Can't they atleast hire one person that didn't luck out by being born in a rich/middle class american family to go to ivy league universities. What is such complicated product that Fog Creek makes that it needs graduates from top 10 universities? Serious question.
I'm a Fog Creek employee who is also an immigrant and did not go to an Ivy League school. I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.
How did you get past 'must be eligible to work in us' restriction? Did they sponsor your visa?
> MOST ANNOYING THING A weekend is plenty . You're an intern: there are many, many more of you to choose from. As you pointed out, nobody wants to waste time. The person that offered you the placement wants someone who wants to be there, not someone looking for an backup offer.
This is actually true, nothing smug about it. It's an internship, and a lot of companies look for people who might be interested in working for the company after school's over. If someone has that much to think about that they would need more time, then they clearly have no interest in the company itself- they're just looking to get the most money, regardless of who it's coming from. The differences in compensation a…
That's simply not true. CS internships vary widely in compensation and often approach entry level wages. I know interns making 7500 a month at Palantir, 4800 at Intel, 6500 at Amazon,and others. All of them have different relocation, housing, and other benefits on top of salary. None of these interns are from where they are interning, they all are flying out to live in a different state off of their own dime. Some of them even had to fly in to interview (as a freaken intern!). The CS job market is weird right now.
As someone who just went through the internship process with a few different companies, I find this fascinating. This is pretty much what I expected going into the experience (multiple interviews, at least 1-2 coding questions/examples to do, a test maybe). Out of the few companies I interviewed from, I had nothing as intense as this. The majority of them didn't even test coding/theory knowledge at all. They were jus…
> MOST ANNOYING THING A weekend is plenty . You're an intern: there are many, many more of you to choose from. As you pointed out, nobody wants to waste time. The person that offered you the placement wants someone who wants to be there, not someone looking for an backup offer.
There aren't necessarily "many, many more" quality interns to chose from for these companies. There is labor shortage in the tech industry right now and some interns are quite capable of contributing real work. That makes them valuable and gives them leverage. It is not unheard of for interns to pit big companies against each other for a better offer these days.
> If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program.
I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan, UIUC, or Purdue it's clear that there is a lot of talent in the midwest. Just because someone wasn't born on a coast or with a connection to an ivy league school doesn't mean they don't make a cut for selectiveness.
I'm a Fog Creek employee who is also an immigrant and did not go to an Ivy League school. I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.
How did you get past 'must be eligible to work in us' restriction? Did they sponsor your visa?
Being an immigrant does not mean that you aren't allowed to work in the US. In fact, there are a ton of immigration visas built around the idea that you will in fact work in the US.
If you are on a student visa (which clearly a full time employ isn't), then there are some hoops to jump through in order to work, but I am not familiar with the necessary steps.
I'm a Fog Creek employee who is also an immigrant and did not go to an Ivy League school. I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.
How did you get past 'must be eligible to work in us' restriction? Did they sponsor your visa?
As someone who did a summer internship last year at an amazing SF company, the pay-scale at fogcreek sounds pretty competitive (read amazing). $6,000 a month comes to a shade less than $40/hour. Bear in mind that most full time students work only in summers so although considerable federal tax is deducted from this amount, the intern is likely to receive most of it back when filing taxes next year. Also, catered lunc…
$6000 a month is more than what most senior software engineers earn here, before considering currency conversions. You guys are lucky man.
The phrasing in your second paragraph is a little off target: the truth is if you're doing anything nontrivial you always want better people because they'll get the job done faster and better even if less skilled people could have done it at all. The real question is, why does Fog Creek think it is to its advantage to only hire potlatch participants, when such discrimination is usually irrational as well as unethical…
Side question: in what sense are you saying Ivy league is like a potlatch? Song-and-dance-and-reciprocity? Or conspicuous gift-giving (like "purity potlatch")? Or slave exchange?
Signaling relative status by the destruction of valuable resources.
I have to say the pay is by no way "spoiling". It is no where near the top tier pay (for interns) seen in the industry.
It's not that far off the top tier pay for tech companies. Glassdoor compiled their list for 2014, and it's not too inaccurate [1]. Speaking from personal experience, the numbers for SWE undergrads for some of the companies on the list this year: Palantir - 7,500 - 1,200 for housing if you choose Facebook - 6,200 + free housing Salesforce - Varies per year, 34.50/hr for rising junior, housing. Cisco - 22/hr Quora and…
Wow... this sounds kind of irrational. I mean, these are close to senior salaries annualized - Sales force is around 70K, while a senior gets about 100K across most of the US.
Are 4 interns really more useful than 3 seniors? Really?
> If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program. I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan…
Upvoted. There are tons of hardworking poor kids at less prestigious schools, and tons of grade-grubbing slacks and practice field All-Americans at the selective ones.
If you have zero time to weed a large pile down to a small one and thus no other choice, I can see this being a logical step. However, if you're hiring for any engineering position and the application form doesn't ask for a link to something the candidate has built (be it on Github, Sourceforge, or just on the web in general), you're likely missing out on the most important metric.