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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

#81

Post by wlesieutre »

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.

Are CRUD projects really the most guilty of only hiring from "elite" schools?

Sure, there are software jobs where you're setting up wordpress blogs, but there are plenty that require you to think about algorithms and how your database actually works in order to do them well.

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

#82

Post by tdb7893 »

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…

I've worked with great engineers and most of them have degrees from state schools. I've found the biggest difference between the large tech companies and other places from having talked to people is that the big places have a lot more money to blow on stuff.

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

#83

Post by rpcope1 »

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…

> CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems.

This might be true for graduate level programs, but between decent state schools and Ivies, the difference, so I have found having been in both "types" of universities, in the curriculum is far, far less than you would lead us to believe. From having met and interviewed a number of people from both, the talent of the individual seems to shine through regardless of the school they attended (if it was at least reasonably decent, i.e. most research-oriented state schools).

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

#84

Post by vonmoltke »

drraid0 wrote: post #56

What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?

Then you would be objectively wrong, because there is no fiduciary responsibility to maximize anything for shareholders.

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

#85

Post by akhilcacharya »

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…

> Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail infrastructure is a Java backend

Not only this, but most new grads are hired in a pool and not for specific skills.

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

#86

Post by leeny »

ForHackernews wrote: post #39

This graph is goofy: http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/thres... If I'm reading it right, the X-axis is backwards from normal convention (origin in lower-left), but the axis isn't really labelled.

You're right! Will fix.

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

#87

Post by dominotw »

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 for a variety of reasons

why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?

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

#88

Post by bogomipz »

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…

>"A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development."

I find it odd that you have chosen to respond to an article on diversity with comments that display a knee-jerk bias. Also "IT-focused Java development" is not even a real term. I can only imagine you mean Enterprise Java Development.

I can assure you a quality engineer with great problem solving skills, CS fundamentals and real-world experience working on large important projects with real deadlines and bottom line impact can be of great use to a company like Apple.

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

#89

Post by gsnedders »

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…

And even if they didn't have so much Java, they'd quite possibly still be interested—plenty of major places are more interested in your problem solving skills than your knowledge of any given language.

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

#90

Post by indubitable »

TuringNYC wrote: post #13
tiggybear wrote: post #3

Honestly, I think the socioeconomic status of your parents should be more heavily waited in "diversity" measures than skin color.

Totally agree, but as another commenter suggested it is difficult to measure socioeconomic status. I think the bigger issue is -- why are negative points applied to Asian applications on my affirmative action schemes, rather than negative points evenly distributed against the entire non-preferred pool? Is anyone seriously arguing that Asian applicants have it easier than caucasians? Having grown up quite poor in NYC,…

Organizations are somewhat damned if they do and damned if they don't with affirmative action. In particular the onus of proving that an e.g. university is not being discriminatory rests on them. But diversity quotas such as at least 10% of all accepted applicants will be green, 15% blue, etc are illegal. It puts organizations in a situation where they cannot have diversity quotas, but my run into issues if their results do not look like diversity quotas. This same issue is faced by larger corporations as well.

Consequently, you end up with affirmative action that is based on equality of result instead of equality of opportunity. There are a large number of extremely well qualified Asian applicants so in order to constrain the amount accepted (keeping in mind that acceptance is a zero sum game) they are substantially penalized. I think there's a more fundamental problem with this beyond just fairness.

The whole point of affirmative action was to combat widespread overt racism and other discrimination in hiring/acceptance. Equality of opportunity is extremely important. In times past it's entirely possible the talent in individuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson would not have been allowed to be cultivated because of the color of their skin, and that would be a great tragedy. The problem is that systems that end up de facto equality of result face the exact same problem as we did when overt racism and discrimination was so widespread. You end up viewing certain people as less meritorious than they are, because of the color of their skin. This is something that should never be tolerated, no matter how benevolent the reason may be.

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