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If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#71

Post by vthallam »

Manishearth wrote: post #55
vthallam wrote: post #14

>interviewing.io evaluates students based on their coding skills, not their resume. We are open to students regardless of their university affiliation, college major, and pretty much anything else (we ask for your class year to make sure you’re available when companies want you and that’s about it). Unlike traditional campus recruiting, we attract students organically (getting free practice with engineers from top co…

"stringent requirements" like "oh, one of your parents was a student here? here, you're in". Harvard is one-third legacy[1]. > at five Ivy League schools, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown, as well as 33 other colleges, there are more students from families in the top one percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent. stringent requirements, sure, but certainly not the right kind. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/…

That alone doesn't get you an admission. When 2 students has equal test scores, GPA and everything else, your family association definitely helps. This doesn't mean, they accept not so smart people because their parents went to the same school.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#72

Post by compiler-guy »

jondubois wrote: post #63
pfschell wrote: post #29

This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems. A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only…

I'm pretty sure that there is almost no difference in terms of talent between someone who graduated from MIT vs someone who graduated from any other decent university around the world. They share more or less the same curriculum. The main difference is that MIT has more reputable professors and the children have richer parents. Reputable professors are not necessarily the best teachers... Especially at the undergrad…

Having attended an average-at-best school for my undergraduate degree and a name-widely-recognized-as-one-of-the-best school for my graduate degree, and teaching several classes at both:

The top students at both schools were quite close in ability, drive, motivation and talent. There may have been a couple a very little smarter at the name school, but not many, and not enough to make a material difference.

But the mid and bottom students at the average school were quite a bit worse than the mid and bottom students at the name school. And it wasn't even close.

So, in my experience at least, there are definitely students worth hiring at both places, but you have to sift through quite a bit more students at the average schools.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#73

Post by jldugger »

drewg123 wrote: post #37

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR…

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school

Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?

On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.

Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#74

Post by compiler-guy »

lambda_lover wrote: post #26
naturalgradient wrote: post #10

I was an undergraduate at a no-name university for various personal reasons. A Google, Microsoft and other big tech co offices were nearby. Throughout my undergrad, not a single event, talk or recruiting opportunity emerged. I understand this: the top people are the same everywhere but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people. I am now at a world famous grad school and there are…

It really isn't that expensive to send a couple of engineers to a school if you're hoping to hire a couple of talented students, and maybe some interns. You really only need one event a year.

Except that there are hundreds of schools that fit this description. Sending recruiters to any one of them isn't that expensive, but sending recruiters to all of them is quite expensive.

Which isn't to say that there aren't students there worth recruiting.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#75

Post by jeffdavis »

Real diversity is like fine art: you hold some attributes constant and vary other attributes.

For instance, you can keep a similar texture and color palette and use unexpected patterns and geometries; or keep the structure of a symphony but use unexpected instrumentation.

If you stick to expectations too much you will be boring. If you vary too many attributes, it will be chaotic and meaningless.

Similarly, if you choose a random collection of people from around the world and try to make a business, it won't go anywhere. But if you hire all people who followed a prescribed life path, you probably won't be very innovative.

Interestingly, even a single person can be diverse in their ideas. Consider Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

"Diversity" is such a loaded political word now and lost all meaning. It's just cover to whitewash lazy thinking in political correctness. It's common now, in the same breath, to want both diversity and equality of outcomes, which shows how ridiculous our politics have become.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#76

Post by jerf »

w1ntermute wrote: post #5

This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your…

"there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent."

I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.

I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?

Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]

The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.

[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#77

Post by SolaceQuantum »

drewg123 wrote: post #37

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR…

I’m a current UB student. There are some more visits from the top here, but only Bloomberg has any real recruiting events... I think google and Facebook appear sometimes but more to give talks and in smaller/tucked away areas. It’s quite hard to get seen by anyone.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#78

Post by randyrand »

keepper wrote: post #38
pfschell wrote: post #29

This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems. A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only…

Im sorry, but this is where you need to check your own biases at the door. For example, your statement "A company like Apple has little use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development.". Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail infrastructure is a Java backend ( i believe webobjects moved to Java, then was deprecated as an outside project, but kept for intern…

Bias also comes from having knowledge. Statistical racial profiling and stereotyping based on facts are examples of this.

Morally I still haven't figured out what to think about this. Generally stereotyping people is considered okay unless its about something outside of their control (race, etc). e.g. its okay to stereotype about rednecks or Californians, because they could choose to move, etc.

But generally I don't believe in free will - nothing is a choice when you consider all the circumstances. You'll find plenty of articles on Washington post that follow this line of reasoning about the circle of poverty, etc.

So if you don't believe in free will, you're not allowed to judge anyone for any reason - which sounds ridiculous.

So in short, I have not figured out how the morality of stereotyping works, and that bugs me. Has anyone figured it out?

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#79

Post by maxsilver »

notyourday wrote: post #57
wlesieutre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is that if you're hiring a student from Stanford you can assume some baseline level of competence (only approximately true, I'd bet). If you're hiring from elsewhere, maybe you have to interview 10 people to find someone with similar knowledge/skill/misc. It's a bigger time investment in the hiring search, and gauging technical skill in a job interview is still an unsolved problem. If you find an efficie…

You are building a CRUD application. You need him or her being +7 on 0 to +100 scale. You are saying that you only start at those who are +70.

Good luck convincing Google (or Netflix / Amazon / Microsoft / any other major company) that anything they do is 'just a CRUD application'. Even when it's true, they'll never admit it.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#80

Post by habosa »

drewg123 wrote: post #37

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR…

I work at Google and have done some university recruiting (not a ton, but some) and I have not had this experience. Recently I saw a list of hundreds of schools of all sizes and locations that we were committed to sending reps to, so I think Google is actually way out ahead of the field when it comes to not only looking at Ivy League / Stanford / MIT.
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