221–230 of 496 posts
In my experience, major companies are aware of this problem, and would love to find a solution. Frankly, the problem is that, ultimately, they want to hire the best people. Most of the time, the best people are sourced from the top-tier schools. On the other hand, in my experience, they pride themselves on finding great people from outside of that small circle. When they do find such a person, it's not uncommon for h…
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> 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…
Google's interviewing process is incongruously uneven compared to the rest of the company, which is top-notch. I recommend giving it another thought. (Disclaimer: ex-Googler.)
(I guess there's always the wheelbarrow of money, but they don't really even do that anymore, at least here in Boston.)
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I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went. I wonder…
Things ended up working for me overall but I can relate to this post so much ... The assumption that it's 'obvious' that knowledge of how the system works is widespread is just wrong. It's only recently that I clued in to how the industry works, if I had all this knowledge handy years ago, if somebody told me, I don't know what position I would be in right now.
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…
I recently moved from St. Louis to New York City. The number of recruiting emails I receive has probably quadrupled (or more). In all things, it helps to be where the people you want to find you are looking. Also: protip for people in the South or Midwest who are open to relocation: change your online profiles to say you're in the new location.
That'll work at getting more calls, but won't the increase in calls just mean more offers for work without relocation packages?
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 was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.
The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.
I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.
I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
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>It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from. I don't understand this. If you're matching the diversity of the market, that would seem to me that your recruiting practices are unbiased, which is good, right?
Well, for one, 3 schools do not the market make. For two, it means they're not making any effort to reach out to those in disadvantaged populations. It's a large problem that a lot of companies have.
Lack of diversity in STEM is a large problem, but your payroll matching the market doesn't seem like a large problem.
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> In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?
Interesting point - referral schemes are almost always cheaper than using professional recruiters, but they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone. They'll miss a lot of clusters who never get that first Googler in the door, but past that point they're a highly efficient fix.
Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
It works both ways. Kids who grow up in families who push them to attend big-name universities, will grow up to be adults who find it important to work for big-name companies.
There's a lot of opportunity outside that track too though.
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 attr…
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I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to). State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true). School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ab…
I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went. I wonder…
I started high school at 15 and it didn't even cross my mind (and would not have been financially possible) to look for one outside of my town, while I had a reasonable one 5 min walk away from my place. There was one school known to be the top in the state, in a big city 50 km away, but it had a reputation of people going on meth to be able to keep studying 24/7 - not so great.
Then I started the local university at 18 - I happened to go to CS because I didn't see anything matching my skills better, but I didn't even write a line of C before that (did a bit of webdev and PHP though). No one in my family and none of my friends had anything to do with CS before me.
Since then I moved country twice for study/work, but I still don't see myself changing country or even state back then at 18. (At that time, I barely started having fixed internet connection at home, didn't even know something like MIT exists, and what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley).