Yeah, I totally agree with you about how hiring is about filtering. The concern I have is that there's only so much filtering power you have, so anything you ap

Yeah, I totally agree with you about how hiring is about filtering. The concern I have is that there's only so much filtering power you have, so anything you apply on things irrelevant to job performance will end up detracting on things you care about. There's a fairly narrow band of able-to-pass-your-hiring-filter that you're targeting. Anyone below it gets rejected, anyone far enough above it works for Google or founds a company or something. If you turn up one parameter in your filter, you're going to end up turning down the others. Like, I remember hearing a story about a college that ran some statistics on the SAT scores of incoming students. They found that math SAT scores for their students was inversely correlated with their verbal SAT score - yet, among the general population, this correlation doesn't hold. What was happening was students with low verbal + math were getting rejected, and students with high verbal + math were going to MIT and the like, so given that they went to that particular school, they had to have lower math scores if their verbal is high and their overall suitability is in a narrow range. I'm basically trying to make a similar argument here - given that the person you're interviewing accepts an offer there, they've got a certain level of ability-to-get-employed-as-an-engineer. If more of it comes from "having a college degree", then less of it comes from all the other things.