Hacker News Reader

> It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools.

Berkeley is a state school. Also, Waterloo is a Canadian public...

Edit: Pulling up the US news rankings, 4 of the top 10 are public state schools. So a (pretty horrible) recruitment policy that only hits the top 10 schools from a mostly arbitrary ranking system will still get 40% public state schools.

I disagree.

All companies have only a finite amount of time/money to spend on hiring, so they're often forced to use crude heuristics to filter out resumes, especially in companies that get a huge number of applicants every year, like Twitter. Maybe it's just me, but based on my experience, filtering candidates (as a first pass) based on school or previous role does yield many false positives and negatives, but it still works pretty damn well compared to other equally fast/cheap filtering methods.

A couple of things:

1. Limiting your hiring to a tiny set of schools makes about as much sense as only interviewing candidates with names that start with A-F or candidates that come from California. You're just going to end up with a smaller list, not a better list.

2. I thought there was this dire "shortage of engineers", at least that's taken as a given on HN. Why the need for an arbitrary filter?

So you're implying that there's no correlation between academic pedigree and work performance. Maybe that's true, but not what my personal experience would suggest, at least in the realm of software engineering. I'd be happy to change my stance if there's data to the contrary.

Google has studied this.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman...

Didn't Google drop their degree requirement entirely?

how would you even measure that without the causal effects of "we only hired people from these schools" not being an interfering factor?

my own personal experience (from > 20 years in professional workforce) is that there's generally very little correlation between work performance and academic pedigree. For entry level positions, I've seen a bit, but after, say, 5-8 years, people are generally either really good at what they're doing, and are getting better, or they're struggling. I've not seen any correlation between the strugglers/non-strugglers and where they went to school, or indeed, to some extent, what they studied.

> other equally fast/cheap filtering methods

Like what?

I can get why managers think the important thing is to save managerial time. But as somebody who has just gotten done with a round of hiring developers, I believe this is a false economy.

If I can hire just one good developer, I'll have added thousands of hours of effort. If I can find one who settles in, it could be tens of thousands of hours. If I choose especially well, I'll get somebody who acts as a multiplier on those around them. If I choose poorly, I could get somebody who's net negative, making messes and driving away good people.

Given what's at stake, I can spend what seems like ridiculously large amounts of time on hiring and still come out ahead. Maybe if we were drowning in good people, I could still take the risk of tossing good people in the trash. But demand for developers is incredibly high.

Actually, I take it back. HN, y'all should definitely choose people only with top-3 CS degrees. Because then while you're all fighting over a small number of Stanford job hoppers with crazy demands, I can keep hiring the less obvious candidates, ones who are happy to stay for years.

Realistically, I think this policy probably makes sense at a company the size and visibility of Twitter. They probably get enough applicants from the schools listed to fill their needs. I worked at a company of comparable size, and they actually stopped giving referral bonuses because it stopped being useful to pay people bonuses when they had 100+ people apply for every available position.

I suppose. But it's based upon a couple of theories that I disagree with: a) the people you need are the ones who apply unprompted, and b) it's ok if you throw out your best potential hires.

My experience is that large companies mostly end up being seas of mediocrity, and I think lazy hiring is a big cause of that. I think one of the drivers of it is companies seeing programmers as fungible resources, so hiring becomes less about getting the best possible people carefully fitted to teams and more about getting adequate people with low managerial effort.

Not true. Google probably receives far more applications every year and still takes the time to screen every single resume and give them a shot. I graduated from a relatively unknown university in a relatively unknown part of the world, but they looked at what I did and not what stamp I had.

The college list is interesting especially considering the emphasis many startups (Y-Combinator included) place on hiring hackers, self-taught engineers, etc.

The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools.

Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.

3/4 of our engineers aren't from top tier schools.

Several of our best never even graduated.

Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas.

I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.

Engineering != computer science, at least not all the time.

What you're thinking of is pretty different than engineering which is essentially applied math.

There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.

> programming contests

Programming contests aren't anything like actually working at a software company. If you select for the wrong skills, you'll lose lots of good people.

I once encounter someone on reddit who says he purposefully ignore personal projects and open source projects contributions when making hiring decisions, because he thinks it is a white male privilege.

I object to the racism and sexism in the sentiment, but it is a sort of privilege to have access to computers and time to create personal projects on them. But, it's still a good predictor for job success, so unless it results in discrimination against protected groups, it should still matter for hiring.

On the flip side, even if personal projects don't matter for hiring, everyone interested in the industry should be pursuing personal projects, even if it takes buying garbage computers (as I did as a kid) and repairing them to get a learning platform. Personal projects and open source are more accessible than people might think.

That seems like a cartoonish summary, or maybe they're just a cartoonish person. But I think there's some truth in there.

It's undeniable that open source is mainly white dudes. There are plenty of women who will tell you that they don't feel welcome in open source, and so don't participate or have stopped participating. So if you use open source participation as a hiring filter, it will have a bias.

Personal projects are a sign of having time and money. That is also correlated with being a single white guy. Parents, and particularly single parents mostly just laugh when you talk about free time. Making humans from scratch is their personal project.

That's not to say that these aren't good things to look for. I look for them myself. But if you use them as a filter (as opposed to one of many positive signals), then you definitely are biasing your hiring to middle- and upper-class white males.

> This is about pride and self-image; there's zero reason to believe that restricting your hiring to certain universities, certain previous roles, etc. gets you a more effective engineering team.

If the description in the article is accurate, the document said they recruit from particular schools, not that they restricted hiring of new graduates to people from those schools. Is anything publicly known about what they do when someone from a school they do not recruit from sends them a resumé?

This is an important point. I was a hiring manager at a large company. Resources for recruiting activities were not unlimited so choices had to be made. Top schools that helped facilitate the recruiting process were always on the list. We hired from everywhere if the applicant was good. But a lot of good schools were not very organized or proactive in promoting recruiting by employers.