Before I attended and graduated from an ivy, I attended a CUNY school for a year. I remember speaking to a classmate in my calc I class who explained to me that he was taking a full course load on top a 20 hour a week job at a local department store. All while commuting from the depths of Queens.<p>Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).
> Critics say the typical recruitment process at high-profile tech firms often gives an advantage to students at top computing colleges<p>Isn't that exactly what <i>makes them top computing colleges</i>? This seems like the least surprising feedback loop ever.<p>If Google prefers to hire interns from Stanford than from Pasadena City College, is anyone really surprised? If you were in Google's shoes, wouldn't you do the same?
I recently read this interview with Judith Spritz, who runs "Sprinternship" programs for women in tech. <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/lessons-in-leadership-removing-barriers-to-get-more-women-in-tech" rel="nofollow">https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...</a><p>Basically, participants do a 2- or 3-week sprint during an academic break, and then companies have the option to bring them on for a full summer internship.<p>Why is this important for representation?<p>> All the research shows that the single largest predictor of a student landing a job within six months of graduating is whether they had a paid tech internship.<p>But what challenges were underrepresented students facing?<p>> What it boiled down to is that all those things are the result of the “privilege of free time,” when you’re not working one or more jobs as you go through college to support yourself, sometimes to support your family. In essence, the companies were looking for things on résumés that were more attributes of privilege than they were of potential.
BREAKING NEWS: being poor is harder than not being poor. Full story at 11. </sarcasm><p>Yes, we need to do better as a culture at scouting out high potential that wasn't raised with the advantage of having mentors who know how to build a career. But there's this implicit assumption that the companies offering these jobs and internships have endless resources to spend on talent scouting.<p>Schools and local community organizations that exist for these people need to step up their efforts to actually learn what's current and build these bridges: pipeline programs, guest speakers, hosting their own hackathons, career/interview prep courses, etc. Everyone is expecting the tail to wag the dog.
> [An applicant prepared] for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the company’s guiding values, known internally as leadership principles.<p>Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for <i>undergrad internships</i>?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...</a>
Every tech conference of a reasonable size I've been to has had special events for diversity demographics. Most BigCos have recruiting resources targeted at historically black colleges, despite being unwarranted by the colleges' academic performance - in fact the article mentions them! If you're a white or asian male candidate from a second string college you are of course out of luck unless you have some other signaling mechanism.
I find this unsurprising. But I think the problem is upstream.<p>Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its applicants. Our CS program admits 7%, and a demographic profile that bears no relationship to the broader university population. Relevant to this article, far more out-of-state students, and therefore students from wealthier backgrounds. (Because our out-of-state tuition is insane.)<p>So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place.<p>And from where I sit, the situation is even more frustrating, because we have thousands of data points showing that students drawn from the general university population can and do succeed in our CS courses—at least those required for the minor, which has become increasingly popular. But a lot of CS departments have felt increasingly besieged over the past few decades, as we've been swamped with students and frequently not been provided with appropriate resources. (Although there's also plenty of programs out there insisting on doing things that don't scale well, which exacerbates the problem.) So increasingly the "answer" is to clamp down on admissions, in ways that usually disproportionately affect certain populations.<p>We have a lot of ongoing BPC and DEI efforts in my department. But there's very little if any focus on admissions. I asked recently, and apparently we don't even know the demographic breakdown of our applicant pool.<p>Regardless of what aspects of diversity you care about, one of the biggest sources of inequity in CS today is in university admissions.
<< He had chosen to attend an affordable local public university, not a top computing school, and he did not know anyone in the industry who could put in a good word for him with tech recruiters.<p>I am not in tech-tech, but in my volunteer work I had a kid, who could likely do well in our paid internship program ( and it is not a bad place to work at ). I encouraged him to apply, but I have heard nothing since. In a week, I forget about it altogether, but it is always a shame to let a mind go to waste.<p>But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get.<p>I don't know. I just don't understand the point of this article at all.<p>edit: added paid
Parent income may be correlated but it is not an input.<p>As someone who grew up poor, big tech was my best way of building wealth. I didn’t need connections, didn’t need to work unpaid internships. I just had to get an interview and pass it.
I didn’t go to a prestigious school for CS so I had a zig zaggy path through the defense industry before ending up in big tech. Yes, it’s true that you simply don’t get the same opportunities as someone who went to a reputed CS school and honestly I can’t blame the companies: as an interviewer, people with good schools on their resume tend to succeed a lot more at the interviews.<p>That said, if I went to a better school I’m not sure I would have had the chance to study CS in the first place. At places like the University of Washington for example it is extremely competitive to get in to the CS major - I know that I definitely did not have the grades to be competitive as a freshman. So, at my not so great school that lets everyone in, I had the opportunity to learn something I was genuinely interested in and eventually (with a bit of luck) turn that into a zig zag path into a job at a big tech co.<p>The way I see it, tech companies should keep whatever bar they have. Interviews suck but they’re a great opportunity equalizer (yes, people from prestigious schools fail these too). People from low income backgrounds can and absolutely do make it in big tech, and I’ve known many capable colleagues without degrees.
> longstanding inequities in Silicon Valley recruitment and hiring<p>Maybe for intern postions or higher positions, but for regular software developer positions "longstanding inequities" is just not true. From my observation 80% of SWEs are immigrants, we graduated schools nobody heard of in the US. For interview purpose it didn't matter. For all the hate (rightfully) have for leetcode interviews, it doesn't care about your background.
It sucks, but what can you do? Wealthy peers do have their advantages, but that's the case in almost every field out there. This is not unique to tech.
It is always important to maintain some amount of self-awareness. Applying to 200 internships and not getting a single response should signal something in your brain. I'm not saying some form of discrimination is not at play, but at some point you have to be realistic. It seems in the same vein as people being postdocs for 20 years while waiting for a instructor position to open up. Crying foul isn't going to help. That doesn't mean it's not worth writing articles like this one, but I don't think it's going to change much. As long as there is some notion of "prestige" it's going to attract far more people than there are seats, and someone has to get turned away. Meritocracy is a pipe dream.
I wonder how the job market would look like if looking at education was no longer legal (of course, you could look at the existence of a degree or credential, but not where it was conferred from).
Have people not been saying for years that BigTech is like a finishing school for the elites?<p>You finish your fancy degree, get a job at a name-brand BigTech, pay your dues for a few years, then leave as part of a founding team (or the founder) of a VC-backed startup. At worst, you go be an exec at a later stage startup thanks to the wonderful connections you’ve built in BigTech.
I love how tech claims to love diversity among it's employees but then they snatch up the Asian, White, African American, etc, students who also just so happen to be all be wealthy and go to the best CS schools.
I liked the story about the girl from the Colorado School of Mines because I went to New Mexico Tech and they were our rivals. We were successful in the early 1990s of changing their "M" to read "NMT" but when they tried to do the same with us they found that our "M" is inside a weapons testing reservation. (I really saw an M-1 tank parked by the road in there once.)<p>There was an old sci-fi movie where an astronaut said he was say he was from CSM and we'd always boo.
I used to work at a large prestigious tech company in Silicon Valley that makes very popular, widely-used software.<p>And despite all the talk about inclusion and fairness and how we need to hire a diverse bunch of people, each year, without fail interns--some even high school seniors--would show up on our team.<p>So if I'd talk to these kids, who usually had names like "Bretton Pinkerton III" it would always turn out that they were the grandchild of a board member, or the kid of some venture captialist that the CEO or CFO was working with for another company that he was on the board of, etc.<p>Never once did they get interns from say, East Palo Alto high school, or one of the community colleges, or College of San Mateo, or any of the schools that a poorer kid was more likely to be at. Never.<p>The company, desipte their "diversity officer" was actually elitist as they come.<p>(Oh, and these rich kid interns rarely had any interest in what they were doing either. If they were high school, it was just resume padding and then they were off to Harvard or Stanford.)
This applies to every aspect of education and early career advancement, by design. It is ludicrous to think so-called meritocracy could sustain under capitalism. At best, we get hope and anecdotes.