[LukeWalsh]

> If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program.

I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan, UIUC, or Purdue it's clear that there is a lot of talent in the midwest. Just because someone wasn't born on a coast or with a connection to an ivy league school doesn't mean they don't make a cut for selectiveness.

[gecko]

    I personally think this is silly.

I agree! Thankfully, that's not actually what Fog Creek does. Let's separate two aspects of this process, because they deserve different treatment:

  1. *Going to recruiting sessions.*  Going to recruiting sessions
     is expensive and time-consuming, as Liz noted.  To go to
     recruiting sessions, therefore, you have to optimize your bang
     for the buck, and *that's* where the selective schools show up:
     Fog Creek simply did get a better pool of applications when
     going to selective institutions.  There are other things that Fog
     Creek can do to optimize for candidates who actually build things,
     and it turns out they do those things, too (sponsoring intern events,
     sponsoring OUTC, and so on).  But career fairs at selective schools
     can be enormously effective, and are a bit easier to come by.
  2. *Evaluating applicants.*  When Fog Creek does résumé screening, a
     whopping *one out of seven points* is awarded for going to a
     selective institution.  Everything else--having a portfolio, having
     passion, demonstrating follow-through, etc.--has absolutely nothing
     to do with where you went to school.  And that's *only* used for the
     résumé screening.  Once you get your foot in the door and talk to
     a human, it never comes up ever again, in any context.  (When I joined,
     Fog Creek even did double-blind interviews to enforce that!)

So yes, only recruiting students at selective schools is stupid. But that's not what Fog Creek does.

[dodger]

Fog Creek dev, here - we, too, have had absolutely great hires from less-selective colleges and with not-so-great resumes. But if you're pressed for time and resources and you have to use a heuristic for where to put recruiting efforts, this can be a good one.

[nilkn]

Speaking as someone who has done several career fairs (as an employer), they've almost always went better at more selective schools. That's just the truth. Keep in mind it doesn't have to be a hyper-selective school, and it certainly doesn't need to be Harvard.

Outside of that, school selectivity has been only a mediocre predictor for individual candidates. You shouldn't ignore it outright, but you shouldn't be entranced by it. We've had MIT candidates who couldn't really program and a guy whose school I don't even remember who killed it.

[Harimwakairi]

Upvoted. There are tons of hardworking poor kids at less prestigious schools, and tons of grade-grubbing slacks and practice field All-Americans at the selective ones.

If you have zero time to weed a large pile down to a small one and thus no other choice, I can see this being a logical step. However, if you're hiring for any engineering position and the application form doesn't ask for a link to something the candidate has built (be it on Github, Sourceforge, or just on the web in general), you're likely missing out on the most important metric.

[sadfnjksdf]

I never thought of Fog Creek that way before. In fact, I've always gotten the impression they were down-to-earth. But, that one shot of a spreadsheet in this post listing Brown, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, etc. changed my mind.

The other turnoff in this was the weeding out of candidates based on resumes. We hired an excellent employee out of a batch of horrid resumes- what a great hire, though.

[dlp211]

I'm glad that you put Rutgers with the likes of Princeton et al, but it is the state university of NJ. So not everyone came from a prestigious school.

[barry-cotter]

Rutgers is one of the seven members of the ivy league. I'm guessing it's pretty selective. If it's not at least eliteish like UC Berkeley or U Michigan something went badly wrong.

[dlp211]

I hate to burst you bubble, and I am glad that you believe that Rutgers is a part of the Ivy League[1], but I assure you it isn't. Rutgers admits nearly 61% of applicants in, and based on a cursory google search, UMich accepts about 37% and UC Berkeley accepts 18%.

Rutgers is The State University of NJ[2]. It is a very old institution (8th oldest), and that may be where the confusion comes from, since all the other Ivy's came from that time period.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Members [2] http://www.rutgers.edu/

[barry-cotter]

I sit corrected.