If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

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&#x27;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, &quot;people ops&quot;) folks and a SWE or two talking over Google Hangouts to auditoriums full of kids at <i>FIVE</i> different schools which they called &quot;Long Tail&quot;. (and UB wasn&#x27;t even one of them)<p>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&#x27;t understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a &quot;long tail&quot; school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.

I went to a non-top tier undergraduate school. I made efforts--at big companies as well as the one I founded--to recruit from my <i>alma mater</i>. I ended up defaulting to NYU, Harvard and Stanford.<p>Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. They said I should have gone through them first. Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job. They then suggested this CEO come to their fall freshman career fair. I said no, it&#x27;s a high-profile company, they&#x27;d prefer if you curated a list for them. (MIT and NYU, amongst others, do this.) No response.<p>Consider, too, that 90% of recent-college graduate recruiting (in finance, at least) is less about finding brilliance than finding someone who won&#x27;t make dumb mistakes. The Ivy League produces a consistent product. They hold no monopoly on genius. But the variance around others&#x27; outputs is too high for a young firm.<p>All that said, I never turn down an outbound email. (It&#x27;s how I broke into the industry.) I also think it&#x27;s important, as your firm develops, to keep an eye on broadening recruiting.<p>Closing note: in response to recent news, I started thinking about our workplace&#x27;s gender diversity. It&#x27;s bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.

As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and&#x2F;or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious bias or anything else that is theorized&#x2F;proven to exist and affect outcomes.<p>I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.<p>It&#x27;s almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.<p>Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.

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.<p>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.<p>Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.<p>How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?

&gt; <i>No company, not even the tech giants, can cover every school or every resume submitted online.</i><p>Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I&#x27;m pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.<p>But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company&#x27;s service. I stopped reading here, but wished I&#x27;d stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.

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.<p>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.

When we find a candidate we&#x27;re interested in pursuing, we ask our recruiting operation to do two things prior to sending us the candidate&#x27;s resume.<p>1) Remove the candidate&#x27;s name&#x2F;address. Replace with local-to-office = yes|no. Leave phone for screening call.<p>2) Replace the candidate&#x27;s education credentials with yes|no on post-HS attendance, and the focus of study. No other information necessary.<p>It&#x27;s made a huge difference to us.

This is true not just for engineering hires. I recently experienced this with more evolved roles such as PM and PMMs.<p>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.<p>Despite having the requisite experience &amp; 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 --&gt; 2 yrs work exp --&gt; MBA (Top 10) ---&gt; Big Consulting ---&gt; Big tech.<p>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.

Isn&#x27;t this one of the primary reasons why those particular schools are &quot;elite&quot;. Because of the alumni base and &quot;connections&quot; you can make at these schools? It sucks but I feel like most students enter college knowing how this system works and therefore try their darnest to get into one of those elite schools. I went to a school that had career fairs with 50 kids standing in every line waiting for their resumes to be put into a trash pile. Save for 5-10 students who may have gotten professor recommendations it was a complete waste of time. Only now am I getting reached by recruiters from the Big 4. Honestly I can&#x27;t even fully wrap my head around having that kind of opportunity at 22-23 years old.

There are actually two overlapping long tail effects here: top schools and huge companies. Only one quadrant of this 2x2 grid works well for on-campus recruiting.<p>For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it&#x27;s hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it&#x27;s hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.<p>It&#x27;s not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there&#x27;s just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn&#x27;t have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bootcamps-vs-college" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bootcamps-vs-college</a>

I would bet significant amounts of money that if you looked at people based on their in-job performance blinded to background you&#x27;d find insignificant contributions from education.<p>Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I&#x27;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.

If jobs were screened entirely by competency and personality&#x2F;fit, with interviews&#x2F;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&#x27;t been done already.

Tech companies rightly or wrongly (the article doesn&#x27;t make that strong of a case against) are just outsourcing part of their recruiting to elite universities.<p>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.<p>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 <i>that</i> smart but, didn&#x27;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&#x27;t that bad.<p>Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.

I recently watched part of this debate and was struck by an admission Peter Thiel dropped about school hire diversity...<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;Peter Thiel: Thank you. Let me actually just start with that question. You know, I went to Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school. Throughout the &#x27;90s, I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount. We should only hire people that went to the best schools. And - and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal. And I use this -- and I used to -- I thought this was the most important thing in our society. And over the last four or five years, I&#x27;ve gradually come to shift my views on it for a number of different reasons. The narrow technology context in Silicon Valley, that I saw so many very talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinary well. In some ways, they were also more creative.&quot;&quot;&quot; Too Many Kids Go To College- Intelligence Squared U.S. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468</a>

Honestly, I think the socioeconomic status of your parents should be more heavily waited in &quot;diversity&quot; measures than skin color.

&gt;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.<p>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.

Hey Aline!<p>Regarding diversity, have you needed to steer away from any particular anonymous interviewing techniques because that technique heavily favored a particular demographic? A silly example would be that you no longer allow people to do tests at 8:30 a.m. GMT on Tuesdays because only a certain demographic did disproportionately well in that timeslot. If yes, can you give an example?<p>Side note, I really liked the interview you gave Software Engineering Daily. That was the first time in a long time I heard about an attempt to make technical recruiting better that actually sounded better to me! [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwareengineeringdaily.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;interviewing-io-with-aline-lerner&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwareengineeringdaily.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;interviewing...</a>

I&#x27;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.<p>That said, I do agree that I&#x27;ve always been impressed with prospective hires &amp; the students we&#x27;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 is about first jobs out of school (interesting to me b&#x2F;c my kid just started university).<p>How much does it matter after that first job? I couldn&#x27;t tell you were <i>any</i> of my co-workers went to school -- in hiring the work a candidate did previously and what people I know say about their work matters.<p>However I am quite conscious that people give me the benefit of the doubt based on where <i>I</i> went to school (I hope it&#x27;s obvious I mean people who can look me up on LinkedIn, not random people). I&#x27;ve had some absurdly far-fetched ideas, some of which turned out to be quite lucrative and some of which turned out to be stupid. I doubt I would have gotten the time of day without that brand name.

Agreed. As someone who recently graduated from a relatively good (2100 median SAT score) school that ISN&#x27;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.<p>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.

If you care about diversity stop interviewing on these stupid algorithmic questions! Getting a job literally depends on buying the cracking the coding interview book and solving these stupid problems. I know some of my course mates who worked on very interesting projects but couldn&#x27;t get a job because they couldn&#x27;t white board a tree balancing problem :D

Sending alums back to top tier schools is also part PR too for the companies. &quot;Hey look Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are on our campus today. Great companies at great colleges gets great news coverage&quot;.

Interesting, but I don&#x27;t actually care about diversity. The Silicon Valley giants, often criticized for their low diversity, are among the most successful companies of all time. Apple, the least diverse of them, is the most successful. Forgive me for following the example of the Usain Bolts and not the findings of sprinting researchers.

Went to no-name school. My career&#x27;s been just fine, similar to peers who attended top-tier schools.<p>It works both ways. Kids who grow up in families who push them to attend big-name universities, will grow up to be adults who find it important to work for big-name companies.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of opportunity outside that track too though.

Further proof that SV use of the word diversity is closer to a euphemism for assimulation. That is, diversity isn&#x27;t a source for different backgrounds and experiences; but a biological signal to be optimized in order to maximize public perception, while ideas remain essentially the same.

Another point on diversity: It&#x27;s never going to happen to the extent that people want so long as most of the jobs are in Silicon Valley. For many women and minorities and older men (with children), it is difficult to make that move, away from their families. We can&#x27;t pretend like this isn&#x27;t a factor. I recently moved to Austin from south Florida and my last company had a very high Hispanic ratio, because it was located in south Florida, where the local population ratio is quite high. I knew many talented developers who couldn&#x27;t or wouldn&#x27;t make the move to one of the tech hubs because family. Without spreading out tech jobs over more of the country, you&#x27;ll never see great representation.

This isn&#x27;t even a problem that&#x27;s limited to hiring out of schools. I went to a pretty small school in flyover country, and (much as the article outlines) the hardest part about getting a job was certainly not the interviews, it was getting attention from anyone.<p>Now I&#x27;m working at a local tech company near where I went to school, because I only had local connections from internships etc. Recently I&#x27;ve been looking to move on to a new position and, despite having friends inside of multiple companies (Google, Apple, MSFT) refer me, I&#x27;ve gotten exactly one interview.<p>If anyone is open to suggestions on how to get more attention, I&#x27;m all ears. Until then I suppose I get to shotgun application pages endlessly.

I guess I&#x27;m just speaking for myself here, but it&#x27;s depressing that according to many folks in this thread my life path was essentially decided for me by the time I was 18. That being said this is far from the first time I&#x27;ve heard this argument, and largely a reason I decided to get into entrepreneurship. I didn&#x27;t have the pedigree, my parents went to an even worse state school than I did, and my family largely had no industry connections. If I&#x27;m going to jump classes I&#x27;ll have to do it of largely my own merit. Luckily the public at large doesn&#x27;t care if a Harvard grad or a state school grad built the company&#x2F;product they love.

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 &quot;beyond their weight class&quot;.<p>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.

&gt; Mason, the Harvard student, attends an event on campus with Facebook engineers teaching him how to pass the technical interview.<p>&gt; Emily’s school has an informal, undergraduate computer science club in which they are collectively reading technical interviewing guides and trying to figure out what tech companies want from them. She has a couple interviews lined up, but all of which are for jobs she’s desperate to get. They trade tips after interviews but ultimately have a shaky understanding of they did right and wrong in the absence of post-interview feedback from companies.<p>This pains me every.single.time.<p>Being part of a specialized recruiting agency, I want to double down on how much preparation and insight before the actual interview matters.<p>Devs spend most of their time developing, not sitting in interviews, so every recruiter should spend at least a few minutes with every candidate giving them some heads-up.<p>Not like &quot;for question 1, the answer is b&quot;, but like how to carry themselves through the interviews and generally what to expect.

Universities are allowed to base their entrance on intelligence tests[1], while companies face a strong legal presumption that using such tests is illegal discrimination. The easy way to get around that problem is to hire out of the highest ranked universities.<p>[1] Tests like the SAT correlate very strongly with IQ, and are designed to minimize the value of preparation.

Business Town&#x27;s take on this point is as colorful as it is succinct: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;115950267726&#x2F;businesstown-24-businesstown-is-pretty-darn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;115950267726&#x2F;bu...</a>

10 years ago I graduated from a school that&#x27;s not even in the top 100 CS schools. But it was super-duper cheap and i got my foot in the door with hardly any student debt. While I never interviewed at big companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, I have been invited to all 3 for interviews at various times throughout my career (sometimes more than once) and I know a lot of my colleagues have as well. So in my experience the choice of school i went to wasn&#x27;t in any way detrimental to my career. However, I think the story would&#x27;ve been different if i were an entrepreneur and wanted to have access to the same network that someone in MIT or UC Berkley would have access to. That in my mind would be the biggest benefit of attending a top-tier school, but I don&#x27;t know how important it is to a lot of people.

I&#x27;ve recently gone through a few rounds of interview with some of these startups (not google or facebook or apple) and I&#x27;ve come to conclusion, that EVEN THOUGH they interview you, they had already rejected you due to your age&#x2F;school. If you don&#x27;t fit a certain diversity goal they are pursuing, too bad too.<p>They are just interviewing you because if they don&#x27;t interview, it looks bad on them. It doesn&#x27;t matter because the people ops team are paid for it.<p>After spending hours&#x2F;weekends doing the coding&#x2F;projects tests, on my own time, and not getting offers at the end, AND realizing yah they never wanted you in the first place, it&#x27;s very disheartening. I was nothing more than a decoration in the hiring musical chair game.<p>Diversity isn&#x27;t just about gender&#x2F;race. It&#x27;s about age&#x2F;school too.

As a senior at a public university who couldn&#x27;t afford to go anywhere else but made the most of his opportunities earning a good GPA, participating in clubs, going to hackathons, working in research, learning extracurricular subjects, etc. this topic is devastating.<p>I&#x27;ve done my best to learn the skills that companies think I should have when I graduate. But it appears many companies will reject me because of who I am not because of what I&#x27;ve done or what I can do if given the opportunity.<p>Maybe I lack some skills that you only find in candidates from the top universities. It&#x27;s not from a lack of effort. Why not advertise what those skills are and give everyone an opportunity to learn them and demonstrate them?<p>Why play this game where you pretend I am some enemy trying to infiltrate your company with ignorance?

But doesn&#x27;t this fall into economics? It could be that they are just biased, but giving them benefit of the doubt, they might have done the math and said &quot;nope the cost to make the recruiting effort to these schools are not worth it&quot;

It doesn&#x27;t seem shortsighted to me to recruit only from top schools, because companies that hire graduates of Stanford or MIT or wherever can and do hire people after they&#x27;ve been in the workforce for a few years to prove themselves. I went to SUNY Albany and didn&#x27;t even manage a 3.0 GPA, (missed it by _that_ much) and after a few years of working for a local company got contacted by recruiters from both Google and Amazon. They quickly realized I wasn&#x27;t the sort of person they wanted, but there was no artificial barrier if I had been a genius who was tragically unable to attend a world-renowned school.

This article strikes a particularly strong chord with me. I am a student, probably in between the second and third examples, and it is so unbelievably hard to get an interview. I wasn&#x27;t even aware it was so easy for students at top schools. This is frustrating because college admission for many essentially comes down to the first year or two of high school. That can&#x27;t be a good indicator of developer performance.<p>Maybe we need better career services for students at mid-level schools or lower, or maybe we need a company to step in between the gaps. Either way the system is broken right now.

The same top tier schools claim to value diversity very much. Are you going to do better? If you decide to pull from another college at random to counteract only going to the same top five, chances are that college doesn&#x27;t value diversity as much, and you&#x27;ll get a less diverse candidate.<p>If you&#x27;re focusing on good hires and not necessarily diverse ones, then yeah it&#x27;s not smart to aggressively filter by school. Talent (even amazing talent) is not exclusive to any member of such a broadly defined set classification.

Hmmmm. &quot;tech worker shortage&quot;

There are some schools that break the mold. Particularly in Boston. Maybe not completely breaking the mold but the tail is quite longer. I went to a top-100 school and many of my class mates are at companies like NASA, Tesla, Google, Twitter and iRobot.<p>At the same time, as someone who has tried, the name definitely doesn&#x27;t get you in the door like a top 5 school might. You need to work harder to prove yourself. (a LOT harder) And Google sure as heck has never gone to my alma mater&#x27;s career fairs.

Someday, people will realize that diversity on its own doesn&#x27;t solve anything and that people are people. Some are capable problem solvers and some aren&#x27;t. Some have great technical or leadership skills and some don&#x27;t.<p>Hitting some kind of magic ratio won&#x27;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.<p>It turns out that companies aren&#x27;t taking that approach...

Love the article, really hit home for me. I attend UCR, which while being a UC, doesn&#x27;t get nearly enough attention for its engineering program.<p>If your company would like to put the practices of this article into use, I would be happy to help you diversify your recruiting process! (I&#x27;m on the board for many of our engineering orgs.)<p>UCR has a surplus of <i>extremely</i> qualified students that don&#x27;t get internships because of the lack of active recruiting happening on campus.

A friend told me about their big company&#x27;s interview process for interns from Ivy Leagues, which was getting flown out to a party and then getting an internship. The candidates weren&#x27;t asked any technical questions, since they were assumed to be smart enough to learn how to code in bootcamp. It made me feel confused about myself for a while, since I didn&#x27;t have a job or much experience and it was hard enough getting a phone screen.

From what I understand a certain large UK pharma company has already been running an AI based, video conference only recruiting program. So far its been a massive success as the pool of applicants they recruit from grew from just 3 top tier UK universities to about 30. They also noted that the applicants stayed longer in the firm, were a better fit and were marked as a success within the first year of employment.

Wouldn&#x27;t this require at least implicit acknowledgement that top tier schools are not diverse? Subsequently all existing people already at companies need to acknowledge this as well. (Since they are from those schools) It would require breaking the illusion that&#x27;s it&#x27;s those &quot;others&quot; who are the &quot;real&quot; problem, both by schools and companies.

This graph is goofy: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.interviewing.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;threshold-4.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.interviewing.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;thres...</a><p>If I&#x27;m reading it right, the X-axis is backwards from normal convention (origin in lower-left), but the axis isn&#x27;t really labelled.

I&#x27;ve witnessed the imperfection of using the brand name of a degree as a measure of ability. Numerous times throughout my career as an engineer, I&#x27;ve seen someone from [INSERT WELL-KNOWN DEGREE HERE] outperformed by [INSERT LESSER-KNOWN DEGREE HERE], or in one case by an engineer without a college degree.<p>I&#x27;ve also witnessed the corruption of the college admissions process first-hand. I went to a high school where many of the students came from privileged families. I&#x27;ve witnessed a student cheat on multiple exams, including an AP exam, get caught multiple times, and have nothing happen to her -- only to later be admitted to an Ivy League. I&#x27;ve seen students who could barely pass AP Calculus get into Stanford and other Ivy Leagues, because their parents had the right name &#x2F; connections. The bright students also got into good colleges, but the ratio was shockingly close to 50&#x2F;50. Unsurprisingly, one of the college admissions counselors for the high school was later caught fabricating admissions materials, and was fired, but only because he became extremely brazen in his lies. If he had been less lazy, he probably would never have been caught. And who knows how many admissions counselors are out there that are just a bit less lazy than he was...<p>I&#x27;m not the only person who feels this way. Look at this Quora thread about MIT admissions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;If-MIT-only-admits-people-with-a-4-0-unweighted-gpa-and-2300+-test-scores-why-doesnt-everyone-with-a-4-0-get-in-and-why-do-people-with-low-GPAs-get-in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;If-MIT-only-admits-people-with-a-4-0-u...</a>. An admissions counselor admits to rejecting students who have higher GPA&#x27;s and test scores. The reasons for doing so may or may not be valid, but that&#x27;s not the point. The applicants who got rejected in this manner have the potential to become better engineers than many of those who were accepted. And all the brand name universities suffer from this same problem.<p>The university one attends is a noisy signal that can and should be improved upon. That&#x27;s why I respected Google&#x27;s Foobar initiative. It is an unbiased measure of a prospective engineer. The Foobar test doesn&#x27;t know what college you went to. All it knows is whether you can handle some pretty tough engineering problems. But I think Foobar is only the beginning. In the age of MOOC&#x27;s, increasingly comprehensive, unbiased tests of this nature should only become more prevalent.

Not CS&#x2F;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.

So maybe I&#x27;m missing something, but the graph of the &quot;distribution of school tiers on interviewing.io&quot; is nearly identical to the 1% line in the &quot;where 25 year olds went to school&quot; chart.<p>Not sure how this is really any different than just sourcing from top schools?

The reason they are hiring from top schools, is to raise the barrier to entry into their field. If founder came from school X, they see any future grads from there as a threat. Why not buy all the top talent, to prevent competition? Given unlimited cash (unicorn) why not?

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:<p>“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.”<p>In this way you are just taking advantage of the hard work that some college admissions committee put in to sorting your candidates.<p>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&#x27;t go to school here. When I pointed out that fact my boss defended herself and said that she doesn&#x27;t consider herself to be from here either because she didn&#x27;t come to to U-M until grad school. That is what qualifies for an outside hire here.

I feel all I can offer to this discussion is the revelation of my own sense of hopelessness that I&#x27;ll likely never pass the watch of the statistical gatekeepers and be permitted entrance to the Kingdom of Success.

Might be off track, Is there anyone who used interviewing.io and landed a job?<p>How was the experience using interviewing.io?<p>I tried signing up some 2 years ago, it said they are in a private beta and they have been there ever since.

If they miss a lot of talent doing this, there sure is someone smarter hiring all this lost talent! I bet they&#x27;re going to be billionaires in a few years!

This issue is most particularly in India. Here most tech companies even post job ads which specify tier 1 college degree as requirement

This article treats &quot;CS graduates&quot; as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents&#x27; income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the <i>kind</i> of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems.<p>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&#x27;re getting a lot of well-<i>prepared</i> candidates from a particular program, of course they&#x27;re going to focus on those schools. It would be a waste of time and scarce resources to do otherwise.

The truth is they don&#x27;t really care about diversity, it&#x27;s all a PR exercise.

Which five schools are they talking about? Harvard, MIT, Stanford,???

What if they are 5 highly diverse schools?

This is an ad. &quot;We built a better way to hire.&quot;

In my experience, major companies are aware of this problem, and would love to find a solution.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s not uncommon for he or she to excel.

This article hit home for me because I see it <i>all the time</i>. I go to a large state school where a 2-3 of the Big4 show up to recruit, but undergrads rarely get offers. We don&#x27;t pass technical screens (partly on us, partly on the focus of our DS&amp;A classes), and very often we don&#x27;t even get interviews.<p>I think about this all the time and it concerns me. I&#x27;ll never get into a top school now but I do have a big4 internship on my resume on an in-demand ML team - yet, I&#x27;m still going to be looked down upon compared to someone that goes to UIUC or Duke <i>at minimum</i>, not even considering people at HYPSM.<p>Sometimes I wondered if there&#x27;s a point in trying if I&#x27;m already so far behind.

&gt; While enjoying a nice free meal in Harvard Square, he has the opportunity to ask these successful engineers questions about their current work. If he likes the company, all he has to do is accept the company’s standing invitation to interview on campus the next morning.<p>What? That sounds almost comical. It seems obviously false, but just in case I will ask:<p>Is that really what happens at Harvard?<p>&gt; Anthony goes to a state school near the town where he grew up. He is top in his class, as well as a self-taught programmer, having gone above and beyond his coursework to hack together some apps.<p>Are these &quot;todo list&quot; apps or legit impressive feats? If the former, it almost has no value. If the latter, they will have absolutely no problem getting hired.

Wait, what&#x27;s all this talk about how I could learn all the software technologies and get a job without a degree? I&#x27;m 32, highly skilled at algorithmic thinking, and studying to go into the tech industry. After reading this stuff, I want to just go back to doing 3D art. These people sound insufferable.

Everyone resents these guys. I don’t blame you. There’s some serious hatred from ivy leaguers. Serious hatred.

Seems like an obvious point, and yet. And yet.

The only solution is a government mandate. LAW: No American company can employ more than 5 individuals that graduated from the same university. Problem solved.<p>Herein lies the beauty of government.

What if I don&#x27;t care about &quot;diversity&quot; as measured by the number of &quot;underrepresented&quot; minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?

Real diversity is like fine art: you hold some attributes constant and vary other attributes.<p>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.<p>If you stick to expectations too much you will be boring. If you vary too many attributes, it will be chaotic and meaningless.<p>Similarly, if you choose a random collection of people from around the world and try to make a business, it won&#x27;t go anywhere. But if you hire all people who followed a prescribed life path, you probably won&#x27;t be very innovative.<p>Interestingly, even a single person can be diverse in their ideas. Consider Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.<p>&quot;Diversity&quot; is such a loaded political word now and lost all meaning. It&#x27;s just cover to whitewash lazy thinking in political correctness. It&#x27;s common now, in the same breath, to want both diversity and equality of outcomes, which shows how ridiculous our politics have become.