We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

Cue the old saw about how a hiring manager takes a stack of resumes, divides it in half, and then tosses them into the garbage: "we don't hire unlucky people".

It happened that my interview was on Halloween so I joked that it was that once I realized what was going on but still, extremely awkward and set the tone of each interview poorly.

Every time I go to Defcon or similar conferences, though, I think of that interview and imagine the hilarious counterculture opportunities of showing up in something other than the black t-shirt uniform.

I agree with the overall premise that people with particular trendy areas of knowledge get more noticed, but in my experience, a strong enough recommendation from an engineer on the inside can easily override a recruiter screening checklist, and it sounds like your friend has enough experience to warrant a technical phone screen at the least.

I wonder if your engineer contacts at the company in question didn't feel as strongly about the candidate as you did, and hence weren't willing to expend the capital needed to override the recruiter.

That raises the question: are you willing to spend the capital to convince them to do so on your friend's behalf? I mean by talking to them and convincing them. If this article is the attempt to do that, I'm not so sure it is properly directed.

> Wisconsin's rank as an engineering school comes from having professors who do great research which is, at best, weakly correlated to effectiveness at actually teaching undergrads. Despite getting the same engineering education you could get at hundreds of other schools, I had a very easy time getting interviews and finding a great job.

Ah yes, the reputation cartel of elite universities. This is a situation as old as formal education, and exacerbated by the cost of higher education and the inequality of opportunity in early education.

A solution to this is making quality public education from primary through University affordable and accessible to all working class people, just as was done for a specific subset of working-class people in the decades after world war II. That was the original purpose of the public university system after all - the wealthy had their system of private colleges.

Instead, the public university system has turned more to the model of elite private universities, which was more about burnishing credentials in order to retain the position in the class that you were born into. Hence the coining of the phrase "elite public university".

I’ve personally seen Windows developers assumed to be idiots in interview round tables even if they did fine.