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by engmgrmgr 1705 days ago
Curriculum isn’t standardized, and while a noisy signal, difficultly of admission to a school can be valuable in lieu of other signals, or otherwise knowing the details of a particular school’s curriculum — top 50 vs. top 500.

Interview 1000 people uniformly sampled from the population of software engineers and get back to me if you disagree.

1 comments

Ok, I think we will agree to disagree. I interviewed 1000s (low 1000s) of people through out my career.

I made mistakes -- but majority of them were on soft-skills sides of the problem.

The university names mattered little, and in many cases effected person's self-promotion efforts/abilities. That has some value, but not when it is 'instead of' high ethics and technical skills.

I at least partially agree with you. I wouldn’t suggest that a university name or even the presence of a degree should ever occupy the crux of a decision to proceed with or reject a candidate. I guess you could say I think of it as primarily additive value. The bone I have to pick is simply that I think more, rather than less, information is generally better in this case because it makes it possible to determine how additive it truly is.