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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

#331

Post by samstave »

cyberpunk0 wrote: post #312
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warms my heart to know that I was not the only person/startup given this treatment. I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures). Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup. I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no respons…

You placed your hopes in someone other than yourself and we're disappointed when it didn't go well?

Screw this logic. Ok the company who is one of the biggest data--based companies in the world is trying to "make the world a better place" - and we are all one big family blah blah gives no data back, so as to literally stomp on some dream rather than to foster growth.

So, to the VCs out there, you have a moral obligation to tell people why you don't want to invest/work-with or hire.

Otherwise you stick the idea of "vulture capital" aren't helping people get better.

Look at some from the ashes type teams, like WhatsApp - might find more of them if you weren't to crush them out early.

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

#332

Post by throwawayjava »

kafkaesq wrote: post #326
throwawayjava wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So your implication is that the ratio of "competent" : "completely incompetent" for students coming from these schools is roughly... 2:100? the parent can be correct with a ratio closer to 1:10 or 1:20, assuming the top schools churn out many more students than 2nd/3rd tier schools. Which is certainly the case depending on how to define 2nd/3rd tier. For ex parent's observation is probably spot on if you're compari…

For ex parent's observation is probably spot on if you're comparing MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley to an arbitrarily chosen regional state campus. I'll readily concur that students from top-tier schools are on average better than students from Podunk schools. But (based on a wide sampling of data points) I don't see anything like a 1:100 ratio of "better", by any metric.

> But I don't see anything like a 1:100 ratio of "better", by any metric... So again, while it's not like school "tier" doesn't matter - this 1:100 ratio is just silly.

I think you misunderstood my point. Parent's observation may be accurate because of a combination of quality disparity and disparities in raw numbers.

The elite CS programs are relatively large compared to many Podunk States. So it's not just that there's a modest 1:10 or 1:20 or 1:5 or whatever quality ratio, but also that Podunk State graduates 20 or 30 students a year while the elite schools are churning out hundreds. So there's a 1:10 quality ratio but still a 1:100 yield ratio. Or whatever.

Again, inaccurate for the large state flagships, but very believable for the regional comprehensives.

(This isn't idle speculation. My observation is that larger schools tend to get more attention from recruiters, even setting aside quality, and I think this numbers game has something to do with it.)

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

#333

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

cyberpunk0 wrote: post #312
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warms my heart to know that I was not the only person/startup given this treatment. I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures). Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup. I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no respons…

You placed your hopes in someone other than yourself and we're disappointed when it didn't go well?

Not really. I am disappointed that there was no response from the reps. Usually VCs do not respond when your startup is so bad it's cringe worthy.

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

#334

Post by home_boi »

kbos87 wrote: post #255
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…

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.

That depends on what metrics you use for 'diverse'. Diversity is more than skin deep. The candidates are very culturally diverse.

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

#335

Post by johnwalker »

A friend told me about their big company's interview process for interns from Ivy Leagues, which was getting flown out to a party and then getting an internship. The candidates weren't asked any technical questions, since they were assumed to be smart enough to learn how to code in bootcamp. It made me feel confused about myself for a while, since I didn't have a job or much experience and it was hard enough getting a phone screen.

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

#336

Post by sopooneo »

s73ver_ wrote: post #197
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…

"On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive." I would not buy that for a second.

I tend to agree with you. But with the intense competition for talent, why aren't maket forces sorting this out?

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

#338

Post by home_boi »

gumby wrote: post #146
Consultant32452 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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…

> If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you think those things are important (I do), then it's bad.

Mismatch between company demographics and society/customer demographics is common in all industries. It is not a unique phenomenon. Before asking what we can do to change the discrepancy at tech companies, we must first ask why this is a problem in the first place when tens of thousands of companies in different industries have the same problem.

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

#339

Post by plasticchris »

mypalmike wrote: post #298
eastWestMath wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every professor I know who’s involved with programming contests is pretty open that it’s about passing programming tests.

Companies too realize that the process is a highly imperfect proxy for overall developer capability. But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities. Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end…

Worth noting that "not measurable" doesn't mean it's not a problem, but that there is no easy metric.

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

#340

Post by mcguire »

samstave wrote: post #275
viewtransform wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM). 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 dec…

Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population. When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews. Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day. I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given. Then they a…

That story sounds very familiar. :-)
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