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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Can't they atleast hire one person that didn't luck out by being born in a rich/middle class american family to go to ivy league universities.

What is such complicated product that Fog Creek makes that it needs graduates from top 10 universities? Serious question.

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I'm a Fog Creek employee who is also an immigrant and did not go to an Ivy League school.

I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.

How did you get past 'must be eligible to work in us' restriction? Did they sponsor your visa?

Being an immigrant does not mean that you aren't allowed to work in the US. In fact, there are a ton of immigration visas built around the idea that you will in fact work in the US.

If you are on a student visa (which clearly a full time employ isn't), then there are some hoops to jump through in order to work, but I am not familiar with the necessary steps.

I have a green card, so no visa necessary.

"If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program."

That doesn't really jive with the not caring "about which school you went to" bit. If that's the criteria it eliminates all but 2 of the top 25 public universities which is flat out ridiculous.

We have never rejected anyone based on which school they went to, and conversely have never extended someone an offer based on the school they went to. The schools we actively recruit at all admit less than 30% of applicants because we have found that they tend to do better.

In an interview the school you go to doesn't really matter if you can't code.

A great github account would probably help you more in our interview process than a degree from MIT.

Context is important. That was under "Where Should You Post Your Internship?" - yes, if you're limited (by budget, time, etc.), it makes sense to target people who are even marginally more likely to work out.

That doesn't mean you have to go to one of those schools to get in - which school you went to is treated as a weak signal in the resume reviews, and is ignored for the rest of the process. I went to a public school that falls outside of the 30% rule, for example, and another from my school will be joining us this summer.

This is an aside, but why do people use "ivy league" as synonymous with "top ten" in the world of software development?

At the graduate level, there are only two ivies in us news's top cs list

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

I couldn't find specific CS rankings at the undergraduate level, but for engineering in general, the same thing (this time, only one ivy on the list, Cornell)

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

I understand that there are problems with methodology here, and I have no doubt that many ivy programs are excellent, but it's still strange that people would use "ivy league" as shorthand for elite CS programs.

My guess is that Fog Creek's perspective is heavily influenced by its east coast location? Also, general education tends to matter more for undergraduates, so it could be that the general prestige of the "ivies" is a bigger factor than the specialized nature of departments where it comes to raking graduate programs or specific majors.

The phrasing in your second paragraph is a little off target: the truth is if you're doing anything nontrivial you always want better people because they'll get the job done faster and better even if less skilled people could have done it at all. The real question is, why does Fog Creek think it is to its advantage to only hire potlatch participants, when such discrimination is usually irrational as well as unethical?

The answer, I think, is because they are in the unique position of being able to get away with it. In the normal course of events you'll do worse looking for candidates from Ivy League universities than from people who haven't gone to college because you're fishing in a pool that has already been thoroughly fished by your competitors. But Fog Creek frankly doesn't have very many competitors in this regard, at least not ones remotely in the same league. They seem to be so much better at hiring interns than almost anyone else (in the sense of having a strong brand name to attract attention in the first place, a rigorous selection process and generous offers to those selected) that they will probably be able to pick the cream of the crop no matter where they look, so they have no need to look further afield.

So I think it's a case where the number one player can get away with something the rest of us couldn't.

Side question: in what sense are you saying Ivy league is like a potlatch? Song-and-dance-and-reciprocity? Or conspicuous gift-giving (like "purity potlatch")? Or slave exchange?

Signaling relative status by the destruction of valuable resources.

Fog Creek's sister company, Stack Exchange, has near zero full-time dev staff from Ivy League schools. It probably makes sense to look for the best interns there, but it may not be a requirement.

http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2012/07/15/rockstars-went-where/

Not that I went to anything approaching an Ivy League school, but I understand why they limited their search to that subset. They are more likely to find good matches, and given the low amount of time they probably allocated to this, it wouldn't make sense to canvas hundreds of universities.

I doubt that they met all of their applications at the Job fairs, and even if they did, it appears that Fog Creek also attended the SBU CS Fair (which is decidedly not an Ivy League).

I just want to point out that Rutgers is a large public state school, namely the state university of NJ.

The bias in hiring could be more regional than anything else, though they did say they targeted Princeton, Brown and Yale. 5 of the 8 are a few hours drive from NY, and 2 of the 3 that are not local were persistent (applied more than once).

Although Fog Creek definitely skews towards Ivy League hires, as a former FC intern from a tiny Midwest school I can say it's not a requirement.

On their website, they show a bug tracking app, a version control app, and some organizing app. Apart from the money, I don't see anything that would make me excited about working there. Do they work on anything else?

Yes, they make their own (awful) programming language, that spits out VBscript, PHP etc, to write their products in. I kid you not, it's called Wasabi -- though I'm not sure if they use it still.

For all the advice on hiring Joel has given (and its annoying tone for what is, basically, a very simple app company, and not even a very exciting one at that), you'd think they were coding for the space program or something.

Unlike most tech companies started these days, Fog Creek was not started with a product idea; rather, with the goal of being a great place to work (specifically, for software devs). Some people (myself included) find it quite fulfilling to work reasonable hours with great people on interesting tech stacks, even if we aren't making the hottest new app or chasing the next huge exit.

Jews that went to Ivy League schools tend to hire other jews that go to Ivy League schools

that style of bigotry does not belong here

Oh go be a racist-troll somewhere else.

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