[earthtourist]

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing.

The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire.

Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school".

Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.

[disgruntledphd2]

One of my previous bosses (at a large tech company) moved over to the US and was asked to hire 9-10 people in a quarter.

Everyone said it was impossible.

She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools.

She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job.

People (especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended, when it doesn't seem to be that predictive of workplace success.

[namdnay]

> especially US people

definitely not. french companies actually have engineering salary tables depending on your age and university

[hunterwerlla]

That sounds interesting, is there an english source to read about that?

[namdnay]

I can’t find anything concrete, each company does it internally. There are some articles where they publish the starting salary based on your university’s “rank”. Try google translate on this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lexpress.fr/emploi/les-atou...

It discusses how there are 6 ranks for business schools, and your salary for the first N years will be based on that. Same for engineering. It’s funny that one of the companies is proud to declare that they can move salaries by “up to 5%!!!” based on the candidate themselves (whereas the school can make a 20-30% difference...)

[hunterwerlla]

Google translate worked really well on the article, thanks! That's kind of insane that the school you went to can give you a raise from 30k euro to 40k euro despite having to do the same job.

[deepGem]

The university obsession is not unique to US. It's true in India as well. If you are not from the elite institutions, you won't get past any hiring scanners of top tech companies. You'll still get a job, not the best paying one though.

[cies]

It's common to all developing nations, and the US (which is both a developing nation and a developed nation in one).

[ativzzz]

It's common to all nations, period.

[cies]

It's a heck of a lot less common in Scandinavian countries, or even a large part of (Eastern-) Europe. But yeah, no facts, just an opinion i guess

[yakireev]

For the record: not to all nations. In Russia, a really cool technical university (Bauman's, PhysTech, some faculitis of MGU) will give you some advantage in the early stages of your IT career, but not that much.

Source: am a dropout of a shitty university, still have no degree. It does not bother HRs, as far as I could see so far.

[indigochill]

Also anecdotally I haven't noticed it in Iceland. I've been part of a number of hiring processes here and although the presence or absence of education has of course been a factor, where that education happened has been totally irrelevant.

[dmos62]

I don't presume to know what that depends on, but wherever you go, in my experience, there seems to be a mix of job opportunities that are diploma-centric and skill-centric. What's more, the people I'm interested working with are generally in the latter category. So it's somewhat ironic, but the whole me-not-having-a-top-school-diploma thing works to my advantage by inadvertantly pinpointing the interesting opportunities.

[mlboss]

US is so much better than India. Indian companies openly write in job description that only people with education in premier institutes apply.

[ChuckNorris89]

>(especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended

That happens literally everywhere, especially at big companies that make easy money. The elites don't like sharing the pie with the great unwashed.

[disgruntledphd2]

I dunno man, I was really surprised by the behaviours I saw; maybe I have been particularly fortunate in my career but it definitely seemed to me like it was worse in the US.

Perhaps it's bad in other places too. I personally think it's idiotic, as the point of interviewing is to find great candidates, and I have never felt like the University they attended was a particularly good predictor of that.

[technicalbard]

This is curious given there are well documented findings that which school you attended doesn't correlate to actual success. This is true in Engineering and Law. The problem, particularly in the US, is that the skills that are tested by the standardized tests (SAT, LSAT) are NOT the skills that make someone good at the job that comes out at the end.

[concordDance]

That's surprising.

Can I have a citation?

[tikiman163]

That entirely depends on the company. The US is nearly the size of Europe, each state is roughly equivalent to a different country. How people think and behave vary vastly.

[jtdev]

The elite don’t like plebs breaking into their clubs.

[triceratops]

> most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them

Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companies actively recruit from top schools only insofar as every other company in every other industry does. But that doesn't mean they recruit exclusively from top schools either. Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League literally don't graduate enough students for that to be a feasible new grad hiring strategy.

You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. My personal experience is after you've worked a few years, no one in software engineering cares where (or even if) you went to school. And any software engineer with a pulse located in the SF Bay Area can get at least a phone interview with any of the top tech companies.

[BeetleB]

> You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though.

I've worked for 10 years and recently applied for a position. The manager told me I was a good candidate, and that I checked the box for coming from a top school.

He didn't use the phrase "checked the box" but did explicitly say that my coming from a top school meant he could skip most of the technical portion of the interview and just focus on the people aspect.

But for the most part I agree with you. It usually is important for the first job.

[packetlost]

For the first job, I agree that it's important and I don't even have a problem with it being a factor. What I do have a problem with is discriminating salary or hiring based on what school you went to 5+ years into your career, by which point it matters a lot less.

[BeetleB]

> For the first job, I agree that it's important and I don't even have a problem with it being a factor.

As someone who went both to a top school and a very average school, I do have a problem with it. If you've not been to an average school, you may be surprised at how many bright and motivated students there are.[1] And if you've not been to a top school, you may be surprised at how average most of the students are.

I don't know if this generalizes, but it was my observation: Top school students tended to be a bit less honest (soft cheating, etc). At least where I was, it appeared to be clearly tied to the competitiveness needed to get in and get top grades.

[1] My grad school group-mate, who had only been at top schools, once went for an internship in a national lab. He was shaken at the fact that another intern from the University of Alabama-Huntsville was as capable/smart as he was. I saw this often in top school students, where they just assume that if they're doing well in school, that they are somehow better educated than the rest of the country.

[packetlost]

I've only ever been to 'average schools.' With no data to back up this claim, I'd be willing to bet even the worst students that graduate from top schools are still better than the lower end of average from average schools, because the barrier to entry (and continued attendance) at top schools is higher. I'd also not be surprised if your claim of top school graduates being less honest were true, for the same reasons.

If I were in a position to interview and hire someone, graduating from a top school would at least garner some attention, assuming the degree was relevant, but it's not a 'free pass' through any of the steps of the interview process, and may even earn them a more critical assessment in the implicit 'culture fit/personality' category.

This is just my opinion on the matter, not trying to make any sort of factual claims.

[BeetleB]

> I'd be willing to bet even the worst students that graduate from top schools are still better than the lower end of average from average schools,

That may be true, but likely both of these have poor GPAs and thus are filtered out anyway. Usually you'll be evaluating candidates with at least a decent GPA.

I'm not claiming the average is the same between the two. But when there are a lot more average schools than top schools, chances are that numerically most good candidates do not come from top schools.

When I look at resumes of new grads, I ignore the school altogether. GPA has to meet some not-high threshold, and then it's just a peek at interesting projects they may have done.

[cosmodisk]

I've seen some tech jobs here in London essentially requiring to be a graduate from one of 5 or so universities in the country. However,these were more senior positions that'd require years of industry experience. And then they moan they can't get Java devs for £150K/year...

[jermaustin1]

In years past, I've seen a plethora of £700-1200/day contracts in London for candidates with only 2 years of experience and no education requirement.

And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.

[cosmodisk]

I don't think most of those ads had any sense at all tbh( I used to see a lot of them as wel) and here's why: 99% of these jobs are in financial sector, especially in trading branches). Most of them may only require 2 years or so experience, however the experience they need are in some esoteric products/services one can only learn/access if in this kind of job( i.e. FX trading platforms, interbank settlement software,some random inhouse thing that connects to NASDAQ,etc.) The reality is that for most of those jobs there are only 50-100 people in the city who can do it and they are all employed and they all know it.So any recruiter worth his salt knows most of them by name,as they just keep crossing the road from one bank to another every couple of years. So all these ads do serve is some newly hired recruiter with no contacts, who hopes some random guy from abroad will have the necessary experience and won't understand the market situation.

[ck425]

Are those jobs in specific industries? Like financial tech jobs.

[christophilus]

I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have worked for a lot of companies, some very big names, and have been in a hiring position for the last 10 years or so. I’ve never once noticed or cared about an applicant’s university, nor has anyone I worked with. So, anecdotes be anecdotal.

[Drew_]

Sounds like you're just projecting your own mentality on everyone you've ever worked with for some reason.

[christophilus]

That’s probably true to an extent, but I have had many conversations with hiring folks. University never once came up. Anyway, my point is that anecdotal evidence is all I see in this discussion, so who knows what reality is?

[dontreact]

Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this

[ghostcluster]

> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race?

Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

[dmos62]

> Wilberg’s lawsuit targets Google and 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents. It claims that for several quarters, Google would only hire people from historically underrepresented groups for technical positions. In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.” California labor law prohibits refusing to hire employees based on characteristics like race or gender.

Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.

[rubicon33]

What ever happened with that lawsuit?

[KorematsuFred]

As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.

[thu2111]

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.

Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms:

1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities.

2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women.

3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women.

4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately.

5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men.

6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women".

And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men.

BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.

[christophilus]

I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).

[Glide]

Committing a Career Limiting Move?

[alp10]

Yep, or to state it in AnimalFarm terms:

If cardinality(pigs + sheep) > cardinality(work horses), the truth will be downvoted.

In software, the work horses need to be more proactive and not give up what is theirs.

[KorematsuFred]

> But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.

Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity.

There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.

[Drew_]

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.

[lucaspm98]

Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.

[beamatronic]

All of that should be illegal

[pmorais]

Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.

[dominotw]

i've only seen 2 at my workplace. There are positive incentives for hitting women recruit goals but also there are no negative consequences for not doing so.

[thu2111]

That's entirely a matter of perspective. The exact same policies can be phrased as "your full comp is not available if you hire men".

Fact is, hiring is in the instant a zero sum game. If recruiters are prioritising women it means they're putting men to the back of the queue in the hope they won't be forced to hire them. It's sexism, it's wrong and it makes a mockery of everything feminists claim to believe.

[kortilla]

Underrepresented groups get more attempts and are actively recruited more.

[charlesu]

Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :)

The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion.

Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.

[wernercd]

> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.

Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that.

One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance.

that's the definition of "more attempts".

Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...

[charlesu]

I can't speak to other companies, but in my experience, inhouse recruiters have no incentive to pass bad candidates past the phone screen. I have no incentive to pass bad candidates to onsite. We want to spend as much time needed to find the right candidate and no more and we don't want miss out on anyone. But we don't want to waste our time either.

I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.

[kortilla]

> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.

Yes they do. They are not subject to the same cool down period on a phone screen failure. Remember, google pitches it as “looking for a good signal” so retrying until the candidate passes isn’t lowering the bar in their mind (even though it is because phone screens are flawed but that’s another discussion).

> If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences.

I have, I worked there when this started several years back. Several got a chance at a phone rescreen sooner than the normal back-off and one got an invite to come back for a second on-site because “the signal wasn’t clear” on the first.

[downerending]

Take a close look at the diversity report they publish each year.

[downerending]

Not sure why this got downvoted. Google publishes some pretty detailed stats (which I applaud), and the "thumb on the scale" could not be more obvious.

Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data.

[And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]

[solveit]

> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else.

Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.

[Drew_]

"Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.

[dahfizz]

That's a whole lot of bold, unsubstantiated claims.

[m463]

I know someone who does a LOT of hiring and he ended up preferring some schools over others.

It wasn't that there were not qualified people from each school, it was just easier to find them at schools with hard-<subject> educations.

There were other schools that were physically closer even within a few miles, but he could go all day without finding a promising candidate.

He hires many minorities, women, people of different orientations, so it wasn't that.

It was more like, "does anyone understand a linked list?"

[nsgi]

I wouldn't say that's true of most tech companies, maybe the most selective ones.

[TheOperator]

I'm not sure how much I want to replace the pseudo-IQtest system with the system where we hire based on classism offset with racism.

[idoby]

Those are not the only two options, you know...

[whakim]

Your response seems to imply that class and race are not related to each other in any way. In fact, they're deeply intertwined.