Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

There&#x27;s some incongruity here: college admissions are by no means fair, but they <i>also</i> don&#x27;t evaluate for nearly the same things as Google&#x27;s hiring process does.<p>Put another way: colleges aren&#x27;t qualified or equipped to make the kinds of determinations that Google does when hiring engineers, and being hired as a Google engineer prior to going to college isn&#x27;t any particularly strong signal that you&#x27;re prepared to go to a specific school.<p>I sympathize with his situation, but I think treating college acceptances as a foregone conclusion based on demonstrated engineering prowess is an error.

I went to a small rural high school in the 1980s. Taught myself to code, started a business writing software, entered and won the regional science fair and placed second in the CS division of the International Science and Engineering Fair in 1987. Won a prestigious NASA internship, got glowing letters of recommendation from my NASA mentors. Took every AP class available to me (all both of them). Graduated third in my class.<p>Also played on the varsity basketball team, was an Eagle Scout, and served in my church.<p>Oh, and scored 1460 on the SAT and 34 on the ACT.<p>And I got turned down flat by MIT and waitlisted by Yale. Actually, MIT turned me down twice, once for undergrad and again for grad school.<p>I also ended up at the University of Maryland, and had the time of my life there. And I&#x27;ve had a wildly successful career, which occasionally means I fund MIT professors.<p>It&#x27;s a crap shoot. I&#x27;d love to know what happened when the MIT admissions board looked at my resume, because as a rational exercise I don&#x27;t get that decision.

University of Texas, which one? if it&#x27;s UT Austin then its CS program has been top 10 in the nation for quite a long time, so, good college CS program did admit him.<p>SAT 1590 is nothing for MIT or CMU or things like that though, esp for male students with Asian names, you need way more than just a great SAT score and a perfect GPA, a lot more indeed.<p>The high bar on Asian male for good universities just made them even stronger academically, with internet and free job market nowadays, nothing can stop a smart and determined mind, and they might actually have saved a lot of money because some colleges rejected them based on their ethnicity.

I went to community college and a tiny private college nobody has ever heard of and I got a good paying job in tech as an engineer at a prestigious company. And I understand the obsession with Stanford and MIT, the networking opportunities, the namesake, but I never felt like I had to attend a prestigious university to study what I wanted. Just my 2c. Ironically the community college prepared me better for a career in tech than the 4-year school.

Good for them. I am however, confused by the list of accomplishments, one of which is &quot;wrote tests&quot;. I think this goes to show that audience matters---that list looks a lot better as items on a resume at an undergrad career fair than it looks to college admissions or even looks on a resume of someone a few years out of school.

University of Texas has an excellent CompSci department and this person should be happy to attend.<p>Also, there are plenty of engineers at Big Tech companies and at startups who have no degree other than a high school diploma and a huge number don’t have a computer science degree if they do have one.<p>There is also a large contingent of folks who have terminal degrees in law or a PhD in Physics but work in software engineering.<p>I think the college application process is a crapshoot for the most part but its likely that this person didn’t distinguish themselves in that particular area but apparently had no issue passing a completely different criteria and process for an engineering gig at Google.

Kid’s making bank, congrats! But as an ex-L4 Googler I need to say, I’m sure he’s similarly frustrated as I was. I don’t live to maximize income - I want to maximize learning and fun. Compared to successfully launching a startup fixing bugs and launching minor features as an L4 is depressing as hell.<p>Not everyone will have it that bad. Hopefully he’s having a better time than I did.

The real news (to me) here is that Google is smart enough not to care about college degrees.

College admissions are broken, plain and simple. Completely opaque. Success criteria unclear, appears highly subjective, subject to gaming and monetary influence, officially biased against non-alumni &amp; non-affiliated children. Simply F&#x27;ed up. I don&#x27;t have any words for it. Schools or someone else have to clean up this mess.<p>My only hope is that people will see through how potentially useless college education is. For many people, it&#x27;s simply an extended daycare if you need additional time to find your life&#x27;s direction. Kids like this one don&#x27;t need it. Kudos to him! Teaching models are largely broken. All you need is youtube and an internet connection these days. Structured post-K12 education is over-rated.

There have been speculations about whether family connections played a significant role in the hiring decisions. For example, the fact that Stanley Zhong&#x27;s father Nan Zhong is engineering manager at Google may lead to concerns that a reference or recommendation from that parent, who holds a high-ranking position, influenced the hiring process.<p>Moreover, some have pointed out that the Stanley Zhong&#x27;s primary background in the case was founding a startup that utilized services from a major tech company, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This situation has led to discussions about the potential overlap between the teenager&#x27;s career development and the parent&#x27;s professional connections, as Nan Zhong happens to be previously software engineer manager at AWS.

Is this all that surprising? College admissions are not optimizing for people who can currently pass a tech company interview. Maybe they should focus more in that area, but that&#x27;s a separate discussion, and currently schools neither select for nor claim to select for those skills.<p>Plus both processes have immense amounts of variance. It&#x27;s not hard to find excellent candidates who were rejected from a particular university or job.

It&#x27;s no surprise -- being good at work is not the same as being good at school.

Probably not intended by the poster, but this gives me hope. Universities shouldn&#x27;t overvalue these. Ultimately, they are focused on <i>academics</i>. The profile of this person screams &quot;Will drop out before graduating&quot;.<p>I mean, if he applied to average universities and got rejected, that would be notable. But applying only at top universities and getting rejected? That&#x27;s not at all notable.

Can anyone verify the accuracy of this statement? A random post on a message board doesn’t merit a response without a little more evidence…

This case was presented to the House Committee on Education &amp; the Workforce in the hearing on &quot;How SCOTUS’s Decision on Race-Based Admissions is Shaping University Policies&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4Zu5cdfv9kk&amp;t=2587s">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4Zu5cdfv9kk&amp;t=2587s</a>

What a bunch of gossip.

I don&#x27;t know anything about this specific applicant. Often, an applicant to a top school meets with a volunteer alumni&#x2F;ae interviewer from the applicant&#x27;s local area. They might get a competent interviewer with a dev background. There normally won&#x27;t be a quiz on software development but there will be a conversation about a project. If the applicant asserts they did 95% of a project&#x27;s work with 5% help from a parent or other contributor, but the applicant&#x27;s responses give the interviewer a much different perception of the percentage, this can be flagged as an embellished claim. And that can sometimes be much, much worse than not mentioning the project at all.

MAANG isn&#x27;t hiring officially, and only for critical roles and senior engineers on the q.t. It&#x27;s an ostensible belt-tightening that&#x27;s really about repress wages and placating Wall St. by extracting even more money during economy-wide years of massive profits. MAANGs don&#x27;t have below L3 or L4. L3 or L4 is entry-level while IC6-7 are senior, and IC7-9 are custom tailored, under-specified roles of engineers who can make a million or more in TC.<p>Mandatory bragging: When I glance left, I can see a reflection of the top of UT tower and the capitol in my window. Also, I-35 S traffic is backed up as far as the eye can see and I-35 N is inching along like lukewarm molasses.

Well, he certainly did something wrong in his applications. His high school doesn&#x27;t even know he sent some of them, going by the failure to mention eg Maryland or Wisconsin in their list of colleges applied to this year. (And I get the impression this place tracks them pretty closely...)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gunn.pausd.org&#x2F;campus-life&#x2F;college-career-center&#x2F;college-outcomes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gunn.pausd.org&#x2F;campus-life&#x2F;college-career-center&#x2F;col...</a>

I don&#x27;t oppose this being flagged. But I&#x27;m curious, why was it flagged?

Sounds like he dodged a bullet landing a solid 6 figure job rather than paying tens if not hundreds of thousands for the next 4 years (or going into that much debt)

I mean is there any question why he was rejected?

Why bother with working for a large corp or going to college? Seems like he should focus on his organically fast growing startup.

Its because he&#x27;s not rich.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why this is not more widely understood. These schools are not for meritocracy. Schools with sports teams fill much of the incoming class with athletes before they even consider an application, and then they start picking from places and people who&#x27;ll keep their prestige reciprocally high. The son of a foreign dictator would never attend the school that produced the only human with two unshared nobel prizes, because that&#x27;s not the game they&#x27;re playing.<p>And when they pick, they&#x27;re starting with schools the admissions officers have relationships with (rich people schoools) that require rich people middle schools to attend, etc...<p>The chain starts in childhood, you don&#x27;t just take a bunch of tests available to the public.<p>I&#x27;ve had friends whose job it was to interview kindergarteners for access to their exclusive schools. Others had to deal with two sets of parents suing each other over one&#x27;s access to that school.<p>And before you say this is conspiratorial, I&#x27;ve verified this with admissions people and deans from these places.

It&#x27;s true that unis and corporations care about different things.<p>However, I am surprised that he would only be accepted at two of those universities, given the grades, SAT, and competitive coding. Most of those schools are solid but non-name branded.

I&#x27;m trying to find the takeaway, should kids not go to college? or that nobody reads the comments, since one of them raises the question, &quot;is there proof?&quot; and claims that not according to their linkedin

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HgqAy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HgqAy</a>

How much does Google L4 make as a starting salary and bonuses?<p>Where can we see this, glassdoor or something?

Kids, change your names before applying for places. Sincerely, Wanda Abimbola

&gt;Stanley Zhong graduated from high school in June 2023<p>I think it&#x27;s safe to assume that Mr. Zhong is of an Asian background. My guess is that he is, unfortunately, lacking in &quot;interpersonal skills&quot;.

Is there a reason this post is flagged?

&gt; Shortly after he turned 18, Google hired him as an L4 software engineer, a position typically offered to candidates with multiple years of professional experience as well as a college degree.<p>L4 is the entry level for Google&#x27;s SWE position, and Google absolutely hires SWEs straight out of college (no professional experience). A Google SWE without a college degree is more rare but I know a few. I&#x27;d never heard of an 18-year-old landing a full-time Google SWE position, though. Congratulations to him!<p>edit: sorry, got mixed up, entry level is L3. Thanks for the correction.