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tayistay

"Did Hooli recruiters think that they wouldn’t pass the hiring bar?"

Most likely, yes. In the US news rankings, Duke is #10 and UNC is #20. NC A&T is #281.

NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.

Duke engineering is ranked #20, NC A&T is #134.

These schools just aren't in the same league.

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And just how do you think the school ratings are calculated? Graduation rates. Job acceptance rate into industry. Oh, wait, that sounds like a self-reinforcing cycle. Structural racism runs deep.

> Job acceptance rate into industry.

Can you provide evidence of this.

> Structural racism runs deep.

What makes you think Duke is some all-white club. I went to Duke and there were lots of African-American students. My guess is that Duke has among the most Affirmative Action of any school.

Totally agree as another Duke grad. Duke gets painted as some rich white college by people who have never set foot on campus.

It's safer and easier to blame structural racism than to look at multi factor reasons.

Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.

Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.

I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.

It’s also safe and easy to say “no racism here no sir” when confronted with difficult problems and decisions about justice.

I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.

But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.

It sounds like you’re arguing that there was racism, whereas your example suggests there wasn’t racism, just differences in application process - it certainly doesn’t sound like there was any resistance to improving the process in a way that resulted in dramatically increased success of minority students. Or am I misinterpreting something?

Structural racism often means there is no one person to blame - there's not going to be a person we can hold up and say, "Here's the racist!" This was a racist outcome because the students, staff and parents in the minority school weren't in-the-know. Why weren't they in-the-know? Probably for racist reasons going back decades.

it's the emphasis on the system. no one person is to be blamed in this example.

A system that structurally disadvantages minorities based on race is racism. Why do you think that this one school had more black students? Legacies of housing discrimination.

There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.

Could be, but almost every company I have encountered is desperate to hire good people and none of them cared at all about where I or anyone else I knew went to school.

University rankings are next to useless for determining whether a student would be a good developer. Look at the metrics US News uses to rank universities:

* Research reputation

* # of publications, conferences, books

* # of citations

* # of highly cited papers

Where's quality of teaching? Where's student employability after graduation? Where's numbers of student internships? Where's teacher to student ratio? None of these matter to most university ranking lists.

You left out a ton of metrics they use for school rankings, I’m guessing because those would have hurt your argument tremendously.

Actually, US News does seem to measure those things:

Duke student-faculty ratio is 6:1. NC A&T is 18:1.

Duke is #17 in Best Undergraduate Teaching. Seems for NC A&T that info is paywalled.

Duke is #8 in Co-ops/Internships. This might also be paywalled for NC A&T.

Duke acceptance rate is 9%. NC A&T is 61%.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/duke-university-2920/ov...

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/north-carolina-at-2905/...

I'm pretty deep in the college admissions and rankings world. You are not looking into the methodologies closely here. US News is a far cry from relevancy.

To teaching:

> The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2019 peer assessment survey.

So you have a bunch of high up academic deans being asked to rank teaching at hundreds of schools. This just boils down to name brand and is not a representation of teaching quality.

Same goes for the methodology for co-op's/internships if you read up there. It's all a self fulfilling prophecy of prestige.

Class size, yeah that's a real metric, but there are a decent deal of large schools with known CS programs with large classes near that 18:1 - why haven't those been eliminated from recruiting?

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/university-of-michigan-...

But, you know, they could have treated NC A&T students with respect, just in case, especially given the general problems with the U.S. news rankings as a heuristic for hirability.

But there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t treat a similar-caliber school the exact same way as NC A&T. Pointing to race as the reason is a very bold conclusion

The thing about a complex sociological phenomenon like systemic racial bias is that for each individual instance it is hard create a causal link. Yes, you can propose a lot alternate explanations for why this could have happened. The thing is, usually people writing anecdotes like this see them as connected to or emblematic of other experiences they and others have had. So, I think if you consider the evidence as a whole rather than each instance by itself, racial bias serves as a decent explanation for some of the observed effects.

Where in the rankings does the “leftover dinner from the night before” start?

What you are saying is consistent with the author's message: If they did not think they would pass the hiring bar, then they likely went there to check a box.

> then they likely went there to check a box.

Most probably, someone forced them to have this box.

The author's message was that they did this because of racism.

GC is saying it was more likely elitism, which is not the same thing.

Elitism is very much tied up with racism in America. To think that they are completely separate is exactly the sort of problem that we need to correct.

> NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.

I'm not sure that's a useful measure in the direction you think it is.

I have a few friends in academia here in .au - where the higher education system has been systematically defunded by a series of governments on both sides to the extent they're pretty much totally reliant of foreign students paying "full fees". I've heard stories of teachers being told they will be fired if they do not pass foreign student - even if their course attendance makes it blatantly obvious they can barely speak/write english and their handed in course work is blatantly plagiarised and/or ghostwritten. "Not failing" enough students looks a lot like poor academic standards and/or practice from where I sit.

(And it's quite likely a signal of endemic institutional racism as well. Duke don't enroll "the sort of student" who doesn't get private tutoring or who needs to, for example, work a part time job to support themselves through college. Which is why they're not a "HBCU"...)

You don’t have a clue about Duke and the students there, please stop speculating. Many of the kids work while there, most never had a tutor, and all of them are normal average Americans (and foreigners) in every way.

I have no problem believing that there is bias and systemic issues in tech hiring. But you're right, looking at the school rankings shows some problems in the logic.

"Hooli didn't treat a low ranked school as well as they did an extremely high ranked school, must be racism."

It's more about false pretenses, and thereby racism (or, at best, massive negligence and lack of self awareness)

I could agree that more recruiting resources should be dedicated towards higher ranking schools, but food scraps and half-hearted presentations just for PR points falls wayyy below just "lower resources".

Would you rather just not have a company show up, or have a recruiter essentially treat you like a dog?

Note that the article mentions they did drive two hours each way (!!) to give the presentation. Surely that's better than "essentially treat you like a dog."

leftover pizza from a previous event though.

Do people in general take these ratings seriously?

They seem clearly bogus in that they're by English-speaking press and happen to rate all the English-speaking universities top.

And if they're dumb in that way, probably they're dumb in other ways I haven't thought of too, right?

Is there some real signal in there?

> They seem clearly bogus in that they're by English-speaking press and happen to rate all the English-speaking universities top.

USNWR only ranks US universities. It’s not a world ranking. It doesn’t even include foreign in passport only Canada.

I didn't notice that. I was grouping it together with the Times/Economist/whoever else rankings.

It does make my criticism irrelevant in this case, good point.

There are many reasons besides ability why someone may not be able to graduate.

Do you think this person is lying?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23935650

Or do you think those students are just stupid?

That's quite a dichotomy. Anyway, it's not about what I think, it's about what the recruiters thought. The recruiters probably thought (perhaps wrongly, I don't know) that they would find fewer good candidates at NC A&T. Remember: they have a monetary incentive to find good candidates.

Fucking thank you. I have no idea why I had to scroll so far to see this.

It’s Duke. They’re internationally known. Against some no-name state university. Of course they’ll try harder for the Duke students. It doesn’t matter if it’s Idaho State University, Oregon State University, or NC A&T, it’s not on the level of Duke.

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