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

blog.interviewing.io

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

#191

Post by azinman2 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #147
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…

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). One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT. There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those eli…

I toured it in ‘99. I don’t remember the exact stats but the avg HS GPA at the time was around 3.3, it’s SAT’s not very high, and admission % decidedly higher than everywhere else I applied.

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

#192

Post by Bartweiss »

tdeck wrote: post #159
mjevans wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way you can think of for working around this? Some actual method of recruiting outsiders of the system in a realistic way? I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being…

If you can find a student organization for Computer Science / Software Engineering students (like an ACM chapter), they might be able to help you set up a recruiting tech talk. We did this when I was an ACM officer at WUSTL. As did Engineering Council.

Even at my theoretically high-end school, our career services department was completely unfit to handle CS recruiting. They made a decent show of the annual career fair, but everything else was a disaster. With no tech knowledge and no one to answer to, they sent us a steady stream of terrible offers: work-for-experience, unethical businesses, and everything else bad you can think of.

All good CS recruiting happened through the student Computer Science association, which organized tech talks, mock interviews, and all kinds of other high-value events.

Companies that contacted the student group directly got reliable, personalized support and no charges until they showed up; companies that contacted the university got billed for the chance to be lumped in an email listing with scammers.

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

#193

Post by jxramos »

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…

ditto for the amazingness you see across different functions at an elite university. I remember being impressed that any cross cut I made, landscaping, financial aid, administrations, whatever the department was seemed plush with competent people who enjoyed their job.

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

#194

Post by wolco »

vthallam wrote: post #14

>interviewing.io evaluates students based on their coding skills, not their resume. We are open to students regardless of their university affiliation, college major, and pretty much anything else (we ask for your class year to make sure you’re available when companies want you and that’s about it). Unlike traditional campus recruiting, we attract students organically (getting free practice with engineers from top co…

The numbers do not add up.

If I can hire cheaper from candidates not in the top 5 the money could be used to recruit better/same talent at lower costs plus generally a longer employment term.

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

#195

Post by KGIII »

eropple wrote: post #65
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 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…

I wonder if there is a competitive advantage to be had there? UMaine is a pretty good system. When I retired, I taught math at UMF for a little while, so I got to see the system from the inside.

UMF has one of the best teaching programs in the country. They even have a CS path that is judged well.

Maybe recruiting at the small State universities is a potential edge?

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

#197

Post by s73ver_ »

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…

"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.

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

#198

Post by PeterisP »

fleitz wrote: post #21
w1ntermute wrote: post #5

This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your…

As one of those kids to never went to school, I'm going to agree with you. Most people can't program, however, better schools are only slightly better in outputting people who can. I find fizzbuzz and other coding challenges much more effective in hiring. It's hard to do but showing actual code from your codebase with an actual real bug is a much better indicator of whether someone will be successful than anything el…

Although educating people can be done in any decent school (or no school at all) better schools do a better job of filtering people, i.e. the key tasks of ensuring that (a) that the less capable people don't get a degree from you, either because they're pushed to drop out or you filter them out during the application process, and (b) that the top cohort of capable people actually apply to your school (in many schools, their degree is an uncertain but strong indicator that you weren't good enough to get into a better school).

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

#199

Post by wolco »

ebogart wrote: post #131

This article strikes a particularly strong chord with me. I am a student, probably in between the second and third examples, and it is so unbelievably hard to get an interview. I wasn't even aware it was so easy for students at top schools. This is frustrating because college admission for many essentially comes down to the first year or two of high school. That can't be a good indicator of developer performance. May…

College brand means very little for developers.

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

#200

Post by CWuestefeld »

azinman2 wrote: post #191
CWuestefeld wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT. There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those eli…

I toured it in ‘99. I don’t remember the exact stats but the avg HS GPA at the time was around 3.3, it’s SAT’s not very high, and admission % decidedly higher than everywhere else I applied.

At the time I went, I chose RPI above Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins. Times change, I guess.
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