[jpeterson]

Agreed. This requirement is just plain dumb, and bitterly disappointing given how much I've praised Dropbox and their product in the past. I won't be doing that anymore.

I didn't go to a "top-tier" institution, for reasons I'd rather not discuss here. I have worked with a few graduates of these kind of schools, and I can say that their coding and problem-solving abilities were not any greater than my own and others who didn't have such prestigious names on their diplomas. In my experience it makes no indication whatsoever. In fact, I generally ignore the specific undergraduate school when I look at a resume.

This is simply a statement of extreme and irrational elitism, and it stinks.

[idoh]

Often these requirements aren't literal. If you've got a background that is otherwise a good fit they might give you a look anyway.

[j_b_f]

Yeah, anyone who takes the formal requirements literally for a startup the size of Dropbox is probably not the type of person they're looking for. If you do a cover letter where you're like "I LOVE Dropbox and have used it for X years, have developed 10 Android apps (here are the links) and wrote a well-linked blog post on low-level networking over flaky 3G, oh and here's a ton of StackOverflow questions on mobile programming I answered" - you think they'll turn you away because you don't meet some arbitrary job posting requirement?

These postings are just written by other poor saps, on deadline, who generally just pull them out of their ass. They're not set in stone. (None of this applies to huge companies with rigorous HR screening of course.)

[gcheong]

I don't know if it's useful but I noticed that in two out of their four job postings (Senior Systems Engineer and Web Engineer) the "top-tier" degree requirement is not listed.

[sown]

Well, it is a good product and I will probably keep using them.