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Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

finance.fortune.cnn.com

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Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#11

Post by strlen »

jbellis wrote: post #3

This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with? Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.

Not to mention this is standard boilerplate: it's not even listed as a hard requirement (should have, not must have). If someone is deterred from as much as submitting a resume because they don't have one of the "Desired Skills", odds are they shouldn't be anywhere near a startup hedge-fund or any other kind of enterprise that requires taking initiative.

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#12

Post by GuiA »

bishnu wrote: post #5
mitchelldm7 wrote: post #2

Ridiculous. To say that a top-tier university produces a better employee, or business leader, is to say that a person's individual personality, upbringing or work ethic plays no part. A high GPA - that's an understandable requirement - but to base it arbitrarily on a 'top-tier' university is depriving qualified, talented employees from consideration.

Turning away a qualified candidate isn't the bad outcome for a hiring process - hiring an unqualified worker is. So if the trade off for avoiding the latter is some of the former, it is arguably worth it (and Thiel is likely in a good position to know what the appropriate ratios are)

>Turning away a qualified candidate isn't the bad outcome for a hiring process

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#13

Post by biot »

Obviously the requirements for an entrepreneur are different than the requirements for someone who is going to execute on the entrepreneur's vision. I don't see this being inconsistent with the Thiel Fellowship[0].

[0] http://www.thielfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/about-the-pro...

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#14

Post by eli »

jbellis wrote: post #3

This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with? Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.

Agreed. From the headline, I thought he was hiring a personal assistant.

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#15

Post by intenex »

binarycheese wrote: post #8
mitchelldm7 wrote: post #2

Ridiculous. To say that a top-tier university produces a better employee, or business leader, is to say that a person's individual personality, upbringing or work ethic plays no part. A high GPA - that's an understandable requirement - but to base it arbitrarily on a 'top-tier' university is depriving qualified, talented employees from consideration.

Actually there is a difference: Employees from Top Tier universities make better slaves .i.e. They have been trained to "Do as you are told" (no creativity allowed), and "Wait for your turn"

Can't agree with that, even though I dropped out of Harvard to be a Thiel Fellow. Top tier uni students in my experience tend to be quite a few deviations of individual above the norm.

Creativity/individuality/freedom/etc are all very highly valued and encouraged at the best schools. Harvard was remarkably open and innovative. MIT even more so.

(Tangential, in response to the article - Harvard's very accommodating and even encouraging of people taking time off school to pursue other things. They have an indefinite leave of absence policy, which means that if I ever decide, 2, 5, 10, or 20 years down the line that I'd really like to go back to school and get a degree, they'll let me come back. Very nice and farsighted people.)

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#16

Post by lrm242 »

jbellis wrote: post #3

This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with? Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.

Of course the flip side is Thiel has been so amazingly vocal about his views on higher education you'd think he would have made a his staff aware that this requirement wasn't aligned with his views.

In the end it is mostly a depiction of how having a degree is a door opener because it is a default filter for almost all hiring managers. Even hiring managers employed by a vocal advocate of skipping college.

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#17

Post by mitchelldm7 »

jhowell wrote: post #7
mitchelldm7 wrote: post #2

Ridiculous. To say that a top-tier university produces a better employee, or business leader, is to say that a person's individual personality, upbringing or work ethic plays no part. A high GPA - that's an understandable requirement - but to base it arbitrarily on a 'top-tier' university is depriving qualified, talented employees from consideration.

Perhaps they feel that being admitted to a top-tier university is indicative of the quality of a persons upbringing and work ethic? I would not agree, but perhaps that's an assumption in play here.

It's a poor assumption, for sure.

I, for example, went to a state school because quite frankly, I was not really interested in taking on hundreds of thousands in debt to finance a college education. I was accepted to a couple of top-tier universities but for financial reasons, attendance at such schools was not feasible.

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#19

Post by prayag »

jbellis wrote: post #3

This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with? Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.

Even if he personally approved of this opening. There is nothing wrong with it.

The problem is that these reporters that Peter Thiel is anti-education or at least anti-higher education. He isn't. He has a problem with the current model of education. He thinks that there are more efficient models of education that are worth trying.

It's not black and white, it's much more nuanced. Thiel cannot go back in time and change the education model in the past. In the future if Theil's model works we will see more ads looking for people who started companies.

I don't agree with everything he says but I can respect his desire to change higher.

Re: Peter Thiel's unexpected job requirement

#20

Post by munin »

GuiA wrote: post #9

Using GPAs is so silly, as scales vary widely between universities, and even countries. In French universities, you get marks between 0 and 20 (you need 10 to pass a class, and in some cases you can pass a class with 8 if it averages out with certain other classes). In some universities (classes préparatoires), marks superior to 10 are extremely rare, with a class average at ~6-7 being common, as professors want to p…

> (I'm not too familiar with undergraduate studies in the US, but it seems that as long as you show up and do the homework, you pretty much get an A in the class)

that is emphatically untrue (either that, or myself and all of my classmates are a lot dumber than we think we are)

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