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Comment by vvG94KbDUtRa | Hacker News Reader

No the point of the article is they didn't hold them in the same esteem as Harvard and Stanford. Which seems...fine?

That's not what the article said: It said they considered them "long-tail" institutions (below even state schools) that they basically wouldn't hire from.

"Basically wouldn't hire from" isn't a characterization consistent with the remainder of the article. A Howard spokeswoman said that Google's hired 119 interns and 30 graduates since 2017

> Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the “elite” category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to “tier 1” or “tier 2.”

...

> In lieu of a tier, Google’s University Programs recruiting division, responsible for forging partnerships with universities, labeled [HBCUs] “long tail” schools, in reference to the fact that it could take a long time before they would produce a large number of graduates qualified to work at Google, according to the Google employees.

...

> At the time, the 16-year-old company had not hired a single HBCU computer science graduate into an entry-level software engineer role, according to a 2013 document.

I think "basically wouldn't hire from" is a fair characterization of hiring zero for 16 years, and only a handful since then. (And no, interns are not hires).

They noticed the problem in 2013, ramped up hiring since then, and are investing significant effort in helping HBCUs build their CS programs up to par. Isn't that exactly the right approach? (Of course, it's a very different story if Google's belief that "HBCU CS students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures" isn't true, but the source article didn't challenge this claim and I don't know a way to independently investigate it.)

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