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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

#41

Post by gnicholas »

> No company, not even the tech giants, can cover every school or every resume submitted online.

Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.

But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.

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

#42

Post by crispyambulance »

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…

    > How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
Maybe it's better that these great students at "unknown schools" DON'T get hired by google/facebook/amazon/microsoft ?

Maybe their talents are best directed at small-ish companies where they can contribute, grow, and do interesting stuff outside of monstrously large companies with cut-throat competition?

Having ALL the "top" candidates vacuumed up by the "top" employers just seems wrong to me. I feel it's more healthy to have the best students spread out all over the place rather than concentrated in the top 5 or 6 employers in Silicon Valley. After all, there are more employers than there are colleges.

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

#43

Post by guelo »

pfschell wrote: post #29

This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems. A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only…

Firstly, for the most part CS schools don't train students on "IT-focused Java" or "web middleware", whatever that is. Most schools try to teach the fundamentals.

Secondly, a developer that masters and shows proficiency in any complex software ecosystem, including Java and web middleware, is going to have transferable skills valuable to any software company.

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

#44

Post by colmvp »

Not CS/Engineering related, but I went to a pretty mediocre design program in my country (top of my country but compared to others world wide, not that exceptional), yet studying with designers who ended up being far better than some of the designers I worked with in NYC who graduated from notable (and more expensive) institutions like RISD and Parsons.

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

#45

Post by Manishearth »

pfschell wrote: post #29

This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems. A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only…

You're making an assumption that graduates only know what the curriculum teaches.

In an industry where 60% of the workforce hasn't learned the field through a traditional degree[1], and where a nontrivial fraction of these are self taught, I think that's a pretty bad assumption.

Besides, this argument would hold more water if companies actually tested for this stuff. Most companies seem to be interested in testing algorithms and puzzles, which ultimately aren't actually that useful (sure, algorithms are useful, but not the culture of hyperoptimizing-by-big-O; when n is rarely huge O(f(n)) doesn't matter). Yeah, for an AI job they'll test AI as well, but large companies continue to test with an overwhelming bias for this. I don't think they get to say they want to choose the skillset of their pool by choosing colleges if they do that.

Also, all the large companies (Google, MS, Facebook, etc) hire-first-ask-questions-later; they don't hire college grads for a specific position, they just hire them and work out the position later.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/unlocking-trapped-engineer...

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

#46

Post by w1ntermute »

wlesieutre wrote: post #25
chk_ur_autism wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your argument here. If we cut through the clutter, you're essentially advocating that you hire people on an individual basis and shouldn't weight at all what school they come from. No?

The argument is that if you're hiring a student from Stanford you can assume some baseline level of competence (only approximately true, I'd bet). If you're hiring from elsewhere, maybe you have to interview 10 people to find someone with similar knowledge/skill/misc. It's a bigger time investment in the hiring search, and gauging technical skill in a job interview is still an unsolved problem. If you find an efficie…

Yes, this is exactly what I meant.

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

#47

Post by leeny »

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…

This is exactly what we're solving at interviewing.io. We open up our practice platform to all students, and the best performers rise to the top, completely independently of school/geography. We're really, really proud of this.

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

#48

Post by j7ake »

I feel there are money ball like opportunities worth millions of dollars per year here. You essentiall have tons of presumably similarly skilled workers who are not getting the attention from big companies. A smart company that knows about hiring should be able to pick from this overlooked group of workers and find the ones that would make their company punch "beyond their weight class".

That is to say, a purely capitalist solution is to hire all of these overlooked workers at a discount and have their output be competitive with the big companies.

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

#49

Post by leeny »

jasode wrote: post #33
leeny wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we're really proud of what we do at interviewing.io. All students have to go through a series of practice interviews, so by the time they talk to companies, we know they're great, and so far, most of the students we've presented have gotten offers, independently of their backgrounds. With our model, we free up companies from having to worry about exactly what you described because we incur the vetting.

> With our model, we free up companies from having to worry about exactly what you described because we incur the vetting. I looked at your webpage & FAQ for employers. ( https://interviewing.io/employers ) Can you say how much your service costs?

Shoot me an email. aline@interviewing.io

This is our first season doing university stuff, so pricing is flexible.

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

#50

Post by compiler-guy »

guelo wrote: post #43
pfschell wrote: post #29

This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the kind of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems. A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only…

Firstly, for the most part CS schools don't train students on "IT-focused Java" or "web middleware", whatever that is. Most schools try to teach the fundamentals. Secondly, a developer that masters and shows proficiency in any complex software ecosystem, including Java and web middleware, is going to have transferable skills valuable to any software company.

Especially for an entry-level position, where a large amount of training is almost always required.
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