Ask HN: Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges?
Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know, but sometimes I sense a sort of backlash against our peers who went to so-called 'name-brand' colleges by those, like the vast majority of us, who went to non-luxury colleges. Do you see this as well in your workplace? If so, please discuss reasons you think this might be happening. How much differently do you treat people based on where they went to college? Thanks!
19 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadActually, the broader backlash by far seems to be from some self-taught hackers against people who've gone to school for computer science. There seems to be this idea out there that a computer science program is worthless for becoming a good hacker. For crappy programs, this is true. For great ones, it couldn't be further from the truth.
Anyway, do expect some people to try to test you though and embarrass you if they can. Of course, those people probably would have tried no matter where you went to school.
In my experience it's true. Do I think it's unfair? Probably exactly as unfair as giving preference to someone during the hiring process because of where they went to school. Equal and opposite "unfairness." :)
On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as easily how well they'll do.
If you give an easy exam and everyone scores 90% or better you don't know much more about the person who scored 100% than you do about the person who scored 90%. If, on the other hand, you give an extremely difficult exam that results in a curve with the 90% cut-off at 80% and the 10% cut-off at 20% you know much more about the abilities of those who did well compared to the abilities of those who did poorly. I think people tend to view a name-brand college as a the very tough exam and a non-name-brand college as the easy exam. Whether or not this is a safe assumption is another question.
I agree with this, which is why I put "unfairness" in quotes in my other response. There's a certain political correctness that makes people uneasy about comparing two candidates based on the schools they went to. The fact is, the rigor of training for the same degree varies wildly depending on the school you attended.
If you're comparing two seemingly equivalent unknowns who've got no body of work other than a degree, I think it makes perfect sense to bias towards the person who completed the better program.
"does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma)."
I agreed with both your original comment and the follow-up. The question of fairness got me thinking, though, and I wanted to present one way of thinking about it.
LOL welcome to life, buddy.
What makes those higher expectations "unreasonable"? All else being equal, I'd expect the quality of an average grad from Stanford or MIT to be higher than the average grad of some random state school. Of course, there is always more information to consider -- the work you've actually done is far more important than where you went to school, and there are great people at unknown schools (and mediocre people at top places). But in the absence of more information about a candidate, I think marginally higher expectations for grads of top schools is justified.
On the other hand, if you went to grad school, research is such a small world that this kind of thing comes up more often - I might ask who your advisor was, etc, to find out whether we have friends in common. It's less about skills.
Maybe you need to meet some new hackers.
I have never seen this. Ever.
30 years. 90 companies. 1,000,000 lines of code.
Maybe it's just because people who know me know better than to bother with details instead of issues.
Your "pedigree" is a detail. Your work is an issue. Don't waste your time with those who don't know the difference.
If not, please elaborate on your post as I do not understand how you in 30 years can not have met hackers with these qualities.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meritocratic http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/egalitarian
But thanks smacking me with 2 dictionary links. That oughta fix it.
That said, I have heard of backlash against 'name-brand' colleges at a startup, but it was, interestingly, not by hackers but by business dev. people.
I think at the end of the day, you're a jerk if you judge a person by their college. And you're a jerk if you think going to a good college actually means you're inherently more capable than other folks.