11 ms·

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success.

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire. Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school". Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.

solveit 6y ago
> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  "Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.
dontreact 6y ago
Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
- ghostcluster 6y ago
  > Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    What ever happened with that lawsuit?
  - KorematsuFred 6y ago
    As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms: 1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities. 2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women. 3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women. 4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately. 5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men. 6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women". And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men. BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
- downerending 6y ago
  Take a close look at the diversity report they publish each year.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Not sure why this got downvoted. Google publishes some pretty detailed stats (which I applaud), and the "thumb on the scale" could not be more obvious. Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data. [And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]
- kortilla 6y ago
  Underrepresented groups get more attempts and are actively recruited more.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :) The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion. Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.
    - wernercd 6y ago
      > Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that. One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance. that's the definition of "more attempts". Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...
      - charlesu 6y ago
        I can't speak to other companies, but in my experience, inhouse recruiters have no incentive to pass bad candidates past the phone screen. I have no incentive to pass bad candidates to onsite. We want to spend as much time needed to find the right candidate and no more and we don't want miss out on anyone. But we don't want to waste our time either. I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.
dahfizz 6y ago
That's a whole lot of bold, unsubstantiated claims.
triceratops 6y ago
> most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companies actively recruit from top schools only insofar as every other company in every other industry does. But that doesn't mean they recruit exclusively from top schools either. Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League literally don't graduate enough students for that to be a feasible new grad hiring strategy. You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. My personal experience is after you've worked a few years, no one in software engineering cares where (or even if) you went to school. And any software engineer with a pulse located in the SF Bay Area can get at least a phone interview with any of the top tech companies.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I've seen some tech jobs here in London essentially requiring to be a graduate from one of 5 or so universities in the country. However,these were more senior positions that'd require years of industry experience. And then they moan they can't get Java devs for £150K/year...
  - jermaustin1 6y ago
    In years past, I've seen a plethora of £700-1200/day contracts in London for candidates with only 2 years of experience and no education requirement. And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      I don't think most of those ads had any sense at all tbh( I used to see a lot of them as wel) and here's why: 99% of these jobs are in financial sector, especially in trading branches). Most of them may only require 2 years or so experience, however the experience they need are in some esoteric products/services one can only learn/access if in this kind of job( i.e. FX trading platforms, interbank settlement software,some random inhouse thing that connects to NASDAQ,etc.) The reality is that for most of those jobs there are only 50-100 people in the city who can do it and they are all employed and they all know it.So any recruiter worth his salt knows most of them by name,as they just keep crossing the road from one bank to another every couple of years. So all these ads do serve is some newly hired recruiter with no contacts, who hopes some random guy from abroad will have the necessary experience and won't understand the market situation.
TheOperator 6y ago
I'm not sure how much I want to replace the pseudo-IQtest system with the system where we hire based on classism offset with racism.
- idoby 6y ago
  Those are not the only two options, you know...
nsgi 6y ago
I wouldn't say that's true of most tech companies, maybe the most selective ones.
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
One of my previous bosses (at a large tech company) moved over to the US and was asked to hire 9-10 people in a quarter. Everyone said it was impossible. She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools. She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job. People (especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended, when it doesn't seem to be that predictive of workplace success.
- dmos62 6y ago
  I don't presume to know what that depends on, but wherever you go, in my experience, there seems to be a mix of job opportunities that are diploma-centric and skill-centric. What's more, the people I'm interested working with are generally in the latter category. So it's somewhat ironic, but the whole me-not-having-a-top-school-diploma thing works to my advantage by inadvertantly pinpointing the interesting opportunities.
- deepGem 6y ago
  The university obsession is not unique to US. It's true in India as well. If you are not from the elite institutions, you won't get past any hiring scanners of top tech companies. You'll still get a job, not the best paying one though.
  - cies 6y ago
    It's common to all developing nations, and the US (which is both a developing nation and a developed nation in one).
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      It's common to all nations, period.
      - yakireev 6y ago
christophilus 6y ago
I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have worked for a lot of companies, some very big names, and have been in a hiring position for the last 10 years or so. I’ve never once noticed or cared about an applicant’s university, nor has anyone I worked with. So, anecdotes be anecdotal.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  Sounds like you're just projecting your own mentality on everyone you've ever worked with for some reason.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    That’s probably true to an extent, but I have had many conversations with hiring folks. University never once came up. Anyway, my point is that anecdotal evidence is all I see in this discussion, so who knows what reality is?
whakim 6y ago
Your response seems to imply that class and race are not related to each other in any way. In fact, they're deeply intertwined.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m463 6y ago
I know someone who does a LOT of hiring and he ended up preferring some schools over others. It wasn't that there were not qualified people from each school, it was just easier to find them at schools with hard-<subject> educations. There were other schools that were physically closer even within a few miles, but he could go all day without finding a promising candidate. He hires many minorities, women, people of different orientations, so it wasn't that. It was more like, "does anyone understand a linked list?"

solveit 6y ago

> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.

Drew_ 6y ago
"Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.

dontreact 6y ago

Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this

ghostcluster 6y ago
> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
- rubicon33 6y ago
  What ever happened with that lawsuit?
- KorematsuFred 6y ago
  As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms: 1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities. 2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women. 3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women. 4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately. 5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men. 6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women". And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men. BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
downerending 6y ago
Take a close look at the diversity report they publish each year.
- downerending 6y ago
  Not sure why this got downvoted. Google publishes some pretty detailed stats (which I applaud), and the "thumb on the scale" could not be more obvious. Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data. [And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]
kortilla 6y ago
Underrepresented groups get more attempts and are actively recruited more.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :) The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion. Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.
  - wernercd 6y ago
    > Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that. One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance. that's the definition of "more attempts". Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...
    - charlesu 6y ago
      I can't speak to other companies, but in my experience, inhouse recruiters have no incentive to pass bad candidates past the phone screen. I have no incentive to pass bad candidates to onsite. We want to spend as much time needed to find the right candidate and no more and we don't want miss out on anyone. But we don't want to waste our time either. I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.

dahfizz 6y ago

That's a whole lot of bold, unsubstantiated claims.

triceratops 6y ago

> most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companies actively recruit from top schools only insofar as every other company in every other industry does. But that doesn't mean they recruit exclusively from top schools either. Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League literally don't graduate enough students for that to be a feasible new grad hiring strategy. You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. My personal experience is after you've worked a few years, no one in software engineering cares where (or even if) you went to school. And any software engineer with a pulse located in the SF Bay Area can get at least a phone interview with any of the top tech companies.

cosmodisk 6y ago
I've seen some tech jobs here in London essentially requiring to be a graduate from one of 5 or so universities in the country. However,these were more senior positions that'd require years of industry experience. And then they moan they can't get Java devs for £150K/year...
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  In years past, I've seen a plethora of £700-1200/day contracts in London for candidates with only 2 years of experience and no education requirement. And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    I don't think most of those ads had any sense at all tbh( I used to see a lot of them as wel) and here's why: 99% of these jobs are in financial sector, especially in trading branches). Most of them may only require 2 years or so experience, however the experience they need are in some esoteric products/services one can only learn/access if in this kind of job( i.e. FX trading platforms, interbank settlement software,some random inhouse thing that connects to NASDAQ,etc.) The reality is that for most of those jobs there are only 50-100 people in the city who can do it and they are all employed and they all know it.So any recruiter worth his salt knows most of them by name,as they just keep crossing the road from one bank to another every couple of years. So all these ads do serve is some newly hired recruiter with no contacts, who hopes some random guy from abroad will have the necessary experience and won't understand the market situation.

TheOperator 6y ago

I'm not sure how much I want to replace the pseudo-IQtest system with the system where we hire based on classism offset with racism.

idoby 6y ago
Those are not the only two options, you know...

nsgi 6y ago

I wouldn't say that's true of most tech companies, maybe the most selective ones.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

One of my previous bosses (at a large tech company) moved over to the US and was asked to hire 9-10 people in a quarter. Everyone said it was impossible. She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools. She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job. People (especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended, when it doesn't seem to be that predictive of workplace success.

dmos62 6y ago
I don't presume to know what that depends on, but wherever you go, in my experience, there seems to be a mix of job opportunities that are diploma-centric and skill-centric. What's more, the people I'm interested working with are generally in the latter category. So it's somewhat ironic, but the whole me-not-having-a-top-school-diploma thing works to my advantage by inadvertantly pinpointing the interesting opportunities.
deepGem 6y ago
The university obsession is not unique to US. It's true in India as well. If you are not from the elite institutions, you won't get past any hiring scanners of top tech companies. You'll still get a job, not the best paying one though.
- cies 6y ago
  It's common to all developing nations, and the US (which is both a developing nation and a developed nation in one).
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    It's common to all nations, period.
    - yakireev 6y ago

christophilus 6y ago

I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have worked for a lot of companies, some very big names, and have been in a hiring position for the last 10 years or so. I’ve never once noticed or cared about an applicant’s university, nor has anyone I worked with. So, anecdotes be anecdotal.

Drew_ 6y ago
Sounds like you're just projecting your own mentality on everyone you've ever worked with for some reason.
- christophilus 6y ago
  That’s probably true to an extent, but I have had many conversations with hiring folks. University never once came up. Anyway, my point is that anecdotal evidence is all I see in this discussion, so who knows what reality is?

whakim 6y ago

Your response seems to imply that class and race are not related to each other in any way. In fact, they're deeply intertwined.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

m463 6y ago

I know someone who does a LOT of hiring and he ended up preferring some schools over others. It wasn't that there were not qualified people from each school, it was just easier to find them at schools with hard-<subject> educations. There were other schools that were physically closer even within a few miles, but he could go all day without finding a promising candidate. He hires many minorities, women, people of different orientations, so it wasn't that. It was more like, "does anyone understand a linked list?"