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Like others have said, it's a recruitment scheme. It should also be noted that the top SV companies recruit interns primarily (and in some cases, exclusively) f
by potatolicious 11y ago
Like others have said, it's a recruitment scheme. It should also be noted that the top SV companies recruit interns primarily (and in some cases, exclusively) from top schools.
Ultimately it comes down to the belief that investing heavily in a Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/CMU undergrad with no other job experience is a smarter bet than finding a less-pedigreed graduate who is already in the work force.
The existence of this whole recruitment scheme - while not exactly evil in and of itself - suggest a level of credentialism that we like to pretend doesn't exist in our industry.
- Bartweiss 11y agoIn an odd way, it's also a consequence of how little credentialism there is elsewhere in the industry. People have little faith that an arbitrary candidate (even one with prior experience) is competent, and the basic interview process is widely agreed to be inadequate. Given all that, it suddenly starts looking worthwhile to spend 3 months and $30k vetting promising recruits.
- potatolicious 11y agoAgree that in theory internship programs can be a great demonstration of the lack of credentialism. Having gone through the internship gauntlet myself with an AmaGooFaceSoft company in my undergrad years, though, I could count the number of interns from non-top schools on one hand, out of a total cohort of ~300 interns. The internship mechanism would be more convincingly meritocratic if its ranks weren't almost exclusively stacked with MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU/other-top-school students.