Ask HN: Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges?

19 pointsrdr18 comments

Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know, but sometimes I sense a sort of backlash against our peers who went to so-called 'name-brand' colleges by those, like the vast majority of us, who went to non-luxury colleges. Do you see this as well in your workplace? If so, please discuss reasons you think this might be happening. How much differently do you treat people based on where they went to college? Thanks!

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There's jealousy sometimes, but ultimately if you've got skill commensurate (or better) with the name brand of your degree, it's not a problem at all. Most people are cool. If you're an arrogant ass, you'll get treated like one. If you got hired by management based on your school, but you can't code very well, people will look down on you.

Actually, the broader backlash by far seems to be from some self-taught hackers against people who've gone to school for computer science. There seems to be this idea out there that a computer science program is worthless for becoming a good hacker. For crappy programs, this is true. For great ones, it couldn't be further from the truth.

Anyway, do expect some people to try to test you though and embarrass you if they can. Of course, those people probably would have tried no matter where you went to school.

thanks for the quick reply! i'm curious about your statement about "skill commensurate with the name brand of your degree" ... does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma). if 2 people are in the same position at the same company receiving the same pay (working as peers), shouldn't others expect something similar from them regardless of their degrees?

On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as easily how well they'll do.

If you give an easy exam and everyone scores 90% or better you don't know much more about the person who scored 100% than you do about the person who scored 90%. If, on the other hand, you give an extremely difficult exam that results in a curve with the 90% cut-off at 80% and the 10% cut-off at 20% you know much more about the abilities of those who did well compared to the abilities of those who did poorly. I think people tend to view a name-brand college as a the very tough exam and a non-name-brand college as the easy exam. Whether or not this is a safe assumption is another question.

Is it really unfair to hold someone to a higher standard because they went to a 'good' school? I think part of the way we estimate future performance is by examining past performance, and performing well at a name-brand school should indicate ability to perform well at tasks for which their education prepared them. On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as easily how well they'll do.

I agree with this, which is why I put "unfairness" in quotes in my other response. There's a certain political correctness that makes people uneasy about comparing two candidates based on the schools they went to. The fact is, the rigor of training for the same degree varies wildly depending on the school you attended.

If you're comparing two seemingly equivalent unknowns who've got no body of work other than a degree, I think it makes perfect sense to bias towards the person who completed the better program.

I should have been more clear about what I was responding to - this commend by rdr:

"does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma)."

I agreed with both your original comment and the follow-up. The question of fairness got me thinking, though, and I wanted to present one way of thinking about it.

does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard [with unreasonably elevated expectations] due to where they went to college?

In my experience it's true. Do I think it's unfair? Probably exactly as unfair as giving preference to someone during the hiring process because of where they went to school. Equal and opposite "unfairness." :)

does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations)

What makes those higher expectations "unreasonable"? All else being equal, I'd expect the quality of an average grad from Stanford or MIT to be higher than the average grad of some random state school. Of course, there is always more information to consider -- the work you've actually done is far more important than where you went to school, and there are great people at unknown schools (and mediocre people at top places). But in the absence of more information about a candidate, I think marginally higher expectations for grads of top schools is justified.

> that seems unfair

LOL welcome to life, buddy.

I'm more worried whether there's a bias against hackers from non-name-brand colleges, especially in the startup community.

really? isn't the startup community supposed to be more anti-establishment and not worry about paper credentials as much as, say, a large corporation or government organization?

Hopefully I know enough about a co-worker's skills to form a good opinion of them before I find out what college they went to. If you bring it up in our first conversation, I'm going to wonder why.

On the other hand, if you went to grad school, research is such a small world that this kind of thing comes up more often - I might ask who your advisor was, etc, to find out whether we have friends in common. It's less about skills.

It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same. -Paul Graham. "How to Start a Startup," March 2005.

A brand name helps in getting job interviews and it helps open doors. Backlash is very uncommon, unless you are a jerk.

It's a good question, but tough to answer because its impossible to generalize the behavior of "hackers".

That said, I have heard of backlash against 'name-brand' colleges at a startup, but it was, interestingly, not by hackers but by business dev. people.

I think at the end of the day, you're a jerk if you judge a person by their college. And you're a jerk if you think going to a good college actually means you're inherently more capable than other folks.

"Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know..."

Maybe you need to meet some new hackers.

I have never seen this. Ever.

30 years. 90 companies. 1,000,000 lines of code.

Maybe it's just because people who know me know better than to bother with details instead of issues.

Your "pedigree" is a detail. Your work is an issue. Don't waste your time with those who don't know the difference.

Your reaction to this suggests to me that you may have mistaken what meritocratic and egalitarian mean. People with these qualities do not usually care about things such as ones "pedigree", thus the GP's confusion that hackers look down upon people who've attended "name-brand" universities.

If not, please elaborate on your post as I do not understand how you in 30 years can not have met hackers with these qualities.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meritocratic http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/egalitarian

Sorry. The part of OP's post I have never seen was that "backlash" part, not the "meritocratic and egalitarian" part. I see now how that could have been misinterpreted because my manual string extraction was off by 62 characters.

But thanks smacking me with 2 dictionary links. That oughta fix it.

No offense was intended, I simply did not parse your reaction to what you quoted.

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