Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

There is a signalling/game mechanic that explains this sort of thing:

1) You have some rare ability that is distributed unevenly (Research skill, football skill) 2) There's certain brands that are imperfectly connected to the distribution of ability (Harvard, Man Utd) 3) You can hire a guy who looks to have the ability minus the brand, and he'll be cheap (Easier to lure, lower weekly salary). Once in a while, someone does this for a brand and the guy is "in". 4) Hire the wrong guy without the brand and your head is on the block. Gotta publish/win championships. 5) Hire the wrong guy with the brand, and you can point at many other coaches who did the same.

So what's going to happen? Anyone who is obviously good will get in no matter what, but the bar is extra high. And a fair number of obviously good people will also get the brand name. Everyone who is good but not great needs the brand.

Just looking at the numbers in the academia game, it looks very hard. Committees need to justify their choices, and they are choosing a very small subset of the applicants. Getting a dud on a team of say 7 researchers could be costly. You'll get some anyway (there's a HN article today about how hard it is to interview people) but you can at least pretend you did the conservative thing. Also, with a very small size the top spaces are reserved for special talents (Terence Tao article today as well). If you're on a shortlist with TT, you're not getting that job.

I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

True at the graduate level. But how many faculty at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. did their PhD at a school outside of the top ~15 schools?

I think the explanation model agrees. For instance if you're a top football club, you can tell who the cream of the crop are, and you'll get your share.

If you want to, you can take a chance on a player. If he's not good enough, he's still got your stamp of approval, so he can be sold at a higher price anyway.

> I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

Well, that's probably deceptive, as those guys are probably exceptional in other ways (publications as an undergrad, other research, etc) which takes away from their grades, or they only cared about certain classes which were important to their field.

As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10 programs I can confirm this.

My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline, worked on open source, gave talks at workshops and software engineering conferences, TAed, constructed two student led courses, etc.

It seems the most important thing is to demonstrate your ability to work as a researcher (your primary role as a CS graduate student) trumps all in graduate admissions, but that is just my 2 cents.

That's what I've heard, and it makes sense. Most specifically, to get into grad school X, you need to have one or more of the facility members in your school who are known by one or more in X recommend you with the message that you can do research.

To summarize: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

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