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Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

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Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#61

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

woodruffw wrote: post #22

There's some incongruity here: college admissions are by no means fair, but they also don't evaluate for nearly the same things as Google's hiring process does. Put another way: colleges aren't qualified or equipped to make the kinds of determinations that Google does when hiring engineers, and being hired as a Google engineer prior to going to college isn't any particularly strong signal that you're prepared to go t…

There are more qualified applicants for both top-colleges and Apple/Google/Amazon jobs, so both processes have a high degree of randomness. I don’t draw any conclusions from one event occurring but not the other.

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#62

Post by [deleted] »

shaburn wrote: post #50
woodruffw wrote: post #22

There's some incongruity here: college admissions are by no means fair, but they also don't evaluate for nearly the same things as Google's hiring process does. Put another way: colleges aren't qualified or equipped to make the kinds of determinations that Google does when hiring engineers, and being hired as a Google engineer prior to going to college isn't any particularly strong signal that you're prepared to go t…

Then what are the comp sci departments screening for and why?

[deleted]

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#63

Post by yumraj »

sho_hn wrote: post #15

The real news (to me) here is that Google is smart enough not to care about college degrees.

Only recently, though I don’t know exactly since when and it may have been for a while.

But, for many of its early years it was very particular about not only college degree, but which college and what you studied.

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#64

Post by 9991 »

jordigh wrote: post #20
9991 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Are you saying someone with a last name of Zhong won't get admitted into universities?

No, but it is 10 times harder. A black woman with Zhong's resume would have gotten in everywhere, and you know it.

Anyways, it's not me that's saying it: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/

They recently won a court case you may have heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

But that decision is too late for this guy.

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#65

Post by bananapub »

yumraj wrote: post #63
sho_hn wrote: post #15

The real news (to me) here is that Google is smart enough not to care about college degrees.

Only recently, though I don’t know exactly since when and it may have been for a while. But, for many of its early years it was very particular about not only college degree, but which college and what you studied.

at least ten years

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#66

Post by lazyasciiart »

Gunax wrote: post #53

It's true that unis and corporations care about different things. However, I am surprised that he would only be accepted at two of those universities, given the grades, SAT, and competitive coding. Most of those schools are solid but non-name branded.

Some interesting hypotheses in the thread based on other people’s anecdotal experience: didn’t care to write application essays, didn’t take expected minimum classes (e.g 2 years of social sciences or whatever). For example Cal Poly says minimum 4 years of English classes in high school and they recommend 5 years by doubling up or doing early college.

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#67

Post by Gunax »

rurp wrote: post #49

Is this all that surprising? College admissions are not optimizing for people who can currently pass a tech company interview. Maybe they should focus more in that area, but that's a separate discussion, and currently schools neither select for nor claim to select for those skills. Plus both processes have immense amounts of variance. It's not hard to find excellent candidates who were rejected from a particular univ…

While that's true, there seems to be enough for universities. He has the grades, the SAT, and the extra curriculars.

I feel like we are missing something. Someone with perfect grades, SAT, and leading a competition coding team should get accepted to more schools (many are strong but not name-brand).

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#68

Post by Gunax »

9991 wrote: post #64
jordigh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying someone with a last name of Zhong won't get admitted into universities?

No, but it is 10 times harder. A black woman with Zhong's resume would have gotten in everywhere, and you know it. Anyways, it's not me that's saying it: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/ They recently won a court case you may have heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... But that decision is too late for this guy.

Not of all these schools participate in AA. Caltech notably does not.

Re: Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

#70

Post by solveit »

cj wrote: post #36
dadrian wrote: post #24

Good for them. I am however, confused by the list of accomplishments, one of which is "wrote tests". I think this goes to show that audience matters---that list looks a lot better as items on a resume at an undergrad career fair than it looks to college admissions or even looks on a resume of someone a few years out of school.

> RESTful APIs, workflow orchestration, metrics and alerting, horizontal scaling, CDN, rate limiting, security hardening This more than likely reads like gibberish to the average admissions officer.

Yes, that's almost certainly true. It's very odd that American schools generally run their undergraduate admissions with minimal input from their faculty.
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