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When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad scho

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR (sorry, "people ops") folks and a SWE or two talking over Google Hangouts to auditoriums full of kids at FIVE different schools which they called "Long Tail". (and UB wasn't even one of them) I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.

jldugger 9y ago
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago. Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  I’ve worked for startups where nearly all of the early employees were from one university, because it’s easier to recruit that way for a small startup. But they grew out of it after a few years. It’s stranger to be still doing much the same thing decades down the road.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Another variation is when a significant cohort comes from another company. Similar to how people from the same school speak the same language, people from the same previous company speak the same language. This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.
    - mathattack 9y ago
      This "hire a batch from one company" works in small cases but doesn't scale. A great manager can cherry pick 5 or 6 top talents, but a B level manager won't. It also can create cliques in the company. I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago. An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent. Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible. If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    Of course, this means outsourcing the decision back in time, too. You're basically hiring for "the best students by <questionable metric> from four years ago" the moment you factor the college into the question.
    - Anderkent 9y ago
      You're basically hiring for intelligence, but you're not allowed to ask about IQ, so you use bad proxies like the school someone attended.
      - vacri 9y ago
        Not 'intelligence', but 'capability'. There are plenty of intelligent-but-not-capable people out there, and plenty of capable-but-not-highly-intelligent folks as well.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive." I would not buy that for a second.
  - sopooneo 9y ago
    I tend to agree with you. But with the intense competition for talent, why aren't maket forces sorting this out?
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      You're assuming the actors are all rational. In other words, "No one ever got fired for hiring from Stanford"
- wpietri 9y ago
  > Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.
  - nerpderp83 9y ago
    If I can't reinforce my bias to show, no prove I am amazing, then what do I have to live for? I cannot afford to be objective, I be normal or even worse, normal.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    That's a very noble view. I'd say the point of education is primarily money: for the teachers/profs who teach and the students who study. Academics in the humanities in particular like to claim that listening to them lecture for a few years will grant someone a better soul and make them intellectually superior for life, but there's no evidence of that and indeed, I sometimes suspect it's the opposite.
- kbos87 9y ago
  It isn’t just about finding “good” candidates. It’s about finding a diverse set of candidates. Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.
  - home_boi 9y ago
    That depends on what metrics you use for 'diverse'. Diversity is more than skin deep. The candidates are very culturally diverse.
eropple 9y ago
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.
- drewg123 9y ago
  I ended up at a no-name school because I got a terrible financial aid package at an elite school that I'd applied to early decision. So bailed and went to a state school for almost free.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Same here.
    - mathattack 9y ago
      I can't find the link but I recall reading (via Freakonomics or Jeff Selingo?) a study that showed that once you control for SATs and income, attending an elite school doesn't confer as much benefit as merely applying to one.
      - gaius 9y ago
        Dropping out of an elite school carries as much if not more social cachet than graduating. "Harvard dropout" is an archetype for a reason.
  - Muuuchem 9y ago
    Got paid to go to state school lets get it
learc83 9y ago
We had an alum make a recruiting trip for Google to our large, not particularly well ranked state school when I was in my last year there.
SolaceQuantum 9y ago
I’m a current UB student. There are some more visits from the top here, but only Bloomberg has any real recruiting events... I think google and Facebook appear sometimes but more to give talks and in smaller/tucked away areas. It’s quite hard to get seen by anyone.
- mathattack 9y ago
  I would think one benefit of hiring there (vs say CUNY) is it isn't hard to convince people to move.
habosa 9y ago
I work at Google and have done some university recruiting (not a ton, but some) and I have not had this experience. Recently I saw a list of hundreds of schools of all sizes and locations that we were committed to sending reps to, so I think Google is actually way out ahead of the field when it comes to not only looking at Ivy League / Stanford / MIT.
- eropple 9y ago
  That was not the case two years ago. And maybe that's changed, but there's some prove-it here.
- mcguire 9y ago
  http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/23/tech_company_feeder_schools_stanford_to_google_washington_to_microsoft_sjsu.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/23/tech_comp... (2014) How many of those schools have you never hired anyone from, vs how many are hired every year from Stanford?
- internetman55 9y ago
  I attended a state school where we had presentations each semester from Google recruitment, including advice from alumni Google employees on how to schedule your classes and choose extracurricular activities if you wanted to be a strong applicant. I don't doubt that top school folks have some resources that others may not, but Google had some presence at my school (East coast state school with quite strong mathematics department and a relatively strong CS department).
dominotw 9y ago
>They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?
- wolco 9y ago
  Yes and google would be better off. I would employ a community college programmer over an average harvard grad. More experience and more focused brings better results.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Yeah, you kinda could. A lot of those things select for people with money.
rsynnott 9y ago
The odd thing is, the university I went to, not in the US, is ranked a bit higher than UB in the international rankings, but definitely the same general area. And it gets lots of attention from Google recruiters and those from similar companies, I believe. The interviews are still fairly hard work, I hear, but they seem less fussy about universities outside the US.
- smm2000 9y ago
  Rankings do not fairly represent quality of students when compared internationally. Very very few people will go to UB if he/she was accepted to Harvard/MIT so very few top students in US ends up in UB. University of Country (ranked the same as UB internationally but the best in that country) gets almost all smart students from that country. Quality of education itself is mostly irrelevant - difference is small and it's good enough pretty much everywhere now.
chaostheory 9y ago
Didn't Jeff Dean come from a 'long tail' school for undergrad?
- cycrutchfield 9y ago
  If you consider the University of Minnesota to be "long tail", then sure. I wouldn't, though.
fossuser 9y ago
I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to). State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true). School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers. Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops. This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went. I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up. Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.
  - _raoulcousins 9y ago
    Yep! I chose a local state school over my top choice. State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt. I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?
andreaferretti 9y ago
Unrelated, but please remember that not everyone here is a native English speaker. It is hard to make head or tails of your comment with all these abbreviations
- strictnein 9y ago
  I don't know what UB is (I'm assuming it's a university). BS = Bachelor of Science MS = Master's of Science HR = Human Resources
  - felipemnoa 9y ago
    I believe UB stands for University at Buffalo [1] or more precisely State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      as someone who grew up in Texas, I was wondering WTF UB meant and how so many people seemed to know what it was. RPI I knew because I they sent me literature while I was in high school 30 years ago.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - twic 9y ago
        UB = undefined behaviour RPI = Rob's Pairing Interview I understanding wanting to avoid the former, but the latter is pretty good.
  - jdminhbg 9y ago
    UB is presumably the University of Buffalo in New York state.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
mseebach 9y ago
> In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Interesting point - referral schemes are almost always cheaper than using professional recruiters, but they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone. They'll miss a lot of clusters who never get that first Googler in the door, but past that point they're a highly efficient fix.
  - twentythree 9y ago
    > they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      Yes, certainly - I think the thing I mean doesn't conflict with the thing you mean. Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great. Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades. But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.) So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.
viewtransform 9y ago
When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM). I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR. The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree. I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford. I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
- nether 9y ago
  Then we've got this 2013 article saying that Google doesn't care about GPA and test scores: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-.... Maybe things have changed since your experience.
  - FreakyT 9y ago
    I believe they did -- from what I've read back in the day it was quite common for Google to demand college transcripts from all applicants, even seasoned professionals.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      That would be to check that the degree is real. There are people who pretend to have one while they don't. It's normal due diligence, assuming it's after you are hired.
mypalmike 9y ago
Interesting. When I pushed a bit at (well-known tech company), I managed to get a couple of high-GPA CS students from my state university into the internship interview pipeline. These students were personally recommended to me by the school's top (IMO) CS professor. I was particularly excited for one of them, who had a 3.9-something GPA, and who seemed pretty solid technically when I spoke with him on the phone. Unfortunately, he didn't pass the online coding test in order to proceed to the next step. The others did miserably on this test. Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been. My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies. On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Or the top schools prepare their candidates for the test. I think I’m a pretty decent coder, thank you very much, but I suck on those blackboard interviews. I could see that being fixed with practice though, and maybe the big schools format their classes and labs such as to practice for that?
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    Every professor I know who’s involved with programming contests is pretty open that it’s about passing programming tests.
    - mypalmike 9y ago
      Companies too realize that the process is a highly imperfect proxy for overall developer capability. But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities. Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.
kobeya 9y ago
UB?
leesalminen 9y ago
Shout out to a fellow UB undergrad. Fun times and you’re right, lots of talented young folks.
Spooky23 9y ago
Did that change recently? I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!
Chathamization 9y ago
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.
cm2187 9y ago
You can see it both way. My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students. So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts. It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).
busterarm 9y ago
UB has(/had?) a pretty decent CS department too. Bioinformatics as well. Dropping out of that place was still one of the best decisions I've ever made though.
bane 9y ago
Like many people on HN, I've been through the Google recruitment cattle grinder a few times - the usual observations about absurd process that leads to terrible fit apply. I'm even open at the beginning about various conditions of employment if they want to move forward...such as a desire not to move. They always move forward anyways and then at the end ask if I'd be willing to move to whatever office location has the position. At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly. I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.
codeonfire 9y ago
They understand perfectly. They are hoping for rich, well connected kids from rich families that can bring in money and power into the organization. They may have tried some "ordinary" people before and were befuddled when it did not bring in $100 million dollars and several political contacts.
- codeonfire 9y ago
  Downvoted for truth. I don't like it either, but the world is not fair.

jldugger 9y ago

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago. Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.

rsynnott 9y ago
I’ve worked for startups where nearly all of the early employees were from one university, because it’s easier to recruit that way for a small startup. But they grew out of it after a few years. It’s stranger to be still doing much the same thing decades down the road.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Another variation is when a significant cohort comes from another company. Similar to how people from the same school speak the same language, people from the same previous company speak the same language. This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    This "hire a batch from one company" works in small cases but doesn't scale. A great manager can cherry pick 5 or 6 top talents, but a B level manager won't. It also can create cliques in the company. I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.
Bartweiss 9y ago
> Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago. An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent. Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible. If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  Of course, this means outsourcing the decision back in time, too. You're basically hiring for "the best students by <questionable metric> from four years ago" the moment you factor the college into the question.
  - Anderkent 9y ago
    You're basically hiring for intelligence, but you're not allowed to ask about IQ, so you use bad proxies like the school someone attended.
    - vacri 9y ago
      Not 'intelligence', but 'capability'. There are plenty of intelligent-but-not-capable people out there, and plenty of capable-but-not-highly-intelligent folks as well.
s73ver_ 9y ago
"On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive." I would not buy that for a second.
- sopooneo 9y ago
  I tend to agree with you. But with the intense competition for talent, why aren't maket forces sorting this out?
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    You're assuming the actors are all rational. In other words, "No one ever got fired for hiring from Stanford"
wpietri 9y ago
> Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.
- nerpderp83 9y ago
  If I can't reinforce my bias to show, no prove I am amazing, then what do I have to live for? I cannot afford to be objective, I be normal or even worse, normal.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  That's a very noble view. I'd say the point of education is primarily money: for the teachers/profs who teach and the students who study. Academics in the humanities in particular like to claim that listening to them lecture for a few years will grant someone a better soul and make them intellectually superior for life, but there's no evidence of that and indeed, I sometimes suspect it's the opposite.
kbos87 9y ago
It isn’t just about finding “good” candidates. It’s about finding a diverse set of candidates. Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.
- home_boi 9y ago
  That depends on what metrics you use for 'diverse'. Diversity is more than skin deep. The candidates are very culturally diverse.

eropple 9y ago

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.

drewg123 9y ago
I ended up at a no-name school because I got a terrible financial aid package at an elite school that I'd applied to early decision. So bailed and went to a state school for almost free.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Same here.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    I can't find the link but I recall reading (via Freakonomics or Jeff Selingo?) a study that showed that once you control for SATs and income, attending an elite school doesn't confer as much benefit as merely applying to one.
    - gaius 9y ago
      Dropping out of an elite school carries as much if not more social cachet than graduating. "Harvard dropout" is an archetype for a reason.
- Muuuchem 9y ago
  Got paid to go to state school lets get it

learc83 9y ago

We had an alum make a recruiting trip for Google to our large, not particularly well ranked state school when I was in my last year there.

SolaceQuantum 9y ago

I’m a current UB student. There are some more visits from the top here, but only Bloomberg has any real recruiting events... I think google and Facebook appear sometimes but more to give talks and in smaller/tucked away areas. It’s quite hard to get seen by anyone.

mathattack 9y ago
I would think one benefit of hiring there (vs say CUNY) is it isn't hard to convince people to move.

habosa 9y ago

I work at Google and have done some university recruiting (not a ton, but some) and I have not had this experience. Recently I saw a list of hundreds of schools of all sizes and locations that we were committed to sending reps to, so I think Google is actually way out ahead of the field when it comes to not only looking at Ivy League / Stanford / MIT.

eropple 9y ago
That was not the case two years ago. And maybe that's changed, but there's some prove-it here.
mcguire 9y ago
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/23/tech_company_feeder_schools_stanford_to_google_washington_to_microsoft_sjsu.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/23/tech_comp... (2014) How many of those schools have you never hired anyone from, vs how many are hired every year from Stanford?
internetman55 9y ago
I attended a state school where we had presentations each semester from Google recruitment, including advice from alumni Google employees on how to schedule your classes and choose extracurricular activities if you wanted to be a strong applicant. I don't doubt that top school folks have some resources that others may not, but Google had some presence at my school (East coast state school with quite strong mathematics department and a relatively strong CS department).

dominotw 9y ago

>They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?

wolco 9y ago
Yes and google would be better off. I would employ a community college programmer over an average harvard grad. More experience and more focused brings better results.
s73ver_ 9y ago
Yeah, you kinda could. A lot of those things select for people with money.

rsynnott 9y ago

The odd thing is, the university I went to, not in the US, is ranked a bit higher than UB in the international rankings, but definitely the same general area. And it gets lots of attention from Google recruiters and those from similar companies, I believe. The interviews are still fairly hard work, I hear, but they seem less fussy about universities outside the US.

smm2000 9y ago
Rankings do not fairly represent quality of students when compared internationally. Very very few people will go to UB if he/she was accepted to Harvard/MIT so very few top students in US ends up in UB. University of Country (ranked the same as UB internationally but the best in that country) gets almost all smart students from that country. Quality of education itself is mostly irrelevant - difference is small and it's good enough pretty much everywhere now.

chaostheory 9y ago

Didn't Jeff Dean come from a 'long tail' school for undergrad?

cycrutchfield 9y ago
If you consider the University of Minnesota to be "long tail", then sure. I wouldn't, though.

fossuser 9y ago

I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to). State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true). School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers. Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops. This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.

whipoodle 9y ago
I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went. I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up. Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.
- _raoulcousins 9y ago
  Yep! I chose a local state school over my top choice. State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt. I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?

andreaferretti 9y ago

Unrelated, but please remember that not everyone here is a native English speaker. It is hard to make head or tails of your comment with all these abbreviations

strictnein 9y ago
I don't know what UB is (I'm assuming it's a university). BS = Bachelor of Science MS = Master's of Science HR = Human Resources
- felipemnoa 9y ago
  I believe UB stands for University at Buffalo [1] or more precisely State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    as someone who grew up in Texas, I was wondering WTF UB meant and how so many people seemed to know what it was. RPI I knew because I they sent me literature while I was in high school 30 years ago.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - twic 9y ago
      UB = undefined behaviour RPI = Rob's Pairing Interview I understanding wanting to avoid the former, but the latter is pretty good.
- jdminhbg 9y ago
  UB is presumably the University of Buffalo in New York state.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

mseebach 9y ago

> In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?

Bartweiss 9y ago
Interesting point - referral schemes are almost always cheaper than using professional recruiters, but they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone. They'll miss a lot of clusters who never get that first Googler in the door, but past that point they're a highly efficient fix.
- twentythree 9y ago
  > they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Yes, certainly - I think the thing I mean doesn't conflict with the thing you mean. Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great. Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades. But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.) So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.

viewtransform 9y ago

When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM). I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR. The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree. I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford. I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.

nether 9y ago
Then we've got this 2013 article saying that Google doesn't care about GPA and test scores: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-.... Maybe things have changed since your experience.
- FreakyT 9y ago
  I believe they did -- from what I've read back in the day it was quite common for Google to demand college transcripts from all applicants, even seasoned professionals.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    That would be to check that the degree is real. There are people who pretend to have one while they don't. It's normal due diligence, assuming it's after you are hired.

mypalmike 9y ago

Interesting. When I pushed a bit at (well-known tech company), I managed to get a couple of high-GPA CS students from my state university into the internship interview pipeline. These students were personally recommended to me by the school's top (IMO) CS professor. I was particularly excited for one of them, who had a 3.9-something GPA, and who seemed pretty solid technically when I spoke with him on the phone. Unfortunately, he didn't pass the online coding test in order to proceed to the next step. The others did miserably on this test. Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been. My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies. On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.

kobeya 9y ago
Or the top schools prepare their candidates for the test. I think I’m a pretty decent coder, thank you very much, but I suck on those blackboard interviews. I could see that being fixed with practice though, and maybe the big schools format their classes and labs such as to practice for that?
- eastWestMath 9y ago
  Every professor I know who’s involved with programming contests is pretty open that it’s about passing programming tests.
  - mypalmike 9y ago
    Companies too realize that the process is a highly imperfect proxy for overall developer capability. But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities. Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.

kobeya 9y ago

UB?

leesalminen 9y ago

Shout out to a fellow UB undergrad. Fun times and you’re right, lots of talented young folks.

Spooky23 9y ago

Did that change recently? I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!

Chathamization 9y ago

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.

cm2187 9y ago

You can see it both way. My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students. So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts. It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).

busterarm 9y ago

UB has(/had?) a pretty decent CS department too. Bioinformatics as well. Dropping out of that place was still one of the best decisions I've ever made though.

bane 9y ago

Like many people on HN, I've been through the Google recruitment cattle grinder a few times - the usual observations about absurd process that leads to terrible fit apply. I'm even open at the beginning about various conditions of employment if they want to move forward...such as a desire not to move. They always move forward anyways and then at the end ask if I'd be willing to move to whatever office location has the position. At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly. I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.

codeonfire 9y ago

They understand perfectly. They are hoping for rich, well connected kids from rich families that can bring in money and power into the organization. They may have tried some "ordinary" people before and were befuddled when it did not bring in $100 million dollars and several political contacts.

codeonfire 9y ago
Downvoted for truth. I don't like it either, but the world is not fair.