They discriminate employment based on what school you go to, or at least they did circa 2013
B) if you have work experience, they filter on where you worked because the average google engineer / HFT engineer is probably better than your average engineer who works at missouri national bank.
C) if you've done something great that everyone knows about (like being the author of popular libraries, inventing tools that people use), then you can most likely bypass filters A and B if you can get in touch with a human recruiter (shouldn't be too hard).
For prestigious smaller companies which gets a lot of applicants, there is no easy way to reduce the pool without doing A and B. It is unfair and what college you go to might depend on circumstances beyond your control but if you have high ability regardless of what school you went to, you would eventually do B or C and get into the prestigious company.
If you don't have high ability and will never do either B or C, then they did the right thing filtering out your resume.
In the real world, it doesn't make sense for a company to discriminate against a candidate with higher ability just because they went to the wrong school (unless the company makes money from appearances like law firms, consulting firms or is corrupt and entrenched).
That being said, if you went to a community college but also had 10+ years experience at one of their competitors (eg: DE Shaw, 2Sig, Citadel, etc), you'd almost be guaranteed an interview. But once again, thats another very small set of applicants.
It wasn't a "logical way", it was an "easy way". That's classist at the very least.
I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.
But not socio-economically.
I know that fancy colleges like to say that they strive to base admittance on performance, and I believe that’s true to an extent, but it certainly seems like they make an exception for students who come from a lot of money. I’ve mentioned this before but think about any politician that you think is un utter moron, and there’s still a reasonably good chance that they went to an Ivy League because they come from a rich family.
And it annoys me that people act like Ivy League schools are the only ones that accept based on performance. I applied to a bunch of state schools as a teenager and I got declined by a bunch of them. We can wax philosophical about why I was declined but I doubt it was personal, just that they probably didn’t think I would perform well based on some metric.
The question is what other attributes you "accidentally" filter by if you filter by school prestige. Even if you do bias your pool to individually better candidates on average, you may bias it in a lot of other ways.
If the purpose of the filtering is to reduce the pool to a size where humans with common sense can make sensible calls, then that CC graduate with 10+ years of competitor experience would likely be filtered out before common sense could suggest he might be good anyway.
HFT jobs are high value / high comp jobs, so Jane Street and their cohorts put a lot of effort into recruiting. This includes their resume intake system, internships with desirable colleges and professional outreach.
they get many applicants for a job. So you have to filter those applications. One way is to recruit from known places where they have already got people from as they know it worked. Typically those universities also filtered on how good you were and so the average quality is higher from those.
Obviously there will be exceptions but not work spending time to find them. Recruitment costs a lot in time and money.
I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.
I learned math of finance from a professor I'm pretty sure was quanting on the Street at the time.
When I told him one of the constants in our little trading game was off by a factor of 10x, he said prove it. My final talk was: "How to make 2.3 million dollars in 30 days using options."
The real lesson wasn't about pricing options. It was about being ruthless when the time came.
What I find amusing is that I'm categorically a much better functional programmer now than I was then, with professional F# experience with a lot of Clojure to boot, but they haven't responded back to any of my applications in the last three years.
I think if I want to work at Jane Street now, I either need to finish my PhD, or get a Masters degree from a sexy school to "cleanse" my WGU degree (despite the fact that I don't think I know much less than the average Ivy League graduate, though obviously I'm a biased audience).
I'm not saying that I think this order of things is jolly good, but from the perspective of this kind of business sector it makes sense. Personally I avoid finance related sectors, a stint at a casino operator to get some experience on the CV was enough for me.
I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week.
I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU.
(If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research)
So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school.
I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it.
[1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.
You can't claim to have diversity if everyone did the same courses in the same schools.