity works better :).
Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain.
Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boilerplate response without even talking to anyone. Some sleuthing revealed this big tech firm tends to recruit heavily from McKinsey. Most people at the role had this trajectory BA at Ivy League --> 2 yrs work exp --> MBA (Top 10) ---> Big Consulting ---> Big tech.
This seems to bode well who could afford either an ivy league education and an expensive MBA. Leaves little room for folks with street experience. On the other side, maybe it calls for long-term gorilla marketing tactics to really sell your personal brand.
For instance, you can keep a similar texture and color palette and use unexpected patterns and geometries; or keep the structure of a symphony but use unexpected instrumentation.
If you stick to expectations too much you will be boring. If you vary too many attributes, it will be chaotic and meaningless.
Similarly, if you choose a random collection of people from around the world and try to make a business, it won't go anywhere. But if you hire all people who followed a prescribed life path, you probably won't be very innovative.
Interestingly, even a single person can be diverse in their ideas. Consider Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
"Diversity" is such a loaded political word now and lost all meaning. It's just cover to whitewash lazy thinking in political correctness. It's common now, in the same breath, to want both diversity and equality of outcomes, which shows how ridiculous our politics have become.