[api]

"We hire from these five schools, period," right?"

I'm so glad they brought this up. This is the elephant in the living room, and is a root cause behind a lot of these issues.

The "top ten universities" fetish is by far the most significant mechanism for the perpetuation of aristocracy and aristocratic networks in our society. It's a effectively a feudal system of "knighthood," or at least analogous to that. Those who are admitted to top tier universities are tapped to be at least considered as future members of the nobility.

I'd love to see some real data on employee (and founder) performance vs. where they went to school.

[VLM]

Recruiting only the top 1% nobility is a peculiar power mismatch unless your company really is one of the top 1% nobility of all employers.

What I'm getting at is if you're a bottom 10% marketing experiment startup, demanding to recruit top 1% talent, you're going to get some self selected weirdos. You better check their references and backgrounds to make sure, and its foolish to assume anything about their demographics is going to be normal. There's probably a reason a claimed top 1% applies to a bottom 10% employer and its probably not good. Best case scenario is addiction to extreme risk taking. Worst case, well, its pretty bad, closet full of skeletons or outright fabrication of background or worse.

(edited to add, my example is unfortunately too extreme, but the general rule holds that the wider the mismatch the weirder the applicants are going to be... top 1% vs bottom 10% will as I propose be really weird, yet still, demanding top 1% at a "mere" top 10% employer is still going to be all messed up. Also by "worse" I mean stuff like fired for cause because of sexual harassment and stuff like that, and this explains a lot about the stereotypical bro)

On the other hand, if you want to work at a pretty boring median fortune 500 type company, we have plenty of women and minorities. Unsurprisingly if you demand normal people for normal work you get a normal-ISH distribution of gender and race. Maybe not perfect but not some absolutely laughable 3% stat.

Pro athletic teams demand weird non-median employees... not the median walmart shopper. Unsurprisingly their demographics tend toward the bizarre compared to the general population. Google for NBA racial demographics, its truly weird compared to the general population, as an example.

[a_gentle_autist]

Here's what I've noticed.

There's no correlation.

It doesn't mean anything. It's a position taken out of fear.

At this point, if you've graduated from top ten universities I will ignore your resume, because you won't have the hunger I want from an employee, nor where you have great creative thinking.

[api]

That's been my suspicion for some time too.

"Nobody ever got fired for hiring someone from Stanford."

[jacquesm]

I've hired a fair number of people, college educated (UK top schools), 1 from a top tier US university and a whole scala of other levels of education, all the way to none.

My experience (which is very limited) was that the people that were less educated had more drive because they were given a chance but the people that had a degree of education that was generally perceived as higher were more productive even without that level of drive and the quality of their output was generally higher.

This is probably not surprising but with very few exceptions that seemed to be the rule (and those exceptions were totally off the scale).

[api]

So you'd say that the median performance is higher from the top schools, but that the difference appears less pronounced at the extreme ends of the curve?

Basically this would mean that an average person from Stanford would probably be better than an average person from University of Nowheresville, but that an exceptional person from the latter might be as good as an exceptional person from the former...?

If true this would account for a tendency to try to recruit from top schools, since the odds of getting a better candidate might overall be higher. But it doesn't change the overall social implications much.

[jacquesm]

No, an exceptional person without any formal education can blow a person with a formal education clear out of the water both in drive and in productivity and quality.

But that's 'exceptional' for you, it is an exception, I've only encountered one such person to date.

[pimlottc]

> I've hired a fair number of people, college educated (UK top schools), 1 from a top tier US university and a whole scala of other levels of education, all the way to none.

Did you mean to say "scale" here?

[jacquesm]

No, I meant scala. It's not just a programming language :)

scala(Noun)

Ladder; sequence.

http://www.definitions.net/definition/scala

[dabockster]

However, the unfortunate truth is that no one is willing to risk getting fired over not hiring the very best. And often, this means that only the top tier schools have a chance.

[jacquesm]

The laws of limited supply are your friend here. They may want to hire only from the top tier schools but since these are typically only available in certain numbers and usually already gainfully employed this becomes less of a problem because they probably can't.