Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT.

I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most important as it's crucial to your "personal brand" (A "Harvard trained" lawyer). With doctors it seems less important and with most other professions it seems almost irrelevant.

View on HN

> I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT.

Yes but for many the reason they were at Google was because of the MIT degree. So not only do you get a great education, but then you go on to do solid work (hopefully) and get good experience. It's acceleration on ROI of the degree.

It doesn't necessarily work like that anymore. I have 4 close friends of mine who did EECS@MIT who didn't get recruited at Google.

Overall it does work like that though. Google (or other tech companies/elite institutions) attends MIT engineering career fairs, it doesn't attend others.

Corporations are not good at identifying promising talent outside of their traditional (Ivy League, etc.) recruiting grounds so they stick with their traditional recruiting grounds and then they'll favor "diverse" students from their traditional recruiting grounds. That's why they (corps) haven't made any substantial progress in "diverse hires" IMO.

For example if "Google" wanted to make a difference it would actually ban hiring from Ivy League or top-20/30 universities (wiggle room on details here) and instead focus on universities that have higher admission rates (50% or so), large public universities, big time diverse populations relatively speaking.

I'm not denying that, but you are ignoring the fact that Google would open that booth at a LOT of public schools as well. Just off the top of my head - UC Berkeley, UCLA, Mich, Iowa State, UIUC, UW, UW Madison, UCSB, Oregon State, UMass Amherst, etc.

And honestly, I really don't think you understand how hiring whas changed at a traditional corporation.

For management track roles, these companies (eg. Danaher, Abbvie, P&G, Coca Cola) would hire undergrads from regional schools for management track LDP programs.

Traditionally (aka the 70s and 80s) they would recruit from Ivies only, but that basically ended by the 2000s when they saw they couldn't compete on the package.

I don't think it's true that companies disregard the ivies and instead look for leadership recruits at no name schools. Source?

Not Ivy =/= No Name School

CMC has no reputation out East, but has a massive west coast PE/IB alumni network.

Danaher's GM Development Program (leadership track program) targets Carnegie Mellon

You need to attend an elite university to succeed, but an elite university doesn't have to be an Ivy. Selective public schools like Cal, Mich, UVA, UT Austin, UCLA, etc are feeders as well as Selective Privates like Tufts, UChicago, BYU, CMU, CMC, NYU, USC, etc.

CMU is close to am elite school so that goes against the argument

Yes, but it's not an Ivy, as you mentioned in your comment. Unless you are using Ivy to represent the 50+ top universities in the US which are a mix of public and private schools.

I was a part of GE Aviation's Leadership Program and they definitely started looking towards especially more local schools towards the end of my program. They found that people who were from more local schools were more likely to stay longer term after the program finished. Most of the people they hired from the larger schools would leave pretty quickly after finishing the program.

Berkely, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, are some of the best universities in the country. They exceed Ivy League schools in some fields and compete across the board. These aren't great examples in this context.

UIUC, Wisconsin (CMU as well for example) have really strong engineering programs and "fit the mold".

UCSB (UCI too for example) and Oregon State are based on the west coast. You can get the kids who didn't get in to Stanford or Cal for one reason or another here. I'm guessing UMass fits this profile as well but for MIT/Harvard/etc.

Iowa State is the only one here that's surprising and I'd be curious to find any sort of info online about Google attending their career fairs. It's probably an experiment on Google's part. They typically do not recruit at these types of universities or the footprint is minimal.

Overall the point isn't "has Google ever sat foot on this campus? I guess they recruit there!!" it is "Google primarily recruits at Ivy League Universities (and of course the top 10 or 20 or so universities including public) and that is their bread and butter so to speak. Are you suggesting that Google recruits Harvard the same way it recruits Iowa State?

You initially said "Google didn't recruit my four friends", but Google still goes to campus in-person and recruits there. Google didn't show up at any of the career fairs for my big public universities in Ohio, though I've interviewed a few times based on my own sheer will and luck.

(just to be clear, I'm not picking on Google specifically and these comments can be applied generally to all the top hedge funds, tech companies, non-profits, etc.)

It's a non-exhaustive list.

Iowa State has a strong STEM program because of Ames National Lab.

They also have on campus recruiting at UTD, UMinn, Purdue, BYU, ASU, and Stony Brook.

And when did you attend college?

And, to be fair, if it wasn't Ohio State I doubt they would have been there.

> (just to be clear, I'm not picking on Google specifically and these comments can be applied generally to all the top hedge funds, tech companies, non-profits, etc.)

What school you go to does matter, but it's doable for most students to attend a semi-selective program and still have plenty of doors open. Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.

> It's a non-exhaustive list.

It's going to be very hard to convince me that Google puts the same amount of recruiting resources into Iowa State or similar as it does Harvard, MIT, Michigan, etc. It's not a matter of "they went to campus at least once, therefore it's the same thing" which is what you're implying here.

> And when did you attend college?

I went to Ohio University (close to the same enrollment numbers as Iowa State actually) 2012-2015, and then went to Ohio State 2018-2020. I did a fair amount of campus recruiting on behalf of my employer, helped Ohio University some with getting companies on campus, and created a hackathon with a career fair element to it as well.

> Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.

Yes... which further strengthens my original point.

> Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.

Google won’t pick them up, but the public sector and adjacent industries will, provided a passable background.

Depending where those people land, they may end up somewhere that’s on par with if not better than Google.

That aside, I’d like to know what purpose Indiana Tech and Wright State (and their equivalents) fill according to you wrt careers.

New grad talent is a huge pipeline for Google or any other FAANG, and they'll recruit at every well-rated and large engineering program they can find, the large majority of which aren't just MIT. And tons of engineering programs that aren't those, though they may just do all their recruiting through the colleges' online resources, since they have a limited number of humans to physically travel.

Online recruiting isn't the same as in-person recruiting though. Note that Google (just using them as a stand-in) recruits in-person at MIT but doesn't at other places where they "recruit online" from.

I gave a non-exhaustive list of universities Google does on-site recruiting at.

> For example if "Google" wanted to make a difference it would actually ban hiring from Ivy League or top-20/30 universities (wiggle room on details here) and instead focus on universities that have higher admission rates (50% or so), large public universities, big time diverse populations relatively speaking.

I would love to see a company do this experiment. It would really put their self-proclaimed focus on diversity to the test! Too many companies helplessly say "Oh, we really want to hire a diverse workforce, but by golly it's so hard and we just can't find diverse candidates from our candidate pipeline of only Ivy-league and top-tier schools!" Focus on hiring from mid-tier state schools and see if that's still true.

Exactly this. I now work in a team with a bunch of Ivy League UK equivalents (Oxford/Cambridge), but I'm about 5 years older working at a similar grade/comp ratio. I had to hop around 4 different teams at 2 companies, and build a pretty extensive portfolio of work, before I got a foot in the door they did straight out of university.

After graduating from a bog standard state school, it took me 20 years of job hopping from one non-name-brand company to another before I finally got into a FAANG company. And once you're inside, you can see why this is: You're surrounded by a monoculture of Stanford and MIT and Berkeley graduates, because those (and a few others) are where they do all their university recruitment. Not to pick on graduates of those great schools in particular. They're generally very smart and capable folks! It's just that big tech seems to focus on a small number of schools and practically ignore all the other ones.

I also came in through the side door, and also saw this happening.

I have a similar story but replace "FAANG" with "hedge funds".

Agree with this. Even if it only opens that first door, that's a pretty darned important door.

While I agree it doesn’t matter much 1-2 jobs into your career, Ivies are really good at getting you through that first door. I wouldn’t be surprised if that MIT degree got someone to their first technical screen at Google, or gave them the right resources they needed to pass the interview.

>I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.

I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point. And then do the same thing with name-brand companies, without inquiring much as to what a given developer did at, say, one of the FAANGs.

When I've asked, the stated theory was that those places were good at filtering for smart people, so we didn't really have to evaluate actual competence. And that is one of the theoretical functions of things like degrees, so I get what they're saying, however horrifying I find it personally.

It also strongly selects for people who excel at jumping hoops/working within institutions.

We make it all about smarts, but smarts aren't everything in the corporate grind.

It makes sense that the best teacher-pleasers would go on to be the best executive-pleasers.

> I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point.

I have seen executives (in startups and small, private companies) effectively stable PhDs and others with graduate degrees because of where their degree was printed. They pay these people a lot of money to keep them on payroll because it is, whether true or supposed, a strong signal to potential investors, etc.

Am a lawyer. Completely agree.

For a person who strongly believes in meritocracy, I really picked a stupid career.

I wouldn't worry too much. Meritocracy was a satirical idea from conception.

Academia itself is probably the field that is most particular about these things.

Yeah. For many of the same reasons. Schools want to be able to market “all of our professors are ivy-league grads”

“we would never hire someone that went to a shitty school like this one”

Ostensibly the value of Ivy league as it pertains to tech is in making connections and partnerships with people who have cash-flow and ambition to match. Maybe this is overstated or tech entrepreneurs are more likely to find investment some other way.

If the goal is just to get in at FANG, well, better show some astounding grades, a grab-bag of portfolio items, a knack for communication, among other things. That isn't contingent on Ivy league.

> the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.

but it does matter for a first job, which then has trickle down effects. If you have a better shot at a high-paying company with a good brand name and/or a better shot at "prestige" teams on those companies, that influences the next few years.

Nothing is guaranteed, but these marginal gains snowball.

This is path dependency though. They got into Google because they went to MIT and they'll get their next job because they were at Google and so on. Sure, you could have gone to some terrible college and then ended up at Google, but that's a much more difficult path to break into.

I think this is both true and not true, especially as Facebook/Google/similar get less selective. Having Ivy + Google has a stronger halo effect compared to other colleges, speaking from personal experience compared to peers who went to less selective colleges.

No, I don't think this is true.

Because Google is similarly valuable to MIT in your scenario.

But if you worked at a random startup after college, or three in a row, it's very likely that MIT on your resume will still be the thing that gets you in the door for an interview for your next job.

> I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.

Anecdotally that isn't true. I am not trying to come off like a dick here but hiring manager is (probably) rarely on the level where people care about this stuff.

I was well over a decade into my career as a software engineer before HR types and executives stopped (openly, outwardly) giving a shit about the fact that I didn't have a degree. I made it through the front door based on my network, which I sincerely lucked into.

I absolutely believe (based on analyzing conversations and remarks made with these HR types and executives but also managers over the years) that I was passed over for promotions and given smaller starting salaries and pay bumps because of this. Yes, that did eventually stop. Where I am today, I know for a fact (if you can trust Blind, levels.fyi, and personal anecdotes, etc.) that I out earn some of my peers with equal education and tenure because of my specific experiences and skills, but it came at a cost for a long, long time.

You forgot politics!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com