Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Used to have this argument regularly with executives of startups I've worked for who had worked in more "traditional" industries. The number of times I've had to interject around "pedigree" being "useful" is.. sad. (Most)Everyone I've hired from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, etc have been the worst performing, and the most far behind in relevant skills. RIT, Rutgers, etc, waaaay far ahead. It got to the point where I started to move those people to the bottom because the curriculum they studied was so dated most of the skills became irrelevant; I don't need you to set up some complex excel spreadsheet that shows me the KPIs, and only you know how to update it, I need you to know how to set up mixpanel. I don't need you to program Java, I need you to set up k8s, etc. However, more importantly, these grads(recent or not) often come with an attitude of knowing, vs an attitude of learning.

Interestingly, all the "pedigree" obsessed folks who (all) graduated from ivy league schools went on to found one of the most mediocre and poorly focused VC firms I've seen.

Maybe the problem is you're hiring CS/engineering students to "show KPIs" or "set up mixpanel" or "not program"? I can't imagine any competent student from those disciplines, never mind a student from a top tier school, being happy at any kind of job like that. Especially if they were sold a job that would use their full abilities. Sounds like a recipe for otherwise talented people half-assing your job while looking for a new one, resulting in you thinking they suck rather than just don't care about doing trivial stuff.

Why would I hire engineers to set up mixpanel? You hire marketing people for that!

./.. never said anything about CS/engineering

This is a common anecdotal example of Simpson's Paradox. Even if work performance is positively correlated with college ranking, a subset of selected grads can have a negative relationship with the same variables.

The mechanism is the selection criteria. Presumably, college ranking and demonstrated aptitude are both metrics used for hiring. Thus, if the variables are evaluated additively, and the examined firm occupies a single tier of the ranking+aptitude space, the hired employees will have a ranking/aptitude that falls along a negatively sloping line, similar to a budget constraint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

Yeah elite undergrads are striving to be entrepreneurs, CEOs, or wall street/consulting types, not code monkeys. Going to encounter a lot of resistance with standard coding jobs where need to roll up your sleeves for obvious motivation/identity reasons.

I have a funny anecdote here. In competitive parliamentary debate, almost every school "plays by the rules" and doesn't do some relatively easy and hard to detect cheating. Not RIT though - they cheat blatantly and hard. They come in with pages and pages of evidence that they simply could not have hand written in the 15 minutes they're given for preparing. I have a slightly more poor opinion of any RIT graduate as a result of this experience. I know nothing about the school but I can sure tell you that being unscrupulous is not reserved only for the ivy league elite.

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