[wlesieutre]

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 efficient + effective way to compare all the applicants, that would make it easier to put everyone on the same footing regardless of school. But that's hard to do and it's easy to be risk averse and just hire the Harvard grad.

A Harvard grad presumably costs you more, but they keep doing it that way because 1) it's simple, and 2) if you try to hire more broadly but misjudge and make a bad hire, that's potentially much more expensive.

[notyourday]

You are building a CRUD application. You need him or her being +7 on 0 to +100 scale. You are saying that you only start at those who are +70.

[sidlls]

Forget CRUD applications. Most of the work at most companies, including the usual Big Ones, simply isn't that complicated for anyone with just about any technical degree. On your scale most of it, almost all of it, tops out at like 50-60.

These companies set the bar at 70+ for a number of reasons. Their own egos ("I only work with 'the best' so therefore I'm also 'the best' and don't want to water that down"), status signalling for the companies, to keep bright young talent from starting a competitor, etc.

[maxsilver]

Good luck convincing Google (or Netflix / Amazon / Microsoft / any other major company) that anything they do is 'just a CRUD application'. Even when it's true, they'll never admit it.

[brlewis]

All computation can be described as CRUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#Informal_descri...

[SomeStupidPoint]

It's pretty easy to make a bag of garbage; it's non-trivial to make 100M bags of garbage.

Even if they're making CRUD apps, making tons of high-availability CRUD apps that work against dozens of services your team doesn't own that can serve huge fractions of the globe requires non-trivial coordination and skill. (Not that all those companies do is CRUD apps, but even if.)

I'm not sure it's as jard as those companies make it out to be -- but it's not "just CRUD apps", it's the logistics of CRUD apps spanning the globe.

Source: work at one of those companies.

[beamatronic]

It's CRUD but at web scale!

[wlesieutre]

Are CRUD projects really the most guilty of only hiring from "elite" schools?

Sure, there are software jobs where you're setting up wordpress blogs, but there are plenty that require you to think about algorithms and how your database actually works in order to do them well.

[wolco]

It is the same groupthink as no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

[w1ntermute]

Yes, this is exactly what I meant.