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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

#251

Post by wpietri »

lutorm wrote: post #240
fareesh wrote: post #203

As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious…

The underlying assumption is that, if you average over a large enough population, there should be no underlying consistent difference between subsets selected on gender, race, or class, so a difference of outcome is presumed to be a result of difference of opportunity. The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.

An especially good assumption given that assuming otherwise has been proven wrong time and time again. Pretty much every advance for women was argued against on the basis that women were somehow not biologically capable.

That argument has been consistently wrong since women's suffrage, but that doesn't stop chowderheads from hauling it out anew, apparently unaware of its rich history of failure.

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

#252

Post by wpietri »

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…

> the top people are the same everywhere but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people.

If only a tech company could figure out a way to use computers to scale up processes so that they work for more people.

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

#253

Post by jtmcmc »

logfromblammo wrote: post #128
gonehome wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 get in to MIT, but if I had, it's unlikely I would have attended, due to financial reasons. I went to a state school, and had a handful of scholarships to help me out. In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.

I don't know when you applied but my understanding is that MIT http://news.mit.edu/2008/tuition-0307 this is from 2008 presumably that number has gone up (stanford is now free for families earning under 125k for instance)

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

#254

Post by timr »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #229
timr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

How did you get from unknown undergrad to top PhD? I was considering grad school, but I'm concerned my profile isn't good enough.

General advice: get good grades, do well on the GRE, and do research as an undergrad.

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

#255

Post by kbos87 »

jldugger wrote: post #73
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 selec…

It isn’t just about finding “good” candidates. It’s about finding a diverse set of candidates.

Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.

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

#256

Post by kerbalspacepro »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #27
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…

Maybe companies could leverage this "internet" thing to reach the great students systematically? Maybe put these lectures online? Continue with projects like codejam, though ideally come up with one that is less reliant on obscure math (or OEIS) and more reliant on problem solving.

The lectures aren't there to be lectured. They're networking events that are acting as a shotgun approach to recruiting.

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

#257

Post by skywhopper »

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…

Unfortunately career services is one of those areas of "administrative overhead" that legislators and pundits love to gripe about when complaining about the increasing costs of a higher education. It's no wonder they can't do as much as they used to.

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

#258

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #233
AgentME wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language. Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a…

> We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased

Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision.

We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on your product teams (at the very least).

[1] http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reac... IPOs

[2] http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Fund management

[3] http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4... Boards

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publicatio... Boards

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

#260

Post by obstacle1 »

dogruck wrote: post #242
s73ver_ wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "best".

What's your definition?

This seems like a deflection.

It's totally legit to ask you what your definition of the 'best' candidate is, because you made a claim: that the best people come from the top schools.

How are we to conclude that your argument has any worth whatsoever when you aren't able to even define the components of the claim you are making?

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