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

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

#211

Post by Nicholas_C »

sndean wrote: post #164
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94

I went to a non-top tier undergraduate school. I made efforts--at big companies as well as the one I founded--to recruit from my alma mater . I ended up defaulting to NYU, Harvard and Stanford. Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. The…

> Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor. Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying: "James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of En…

Sounds like the dean of the college you were in needs to get a new job. I have a very similar profile to yours and my undergrad career services doesn't look too bad compared to my current post-grad career services.

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

#212

Post by avenoir »

10 years ago I graduated from a school that's not even in the top 100 CS schools. But it was super-duper cheap and i got my foot in the door with hardly any student debt. While I never interviewed at big companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, I have been invited to all 3 for interviews at various times throughout my career (sometimes more than once) and I know a lot of my colleagues have as well. So in my experience the choice of school i went to wasn't in any way detrimental to my career. However, I think the story would've been different if i were an entrepreneur and wanted to have access to the same network that someone in MIT or UC Berkley would have access to. That in my mind would be the biggest benefit of attending a top-tier school, but I don't know how important it is to a lot of people.

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

#213

Post by wolco »

DavidHm wrote: post #179
wolco wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why give special treatment to a big firm over smaller firms?

If you can host X companies over the course of a semester / year, then selecting large, well-know, well-paying companies maximizes the total salary of all students you are able to place in these companies

There should be a level playing field. The opportunities at a midsize growing tech company will outweigh the extra pay at a large org if one can move up in the company at a faster rate.

Your chances of being the next cto of google in 40 years is extremely low but your chances of joining a startup or working up the ladder and becoming a cto are much higher. You could be earning a lot more.

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

#214

Post by dsacco »

zulrah wrote: post #185

If you care about diversity stop interviewing on these stupid algorithmic questions! Getting a job literally depends on buying the cracking the coding interview book and solving these stupid problems. I know some of my course mates who worked on very interesting projects but couldn't get a job because they couldn't white board a tree balancing problem :D

I agree that whiteboard coding interviews that assess mastery of algorithms and data structures with low applicability to the role are not optimal for hiring.

However, I don't really agree that this is a "diversity" problem, except perhaps weakly so in that it optimizes against people who don't want to study algorithms for interviews. But interviews by definition optimize against some subset of the general population; unless you're defining diversity so loosely that it can be satisfied by the sets `{studies algorithms for interviews}` and `{doesn't study algorithms for interviews}` (and in that case, how are they different)? That's sort of like saying a tech company shouldn't optimize its interviews for people who like to watch baseball versus people who don't - they absolutely shouldn't do that, but that's meaningless as a diversity metric, in my opinion.

How are you defining diversity?

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

#215

Post by ronilan »

guelo wrote: post #99
eropple wrote: post #65

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 for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: rec…

If the biases start with the university imagine how deep it goes.

It's hard to imagine, but it can still be concluded, with certainty, that if they start earlier they go deeper.

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

#216

Post by atom-morgan »

jaggederest wrote: post #16

I would bet significant amounts of money that if you looked at people based on their in-job performance blinded to background you'd find insignificant contributions from education. Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlatio…

Right. The only reason I didn't go to Georgia Tech is because I didn't' live in Georgia at the time so I would have had to pay out of state tuition. But since then, I've had the opportunity to work with graduates from Georgia Tech. I was expecting to be humbled by their technical skills when in reality, they're just like any other programmer from any other school I've worked with.

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

#217

Post by jxramos »

I recently watched part of this debate and was struck by an admission Peter Thiel dropped about school hire diversity...

"""Peter Thiel: Thank you. Let me actually just start with that question. You know, I went to Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school. Throughout the '90s, I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount. We should only hire people that went to the best schools. And - and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal. And I use this -- and I used to -- I thought this was the most important thing in our society. And over the last four or five years, I've gradually come to shift my views on it for a number of different reasons. The narrow technology context in Silicon Valley, that I saw so many very talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinary well. In some ways, they were also more creative.""" Too Many Kids Go To College- Intelligence Squared U.S. https://youtu.be/7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468

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

#218

Post by s73ver_ »

wolco wrote: post #184
moftz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a major state research university for engineering. During career fairs, the big companies would always have huge lines for hours and the unknown, smaller companies would be doing their best to grab every uninterested kid walking past. The big companies were usually a waste of time to talk to (and waste of time waiting to talk to). They would sort resumes by GPA and pitch the bottom 90%. Then you would still…

If you want to one day start a startup you should stay away from big companies, the skills and experience you get at the right startup can make the difference.

If you want to one day start a startup, the huge paycheck you get from the big companies can definitely make that a lot easier.

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

#219

Post by [deleted] »

stevenwoo wrote: post #182
felipemnoa wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe UB stands for University at Buffalo [1] or more precisely State University of New York at Buffalo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo

as someone who grew up in Texas, I was wondering WTF UB meant and how so many people seemed to know what it was. RPI I knew because I they sent me literature while I was in high school 30 years ago.

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by AgentME »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #173
gumby wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts. So yes, you could say they are (perhaps) unbiased vs their input, but their input has problems. In other words, their selection of schools to recruit from means they are outsourcing the distribution of your their candidate pool, and the GP poster is not happy with that aspect of the result. If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you t…

I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.

Rather than try to counteract the bias with an opposing one on the input pool, the answer can be to try to find new less-biased input pools to draw from.
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