For Lower-Income Students, Big Tech Internships Can Be Hard to Get
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).
These are all life choices. I’ve seen many un-optimal college decisions.
Going to college out of state. Taking out too many loans. Studying something with poor ROI. Not going to community college. Looking at what others have instead of concentrating on your own situation. Not realizing the game isn’t over with graduation, you still have to hustle hard core.
Funny how even poor immigrants tend to rise above these obstacles very frequently. It’s largely a mindset issue.
I think the point is that some of these are not life choices for some people. A wealthy student may have the choice to work or not, while a low-income student may not.
If we value meritocracy, we also need to value opportunity. This means not creating a system that is arbitrarily that erodes that opportunity. The top whatever-percent of a society will always find a way to succeed, but I tend to think we want a society that doesn't make it very hard for a large swath to make a middle-class living. Even then, I'm not sure creating a society that forces the masses to "hustle hard core" to manage a middle-class life is a good tack.
I tend to agree with you on some aspects though. There's a mindset and life choices that impact the outcome. I generally say there is a path to middle-class for anyone if you 1) avoid substance abuse, 2) avoid having children before financially ready, and 3) avoid large amounts of debt on depreciating assets. Unfortunately, we've created a system that breaks rule #3 for a lot of people. Some would also argue #2 is getting harder, given the amount training required to become financially stable in a modern economy.
This is all hidden curriculum stuff (just like knowing that applying to 200 places is not what will get you an internship), that you know when you're upper middle class / know people in the field but not as someone who's not in the know.
Now imagine being a Black person with no circle, no network, no money, no one in your family having gone to college. Everything identical for your skin color. Statistically, the hypothetical black person is likely to have worse outcomes than the hypothetical equivalent white person. This is what white privilege is.
It is possible that you benefitted from white privilege, despite all of the hardships you faced.
You can pretend all day that white privilege doesn't exist, but that's just not what is observed.
Here is an alternate way of looking at this. An immigrant from Kenya comes to US with nothing and little to no support system and succeeds despite things stacked against him. A local black person that should have turf advantage can't compete with an immigrant, who is actually hungry to get ahead.
What do you want me to do? Cripple the immigrant so that the local black person can have a leg up?
Are you sure is about white privilege? Are you sure it is not about something more systemic?
We can pretend. We can even have a real conversation.
But white privilege is an actual social construct ( ie. made up bs ).
You can pretend all you want that white people dont receive preferential treatment, but neither research nor the historical record show evidence for that belief.
Everyone is different. Everyone is treated differently. It is only because we have society that we managed to have some level of enforced playing field going.
There is no need to pretend. You can succeed while having deck stacked against you. Naturally, you can also play the victim card.
I honestly do not care. I am done with this conversation. Cuz you know. White privilege and all.
>You can succeed while having deck stacked against you.
I agree! It's also less likely when the deck is stacked against you. If only there were a phrase that conveyed the idea that some people have a bunch of factors out of their control, i dunno say a deck of cards, were like shuffled or maybe stacked in a seemingly random way that broke against them. Of course, theres no cliche like rhat, because that kind of thing doesn't happen. Ever. Not once in science or history.
Youre right, we are all hugely multifaceted individuals. It is hard and maybe even weird to try to isolate the notion of privilege down to a single domain, but often, this is what science is trying to do: control all but one variable and try to observe and measure an effect.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We can, for example, try to measure the effect of one carcinogen to cancer risk. We can’t say all cancer is attributable to one carcinogen.
To relate it to the topic at hand, you would have to measure to total variation of privilege attributable to race as compared to other factors like nationality, socioeconomic status, hell even height, weight, and physical attractiveness. In other words, it’s an incredibly complex model that shouldn’t be reduced to a single variable to estimate effectively.
So, to extend your example, we can't necessarily say p(successful outcome|white)*p(successful outcome|poor) > p(successful outcome|nonwhite)*p(successful outcome|wealthy) until we measure those other socioeconomic conditions. It gets more complicated when we consider they may not all be independent of one another.
And that's just one extra variable. As you say, most agree we are multifaceted individuals. Adding dimensions like p(successful outcome|disability) or p(successful outcome|female) further complicates this as do all the other variables of a social species. So we can't really make strong statements about outcomes of a system very well unless we measure across the entire system of variables. I think that's what people are poking at. We may be able to make conclusions about individual variables but that doesn't always translate to an accurate model of the system at large. It's interesting and perhaps useful, but certainly incomplete. It only works under a "ceteris paribus" assumption, which is to say: "it only works in contrived circumstances that don't reflect reality."
Nonsense! Nobody who wants to go to college joins the military unless they are low income. The US stopped drafting in 1973!
That said, I would like you to consider existence of two populations that refute your statement:
- surge of recruits immediately following 9/11 - military families
If you say nobody, you may want to consider qualifying that statement somewhat.
"Most members of the military come from middle-class neighborhoods. The middle three quintiles for household income were overrepresented among enlisted recruits"[1]
When you look at the educational attainment of those recruits, it erodes your claim. Just talk to some of them and you'll see there's virtually as many reasons for joining as there are recruits. The idea that there is one path for the college-bound (e.g., attending straight out of high school) is probably a contributor to some of the problems we see in college.
[1] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
Isn't that exactly what makes them top computing colleges? This seems like the least surprising feedback loop ever.
If Google prefers to hire interns from Stanford than from Pasadena City College, is anyone really surprised? If you were in Google's shoes, wouldn't you do the same?
Which is debatable, given the prevalence of legacy admissions.
Of course, universities with an established name would also attract the best and brightest. That doesn't mean they produce the best and brightest, though.
What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school. You can say the same about affirmative action.
Nobody believes colleges produce the best from nothing. They produce good results by starting on third base (great students) and letting them run as fast as they can. Some of those will become the best. That’s how it works.
Universities are not ranked like that, at all. Top universities don't necessarily have the best students, they have the best academics.
Harvard could take the dumbest students and still be ranked top 10.
> What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school.
You assume that there is a 60% of absolutely brilliant students, but there is no proof of that.
What on earth are you trying to say? We are talking about school rankings, not professional researcher rankings.
Have you met any brilliant people? Ask them for their opinion.
The proof is in their grades, test scores, competition scores, PhD theses and papers, and later work output.
That's how university rankings work. This is widely known stuff.
If you think that Stanford is up there because they have brilliant students, you are objectively wrong. In fact, there is no standardized way of comparing students of two different institutions other than research work and citations, which makes them, again, part of the academic body.
This paints a very different story.
Also, the fact that there is a percentage reserved for legacy admissions, invalidates your point completely.
Do you think that Stanford's legacy admission policy makes their student body indistinguishable from that of Pasadena City College? Or that no standardized scoring system would reveal any population-wide differences in academic ability between a school which admits 1 of 25 applicants from another that admits 25 of 25 applicants? Hell, admissions rate alone is probably enough to tell a pretty good part of the story.
This does not mean that there are not hardworking talented people elsewhere. They will make it too. But the density of talent at a place like MIT, compared to most other places on Earth in general, is unprecedented, and if that rubs you the wrong way, so be it.
Is there any quantitative evidence supporting your argument from the last 10 years?
Go study CS for a semester at one of those places.
What evidence are you looking for? How would you even quantify “great”? Just go there and see for yourself and go somewhere else.
I think the same is true for 1-20 vs 21-40, but it wouldn't be quite as clear-cut.
Top universities being top is not some kind of mass hysteria.
We’re there great students at the non-top? Absolutely. At the top one though, every other student was just hard core. It was incredibly competitive and the talent was off the chart.
The population differences are real. They're like normal distributions where the mean of one is perhaps a whole SD higher than the mean of another. That said, if you pick the top 5 students at the State School and the top 5 at the Ivy, the students themselves are roughly equivalent, but the ones from the Ivy had a lot more access to higher quality facilities, funding, opportunity, faculty, and peers.
In the simplest case, we could plot the population based on objective talent vs. financial access.
And it's likely that with Stanford, you'll find some people with both high objective talent and medium financial access, and others with medium objective talent but high financial access. Even the scholarship recipients are going to need the freedom to ship off to college and pay for incidental expenses, rather than remain at home to support their families.
On the flip side, at less prestigious colleges, it might be true that in the aggregate the objective talent level is a bit lower, but there are going to be some students with objectively high talent who simply lack the financial access to a place like Stanford, even if scholarships were on the table.
From a recruiting standpoint, is it easier for a company like Google to just ignore students from those less prestigious colleges? Yes. But will it create a bias toward people with more wealth and privilege, and undermine the goal of diversity initiatives? Also yes.
Basically, participants do a 2- or 3-week sprint during an academic break, and then companies have the option to bring them on for a full summer internship.
Why is this important for representation?
> All the research shows that the single largest predictor of a student landing a job within six months of graduating is whether they had a paid tech internship.
But what challenges were underrepresented students facing?
> What it boiled down to is that all those things are the result of the “privilege of free time,” when you’re not working one or more jobs as you go through college to support yourself, sometimes to support your family. In essence, the companies were looking for things on résumés that were more attributes of privilege than they were of potential.
Yes, we need to do better as a culture at scouting out high potential that wasn't raised with the advantage of having mentors who know how to build a career. But there's this implicit assumption that the companies offering these jobs and internships have endless resources to spend on talent scouting.
Schools and local community organizations that exist for these people need to step up their efforts to actually learn what's current and build these bridges: pipeline programs, guest speakers, hosting their own hackathons, career/interview prep courses, etc. Everyone is expecting the tail to wag the dog.
Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for undergrad internships?
[0] https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
They want you to have stories prepared for each of the principles. That's 16 anecdotes you have to prepare. They all have to follow a certain format as well: the STAR method. Situation/Task, Action, Result. You have to describe the situation and tell how it relates to the principle, what you specifically did and how it reflects the principle, and finally the results of your action.
Each anecdote needs to be about 5 to 10 minutes long. So you have to prepare roughly two hours of material total. I can see it taking two weeks.
Imo the bigger issue is that at non-target schools there isn't any mentorship or advice on what to study and why, which leads to a negative reinforcement cycle of kids at non-targets not getting an alumni network at good programs.
It's definitely harder for really junior people to have lots of examples here than someone with 5 years but I scale my expectations way down for interns. But having any experience helps. I'll take examples from anywhere. I actually find the sheltered rich kids are worse at this. Some of them can literally only list their student projects when I ask for a disagree and commit example. But if you worked retail like target or Wendy's you'll have many examples. One of my mentees put themselves through college working the alumni guilt we donations line. We got solid examples across the board in a few hours.
I do also find going and finding these examples also helps you for other job interviews as they're just your interesting experience points
But in general the expectation I have for experience that a intern will have is pretty low. Basically if they have one relevant experience they're at average. If they've done anything else they're going to ace that section.
Less experience... I'll lean more into the code. Generally take it really easy on interns as it is their first real job.
Now for the LP questions on people with 3/5/10/15 years of experience, I've had folks with 10 years of experience with literally no examples of disagree and commit. I had one who was apparently a professional yes person. They straight up told me they would be uncomfortable bringing up any issues to their bosses with any of their boss's ideas. I ended the interview early.
The OAs consisted of a technical quizzes and a weird "work simulator" where you had to apply the leadership principles. The interviews had a similar setup where one was focused on technical questions/experiences while the other was with a manager where I had to relate my experiences to the leadership principles.
My interview prep really only took an hour or two. They sent over some tips regarding the STAR method and leadership principles, etc. I have no idea what this person was doing for two weeks.
It did hurt to turn them down in the end as the pay + housing stipend was really good, and I would have liked to have a FAANG on the resume. However, I had already accepted an offer from a smaller company and preferred a SDE role in a potentially less stressful work environment.
Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its applicants. Our CS program admits 7%, and a demographic profile that bears no relationship to the broader university population. Relevant to this article, far more out-of-state students, and therefore students from wealthier backgrounds. (Because our out-of-state tuition is insane.)
So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place.
And from where I sit, the situation is even more frustrating, because we have thousands of data points showing that students drawn from the general university population can and do succeed in our CS courses—at least those required for the minor, which has become increasingly popular. But a lot of CS departments have felt increasingly besieged over the past few decades, as we've been swamped with students and frequently not been provided with appropriate resources. (Although there's also plenty of programs out there insisting on doing things that don't scale well, which exacerbates the problem.) So increasingly the "answer" is to clamp down on admissions, in ways that usually disproportionately affect certain populations.
We have a lot of ongoing BPC and DEI efforts in my department. But there's very little if any focus on admissions. I asked recently, and apparently we don't even know the demographic breakdown of our applicant pool.
Regardless of what aspects of diversity you care about, one of the biggest sources of inequity in CS today is in university admissions.
Sure. But every big tech company has relationships with universities, and has billions of dollars to invest, and would easily recover in the form of talent if they invested in education, even before the undergraduate level. I've worked at small consulting firms that were able to provide a few scholarships on much smaller budgets.
You're right to hold academia responsible as well, but a big reason that systemic problems like this aren't fixed is that the responsibility for fixing them is spread out across a lot of different groups. This lets any individual group point the finger at another group not doing their part in fixing the problem and use that as an excuse for not doing their part in fixing the problem. People are doing that all over this thread.
Kudos to you for doing your part and acknowledging university admissions as part of the problem, but I'd be less eager to hold big tech blameless.
I am not in tech-tech, but in my volunteer work I had a kid, who could likely do well in our paid internship program ( and it is not a bad place to work at ). I encouraged him to apply, but I have heard nothing since. In a week, I forget about it altogether, but it is always a shame to let a mind go to waste.
But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get.
I don't know. I just don't understand the point of this article at all.
edit: added paid
It's fairly obvious we need to fix our recruiting process for internships: engineers generally don't give a fuck about which school you went to (unlike say, in consulting), but recruiters do, and they'll filter out anyone who didn't go to a target school, it's a real issue.
As someone who grew up poor, big tech was my best way of building wealth. I didn’t need connections, didn’t need to work unpaid internships. I just had to get an interview and pass it.
That said, if I went to a better school I’m not sure I would have had the chance to study CS in the first place. At places like the University of Washington for example it is extremely competitive to get in to the CS major - I know that I definitely did not have the grades to be competitive as a freshman. So, at my not so great school that lets everyone in, I had the opportunity to learn something I was genuinely interested in and eventually (with a bit of luck) turn that into a zig zag path into a job at a big tech co.
The way I see it, tech companies should keep whatever bar they have. Interviews suck but they’re a great opportunity equalizer (yes, people from prestigious schools fail these too). People from low income backgrounds can and absolutely do make it in big tech, and I’ve known many capable colleagues without degrees.
Maybe for intern postions or higher positions, but for regular software developer positions "longstanding inequities" is just not true. From my observation 80% of SWEs are immigrants, we graduated schools nobody heard of in the US. For interview purpose it didn't matter. For all the hate (rightfully) have for leetcode interviews, it doesn't care about your background.
It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that.
Do they not support asking this question?
> If this is a tech specific issue
Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
Who tf knows? Have they published an article on it?
> Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
I am not saying anything about that. All I am saying is this:
For a fair and logical/scientific comparison, the article should have included other rich and powerful industries that folks want to work in, but I guess NYT doesn't believe in fairness.
Stop pointing the finger at other people and take responsibility for your own actions.
Please stop the easy moralizing.
Believe it or not, both you and the New York Times can both be doing the wrong thing.
Wait, if you can't argue logically or decently, just say so. It is understandable to get angry when confronted with logic.
> Believe it or not, both you and the New York Times can both be doing the wrong thing.
I am not the king of Tech.
Here let me spell it out in an easy-to-digest manner:
If in other privileged industries rate of hiring poor folks is lower than that of tech, tech is actually doing good and not wrong. Is that clear?
You assume tech is in the wrong automatically without rationally analyzing it. The way to rationally analyze it is to compare with other rich industries.
Once again, we should stop moral aggrandizing and argue scientifically.
"What they are doing is worse"? That's your defense? What grade are we in?
Believe it or not, the New York Times can both be doing something worse than you, and you can still be doing the wrong thing.
The goal here is "treat people fairly" not "treat people less unfairly than somebody else so you can feel superior".
> I am not the king of Tech.
Just the defender of Tech.
I'm glad that early doctors and engineers working on difficult problems didn't just shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do?"
Hire lower-income candidates?
The #1 thing I would do if you're doing unpaid internships, is get rid of unpaid internships, which should be illegal anyway. Unpaid internships mean that you will only get candidates who come from high-income backgrounds, because low-income candidates can't afford to work for free for any significant amount of time.
I also won't give money to nonprofits that use unpaid internships. If you won't help the people in your own house, that tells me you aren't fundamentally invested in helping people, and I'd argue that remains true no matter what the mission of your organization is.
YCombinator is a startup incubator, so ostensibly a lot of people here aren't in big tech, and startups do often use unpaid interns. Programmers might not have the full impression of this, because programming internships are usually paid in my experience, even at small startups. But lots of internships in (for example) marketing or administration/HR are unpaid.
With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes?
The story is tragic, painful, and heartbreaking to read. My heart and empathy go out to these struggling and ambitious people. Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
Yes.
Obviously that's not the only question you ask them: you still want to hire someone with the ability to perform the job.
> Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
Big tech is well known for only being interested in solving easy problems, which are the only problems worth solving. /s
As far as I can tell, high-income people aren't a protected class anywhere in the US. There are many state laws preventing you from asking salary histories[1], but that's not everywhere, and where such laws exist, companies are already using loopholes to discriminate against low-income candidates. Many of these laws only say that you aren't allowed to use income history to determine pay: you're welcome to filter candidates by income history if your pay is stated up front.
Even under the most strict conditions, you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income. This strikes me as possibly the best solution anyway, because sometimes income doesn't tell the whole story: someone with prior high income might have massive medical debt, for example which decreases their effective income.
[1] https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/states-with-...
Obviously you are allowed to look at income history in some manner, but a lot of the people concerned here won't have any significant income history. So what you're really doing is filtering by the economic status of a student's family. That's inevitably going to be fraught.
> you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income
If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.
Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.
Given the number of companies that blatantly use income to discriminate against underprivileged races and suffer zero consequences, I think your concern here is unfounded.
> If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.
That's not a "little white lie", and having a moral compass that you're willing to follow over money isn't some sort of abnormal thing.
Your opinion fits with a general anti-pattern in aid programs where people spend more money trying to verify eligibility for aid than they would spend letting a few outliers game the system, meanwhile excluding people who are legitimately eligible because the verification process presents barriers.
While I'm not willing to accuse you of either of these things, I will say that this view often comes from people who assume everyone is as amoral as they are, or who are actively trying to undermine the aid programs so they can defund them.
Ultimately your opinion makes no sense. You're worried that some of the candidates might lie and you'd hire high-income candidates when you meant to hire low-income candidates. So you just throw up your hands, and say nothing can be done, and then hire high-income candidates because that's what happens when you make no effort to do otherwise. You literally don't even have to spend more money to try to hire lower-income candidates. It begins to sound like you're just not interested in solving the problem.
> Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.
I'm not tugging on heartstrings. Nowhere have I mentioned any of the hardships which low-income people experience. I'm literally proposing solutions which you're shooting down with incredulity and this straw man argument.
If there's money to be made, Hacker News is all about solving hard problems. But suddenly when it involves taking some responsibility for a social problem, it's hard and that's it!
- ...sure they focus university reach out programs/recruitment teams on less wealthy universities.
- ...start 'apprenticeship' type programs to specifically target groups less represented in their current recruiting pipeline.
- ...ensure their current hiring practices don't have biases that might contribute more to this.
This would lead to a call for for gatekeeping of degree-granting institutions, only we'd call it accreditation rather than gatekeeping.
Once that cycle completed, you'd find that among the many candidates who all had BS in Computer Science from some unspecified (but accredited) universities, some of them came with an additional verifiable credential that they had earned the prestigious "Leland Stanford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Computing", while others had verifiably won the "William Barton Rogers Award for Excellence in Engineering and Physical Sciences" each granted to the several hundred of the top students each year...
You finish your fancy degree, get a job at a name-brand BigTech, pay your dues for a few years, then leave as part of a founding team (or the founder) of a VC-backed startup. At worst, you go be an exec at a later stage startup thanks to the wonderful connections you’ve built in BigTech.
In other words: the wealthy students
The racialization here is so silly. Your suspiciously included categories account for the overwhelming majority of the US population. Also, as we all know, completeness would have required listing every single race.
That's exactly the point: big tech's silly tokenization/racialization only provides superficial diversity. They almost exclusively hire people of means.
There was an old sci-fi movie where an astronaut said he was say he was from CSM and we'd always boo.
What does this mean?
And despite all the talk about inclusion and fairness and how we need to hire a diverse bunch of people, each year, without fail interns--some even high school seniors--would show up on our team.
So if I'd talk to these kids, who usually had names like "Bretton Pinkerton III" it would always turn out that they were the grandchild of a board member, or the kid of some venture captialist that the CEO or CFO was working with for another company that he was on the board of, etc.
Never once did they get interns from say, East Palo Alto high school, or one of the community colleges, or College of San Mateo, or any of the schools that a poorer kid was more likely to be at. Never.
The company, desipte their "diversity officer" was actually elitist as they come.
(Oh, and these rich kid interns rarely had any interest in what they were doing either. If they were high school, it was just resume padding and then they were off to Harvard or Stanford.)