[tt_throwaway]

Thumbtack engineer here, writing anonymously.

Re: "Ivy League educations" -- I believe we have zero engineers from Ivy League proper undergrad, and a couple with grad degrees there. If you include MIT/Stanford/CMU/Caltech/Berkeley we go up to 15/50, but the majority of eng is not from elite colleges. We might have a bias for hiring from Google, I'm not sure how much of that bias is just that Google engineers tend to interview well.

Re: "dismissive of some people, and have difficulty filling positions due to this": I agree that we have a selective hiring process which likely results in a substantial false negative rate. The selectivity tends to be focused towards "ability to write code in an interview setting quite well." I agree this is not all that correlated with the ability to produce good engineering work over a long period of time.

[cookiecaper]

Hey, I appreciate the reply. What I heard through the grapevine is that Thumbtack primarily wants Stanford grads. A very experienced friend had his resume dismissed out of hand because they didn't like his educational pedigree -- didn't even consider an interview. Meanwhile, the Thumbtack employee that had forwarded my friend for consideration told of constant pleas for referrals of "qualified programmers", and promises of exorbitant bonuses for people who could furnish them.

After watching this happen, it was no wonder that Thumbtack was unable to fill their positions. There's a point where such baseless and flippant dismissal of good talent stops representing selectivity and begins instead to represent incompetence.

The prior head of recruiting, who was employed by Facebook and Google before she was employed by Thumbtack, has been replaced since that incident, so perhaps things are better now.