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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

#101

Post by timr »

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."

No, they don't. At least, not at the undergraduate level.

I went to an unknown undergraduate CS program. Later, I did a PhD at one of the top schools in the country. For my career, I have worked with graduates from all of the elite programs. There's no difference in training. The big-name schools may attract "better" high-school students, but even that advantage is overrated.

Undergraduate programs are largely identical. It's only when you get to graduate school that the resources of a top-tier program start to become relevant.

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

#102

Post by rsynnott »

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…

Most CS courses aren’t really vocational courses; graduates don’t come out experts in a particular area, normally. Which is just as well, really; most of the technologies are transient.

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

#103

Post by amorphid »

Hey Aline!

Regarding diversity, have you needed to steer away from any particular anonymous interviewing techniques because that technique heavily favored a particular demographic? A silly example would be that you no longer allow people to do tests at 8:30 a.m. GMT on Tuesdays because only a certain demographic did disproportionately well in that timeslot. If yes, can you give an example?

Side note, I really liked the interview you gave Software Engineering Daily. That was the first time in a long time I heard about an attempt to make technical recruiting better that actually sounded better to me! [1]

[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/19/interviewing...

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

#104

Post by teirce »

This isn't even a problem that's limited to hiring out of schools. I went to a pretty small school in flyover country, and (much as the article outlines) the hardest part about getting a job was certainly not the interviews, it was getting attention from anyone.

Now I'm working at a local tech company near where I went to school, because I only had local connections from internships etc. Recently I've been looking to move on to a new position and, despite having friends inside of multiple companies (Google, Apple, MSFT) refer me, I've gotten exactly one interview.

If anyone is open to suggestions on how to get more attention, I'm all ears. Until then I suppose I get to shotgun application pages endlessly.

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

#105

Post by southphillyman »

Isn't this one of the primary reasons why those particular schools are "elite". Because of the alumni base and "connections" you can make at these schools? It sucks but I feel like most students enter college knowing how this system works and therefore try their darnest to get into one of those elite schools. I went to a school that had career fairs with 50 kids standing in every line waiting for their resumes to be put into a trash pile. Save for 5-10 students who may have gotten professor recommendations it was a complete waste of time. Only now am I getting reached by recruiters from the Big 4. Honestly I can't even fully wrap my head around having that kind of opportunity at 22-23 years old.

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

#106

Post by leeny »

eksu wrote: post #91
leeny wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot me an email, and I'll gladly get you an account. aline@interviewing.io

Just tacking a question on here - when creating a student account, should I be setting my location to where I’m attending school or where I’m planning on being after graduating? Looks like interviewing.io is tackling a big issue. :-)

Please put your current location. We'll be asking about where you want to work later in the flow.

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

#107

Post by compumike »

There are actually two overlapping long tail effects here: top schools and huge companies. Only one quadrant of this 2x2 grid works well for on-campus recruiting.

For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.

It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college

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

#108

Post by throwaway2016a »

There are some schools that break the mold. Particularly in Boston. Maybe not completely breaking the mold but the tail is quite longer. I went to a top-100 school and many of my class mates are at companies like NASA, Tesla, Google, Twitter and iRobot.

At the same time, as someone who has tried, the name definitely doesn't get you in the door like a top 5 school might. You need to work harder to prove yourself. (a LOT harder) And Google sure as heck has never gone to my alma mater's career fairs.

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

#109

Post by chaostheory »

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…

Didn't Jeff Dean come from a 'long tail' school for undergrad?

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

#110

Post by CalChris »

rsynnott wrote: post #96
jldugger wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 selec…

I’ve worked for startups where nearly all of the early employees were from one university, because it’s easier to recruit that way for a small startup. But they grew out of it after a few years. It’s stranger to be still doing much the same thing decades down the road.

Another variation is when a significant cohort comes from another company. Similar to how people from the same school speak the same language, people from the same previous company speak the same language.

This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.

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