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Comment by KevinMS | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how a company that hires with a strong academic bias competes in the long run.

I'm not sure but I suspect Apple is the opposite, and look how they are doing.

Update: is this not a relevant comment? What would motivate somebody to down vote it? I'm curious because I care about the quality of HN, and I don't want to see it become something like reddit where up/down votes are actually like/dislike votes

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If you say something that is positive to Apple and negative to google, you will get down voted here. IF you ask why you're getting down voted, you'll be introduced to all the logical fallacies and errors in your comment, however, this is a red herring. Note the votes that pro-google, ant-apple comments get, even when they are merely assertions.

Of course, my crime is much worse. I have pointed this out. But there it is. (Do it too many times and you'll get banned completely, so beware, and log out periodically to make your your contributions are actually appearing on the forum.)

You assume something that is pretty illogical with no evidence (Google may have a stronger academic bias than most, but Silicon Valley in general has an education bias, Apple included). Also, the concept that Apple is doing well and they don't have a academic bias, so that must be correct is correlation = causation. For example, I hear Google has a strong academic bias, and look at how they are doing.

I would be shocked to find that apple had the same kind of comp-sci bias that google had. They must have a huge number of developers who have been with that company since the 80's and 90's, a time when much of the industry was being created by people with very diverse backgrounds.

The company most similar to Google in hiring bias is early Oracle. In the mid-1980s they were hiring every Stanford graduate they could get hold of.

Oracle still tries to keep up with standard. Getting hired to work in 400 building (RAC, ExaData, etc.) is still much harder than getting into Google.

Be prepared to be shocked - What company wanted all their employees to know how to program (even the secretary!)

(Hint, it wasn't Google.)

But I think this is best summed up by an (admittedly paraphrased) quote from our good friend, Steve Jobs - "Engineers are the only kinds of employees I really hire, everyone else is expendable, because everyone else isn't very smart."

But knowing how to program and knowing all the trendy algorithms are two completely different things, - I should know.

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