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> Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.

An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent.

Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible.

If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.

Of course, this means outsourcing the decision back in time, too. You're basically hiring for "the best students by <questionable metric> from four years ago" the moment you factor the college into the question.

You're basically hiring for intelligence, but you're not allowed to ask about IQ, so you use bad proxies like the school someone attended.

Not 'intelligence', but 'capability'. There are plenty of intelligent-but-not-capable people out there, and plenty of capable-but-not-highly-intelligent folks as well.

I’ve worked for startups where nearly all of the early employees were from one university, because it’s easier to recruit that way for a small startup. But they grew out of it after a few years. It’s stranger to be still doing much the same thing decades down the road.

Another variation is when a significant cohort comes from another company. Similar to how people from the same school speak the same language, people from the same previous company speak the same language.

This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.

This "hire a batch from one company" works in small cases but doesn't scale. A great manager can cherry pick 5 or 6 top talents, but a B level manager won't. It also can create cliques in the company.

I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.

> Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?

Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.

If I can't reinforce my bias to show, no prove I am amazing, then what do I have to live for? I cannot afford to be objective, I be normal or even worse, normal.

That's a very noble view. I'd say the point of education is primarily money: for the teachers/profs who teach and the students who study. Academics in the humanities in particular like to claim that listening to them lecture for a few years will grant someone a better soul and make them intellectually superior for life, but there's no evidence of that and indeed, I sometimes suspect it's the opposite.

It isn’t just about finding “good” candidates. It’s about finding a diverse set of candidates.

Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.

That depends on what metrics you use for 'diverse'. Diversity is more than skin deep. The candidates are very culturally diverse.

"On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive."

I would not buy that for a second.

I tend to agree with you. But with the intense competition for talent, why aren't maket forces sorting this out?

You're assuming the actors are all rational. In other words, "No one ever got fired for hiring from Stanford"