[cortesoft]

> Everyone is all about skills untill the hiring time comes. Now companies want the students of the best colleges, the best degrees, etc. Students with proper skills might not even get through the door without the proper degree.

What hiring companies want is to get good employees who can do the job they are supposed to do, and they want to have as low a false positive rate as possible (hiring someone who can't do the job is very expensive).

I am not a hiring expert, but they probably get a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

Companies don't really care about false negative rates (not hiring a person who would do the job well) as long as they are still able to hire someone else who can't also do the job well. It sucks for the person who isn't hired, but not for the company.

[RHSeeger]

- a lower false positive rate looking at school and credentials than any skill test they give.

- don't really care about false negative rates

That pretty much sums it up right there. And it's not hard at all to see _why_ this is the case.

[rustystump]

Is there data that backs this? In my anecdotal experience it is all over the place. Unless i specifically know a given program it is a total crapshoot on if it means anything.

I find pedigree to be about predictive of performance as a d20 toss.

[Aurornis]

I doubt you’ll find any public data on this because internal hiring success data is rarely ever released and MOOCs are already a rare resume item.

In my experience with hiring, though, it tracks. The number of times I’ve seen a MOOC on a resume is already a small number. Of those, it was usually 1-3 courses, not an entire program. Taking a couple courses does not compare to the repetition and layered learning of an entire program.

If someone showed up with an entire MOOC learning program and certificate of completion that I could verify then I would look into it. In my experience you don’t see this. You see people listing a couple MOOC courses right next to their other certifications. When you ask them questions about the topic they usually don’t remember much because it was a one-time course they took.

[__rito__]

I have been on the hiring side, too. And the difference between a good enough college and an elite college is the density of really good students.

If you have a fraction:

    really good students
    --------------------
     all students in CS

Then this number tends to be much higher in elite colleges than good enough colleges.

This is my personal experience.

(Past) company did hire from non-elite colleges in case-by-case basis, but one time we wanted 4-5 freshers, we did go to the elite college.

All students of elite colleges aren't better than all students of good enough colleges, but the fraction is what is different.

In a a typical CS dept of 50 students, you can find 40-45 really good ones in elite colleges versus 3-8 in good-enough colleges.

[gopher_space]

Nobody gets in trouble for a bad hire from a good school, and nobody wants to read your resume. End of story.

There aren’t any metrics in this area that weren’t pulled out of someone’s ass, and we know this because collecting them correctly is prohibitively expensive and immune to automation.