9 ms·

For Lower-Income Students, Big Tech Internships Can Be Hard to Get

49 points by jpn 4y ago

sokoloff 4y ago
https://archive.is/AnGnM https://archive.is/AnGnM
PaulHoule 4y ago
I liked the story about the girl from the Colorado School of Mines because I went to New Mexico Tech and they were our rivals. We were successful in the early 1990s of changing their "M" to read "NMT" but when they tried to do the same with us they found that our "M" is inside a weapons testing reservation. (I really saw an M-1 tank parked by the road in there once.) There was an old sci-fi movie where an astronaut said he was say he was from CSM and we'd always boo.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- marcellus23 4y ago
  > We were successful in the early 1990s of changing their "M" to read "NMT" but when they tried to do the same with us they found that our "M" is inside a weapons testing reservation. What does this mean?
TrackerFF 4y ago
It sucks, but what can you do? Wealthy peers do have their advantages, but that's the case in almost every field out there. This is not unique to tech.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Yep, would love to see a comparison to journalism internships at places like NYT.
  - ericmay 4y ago
    What do you hypothesize that this would uncover?
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      If this is a tech specific issue.m It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that.
      - ericmay 4y ago
        > It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that. Do they not support asking this question? > If this is a tech specific issue Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
        cscurmudgeon 4y ago
        > Do they not support asking this question? Who tf knows? Have they published an article on it? > Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or? I am not saying anything about that. All I am saying is this: For a fair and logical/scientific comparison, the article should have included other rich and powerful industries that folks want to work in, but I guess NYT doesn't believe in fairness.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    Just because the NYT does the wrong thing, doesn't make it right for us to do. Stop pointing the finger at other people and take responsibility for your own actions.
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      The NYT started pointing fingers and not taking actions. Please stop the easy moralizing.
      - 4y ago
- lantry 4y ago
  what can we do? maybe we could try to reduce wealth inequality, instead of just shrugging our shoulders.
  - ausbah 4y ago
    yeah it's not like we don't know the majority root causes for most of society ills. being poor just perpetuates throughout every other part of a persons life in really nasty feedback loops. criminal justice, health, income, opportunities for advancement, etc.
- owlglass 4y ago
  You're right, we should just let inequality fester and wealth disparity grow. I'm glad that early doctors and engineers working on difficult problems didn't just shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do?"
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > It sucks, but what can you do? Hire lower-income candidates? The #1 thing I would do if you're doing unpaid internships, is get rid of unpaid internships, which should be illegal anyway. Unpaid internships mean that you will only get candidates who come from high-income backgrounds, because low-income candidates can't afford to work for free for any significant amount of time. I also won't give money to nonprofits that use unpaid internships. If you won't help the people in your own house, that tells me you aren't fundamentally invested in helping people, and I'd argue that remains true no matter what the mission of your organization is.
  - stu2b50 4y ago
    The subject of the article are internships which pay very well. Big tech internships are usually between $45-50/hr. Some people I know make more money at internships than their entire annual PhD stipend.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      Sure, I'm pointing out a separate problem. YCombinator is a startup incubator, so ostensibly a lot of people here aren't in big tech, and startups do often use unpaid interns. Programmers might not have the full impression of this, because programming internships are usually paid in my experience, even at small startups. But lots of internships in (for example) marketing or administration/HR are unpaid.
    - wombatpm 4y ago
      Well, the stipend is traditionally shit, but the graduate programs like to remind you about the generous tuition waiver. STEM students are so lucky. I have no idea how humanities students justify their situation to themselves.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    "Big tech" internships are almost always paid, so the good news here is that they're well ahead of you. With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes? The story is tragic, painful, and heartbreaking to read. My heart and empathy go out to these struggling and ambitious people. Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
- throwmeaway1212 4y ago
  Business can :- - ...sure they focus university reach out programs/recruitment teams on less wealthy universities. - ...start 'apprenticeship' type programs to specifically target groups less represented in their current recruiting pipeline. - ...ensure their current hiring practices don't have biases that might contribute more to this.
Arborealist 4y ago
[flagged]
C-x_C-f 4y ago
> [An applicant prepared] for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the company’s guiding values, known internally as leadership principles. Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for undergrad internships? [0] https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
- savanaly 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised Amazon did have questions along those lines for its internships, but I don't get how you could spend 2 weeks on solely this portion of the interview prep unless you were procrastinating hellaciously.
  - C-x_C-f 4y ago
    If you're reserving 10 hours a week to set up distinct dog-and-pony shows for, say, 10 companies, that's 1 hour per company per week, so in this case it's 2 hours to write down about 16 "leadership principles," so 7 1⁄2 minutes per principle. That's not a lot of time per se, though it's certainly wasted if you ask me.
  - bena 4y ago
    I've gone through the full-job interview with Amazon recently (right as they were laying off thousands, so weird timing) so I can relate my experience. They want you to have stories prepared for each of the principles. That's 16 anecdotes you have to prepare. They all have to follow a certain format as well: the STAR method. Situation/Task, Action, Result. You have to describe the situation and tell how it relates to the principle, what you specifically did and how it reflects the principle, and finally the results of your action. Each anecdote needs to be about 5 to 10 minutes long. So you have to prepare roughly two hours of material total. I can see it taking two weeks.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      Also some people need more practice and memorization than others. And some people are way more apt to shit talk their former coworkers, while others realize that you can frame any negative as a challenge for the future.
sokoloff 4y ago
> Critics say the typical recruitment process at high-profile tech firms often gives an advantage to students at top computing colleges Isn't that exactly what makes them top computing colleges? This seems like the least surprising feedback loop ever. If Google prefers to hire interns from Stanford than from Pasadena City College, is anyone really surprised? If you were in Google's shoes, wouldn't you do the same?
- TylerE 4y ago
  This assumes the "top colleges" actually are better, and not just bigger good ole boy's clubs.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Their point is more around the fact that schools vary in quality. You can change the schools in their example as you’d like
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Well they are better as long as they attract better students. This is the most important factor when trying compare educational institutions from the perspective of a potential employer. Actual curriculum is secondary (as well.. it should be to be fair).
    - manuelabeledo 4y ago
      > Well they are better as long as they attract better students. Which is debatable, given the prevalence of legacy admissions. Of course, universities with an established name would also attract the best and brightest. That doesn't mean they produce the best and brightest, though.
      - david38 4y ago
        It’s not debatable. Those who attract the best students will be considered top, of course provided they have the resources to give the students. What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school. You can say the same about affirmative action. Nobody believes colleges produce the best from nothing. They produce good results by starting on third base (great students) and letting them run as fast as they can. Some of those will become the best. That’s how it works.
Swizec 4y ago
Have people not been saying for years that BigTech is like a finishing school for the elites? You finish your fancy degree, get a job at a name-brand BigTech, pay your dues for a few years, then leave as part of a founding team (or the founder) of a VC-backed startup. At worst, you go be an exec at a later stage startup thanks to the wonderful connections you’ve built in BigTech.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
oofta-boofta 4y ago
I love how tech claims to love diversity among it's employees but then they snatch up the Asian, White, African American, etc, students who also just so happen to be all be wealthy and go to the best CS schools.
- whitemary 4y ago
  > the Asian, White, African American, etc, students who also just so happen to be all be wealthy In other words: the wealthy students The racialization here is so silly. Your suspiciously included categories account for the overwhelming majority of the US population. Also, as we all know, completeness would have required listing every single race.
  - oofta-boofta 4y ago
    > The racialization here is so silly. That's exactly the point: big tech's silly tokenization/racialization only provides superficial diversity. They almost exclusively hire people of means.
adubashi 4y ago
The good news is this year very few are getting big tech internships, so problem solved.
lordleft 4y ago
Before I attended and graduated from an ivy, I attended a CUNY school for a year. I remember speaking to a classmate in my calc I class who explained to me that he was taking a full course load on top a 20 hour a week job at a local department store. All while commuting from the depths of Queens. Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).
- david38 4y ago
  How is this a surprise to anyone? Wouldn’t you be more surprised if this weren’t the case? Imagine rich students not realizing they didn’t have to work 20 hrs/week. These are all life choices. I’ve seen many un-optimal college decisions. Going to college out of state. Taking out too many loans. Studying something with poor ROI. Not going to community college. Looking at what others have instead of concentrating on your own situation. Not realizing the game isn’t over with graduation, you still have to hustle hard core. Funny how even poor immigrants tend to rise above these obstacles very frequently. It’s largely a mindset issue.
  - bumby 4y ago
    >These are all life choices. I think the point is that some of these are not life choices for some people. A wealthy student may have the choice to work or not, while a low-income student may not. If we value meritocracy, we also need to value opportunity. This means not creating a system that is arbitrarily that erodes that opportunity. The top whatever-percent of a society will always find a way to succeed, but I tend to think we want a society that doesn't make it very hard for a large swath to make a middle-class living. Even then, I'm not sure creating a society that forces the masses to "hustle hard core" to manage a middle-class life is a good tack. I tend to agree with you on some aspects though. There's a mindset and life choices that impact the outcome. I generally say there is a path to middle-class for anyone if you 1) avoid substance abuse, 2) avoid having children before financially ready, and 3) avoid large amounts of debt on depreciating assets. Unfortunately, we've created a system that breaks rule #3 for a lot of people. Some would also argue #2 is getting harder, given the amount training required to become financially stable in a modern economy.
jawns 4y ago
I recently read this interview with Judith Spritz, who runs "Sprinternship" programs for women in tech. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/lessons-in-leadership-removing-barriers-to-get-more-women-in-tech https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector... Basically, participants do a 2- or 3-week sprint during an academic break, and then companies have the option to bring them on for a full summer internship. Why is this important for representation? > All the research shows that the single largest predictor of a student landing a job within six months of graduating is whether they had a paid tech internship. But what challenges were underrepresented students facing? > What it boiled down to is that all those things are the result of the “privilege of free time,” when you’re not working one or more jobs as you go through college to support yourself, sometimes to support your family. In essence, the companies were looking for things on résumés that were more attributes of privilege than they were of potential.
endisneigh 4y ago
I wonder how the job market would look like if looking at education was no longer legal (of course, you could look at the existence of a degree or credential, but not where it was conferred from).
- sokoloff 4y ago
  My guess: first, it would be swamped with candidates from fly-by-night institutions granting degrees that would make the University of Phoenix look like Harvard. This would lead to a call for for gatekeeping of degree-granting institutions, only we'd call it accreditation rather than gatekeeping. Once that cycle completed, you'd find that among the many candidates who all had BS in Computer Science from some unspecified (but accredited) universities, some of them came with an additional verifiable credential that they had earned the prestigious "Leland Stanford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Computing", while others had verifiably won the "William Barton Rogers Award for Excellence in Engineering and Physical Sciences" each granted to the several hundred of the top students each year...
whitemary 4y ago
This applies to every aspect of education and early career advancement, by design. It is ludicrous to think so-called meritocracy could sustain under capitalism. At best, we get hope and anecdotes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 4y ago
[flagged]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Can you define what you find a reprehensible position and break it down for me? I see nothing so far that is outside the bounds of average conversations with people I know. edit: << And you wonder why people don't like you. I try to keep abreast of US 'mood' in various ways, but that jumped at me. Do you have anything to back up that statement?
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > Can you define what you find a reprehensible position and break it down for me? "Google does the wrong thing because it's good for them, wouldn't you? Doing the wrong thing is fine if it's good for you." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482297 "We can't do anything about this. And: Everybody else is doing it, so that makes it okay!" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482248 "Welcome to the real world." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482260 What we have here is a refusal to take responsibility for their own wrong actions, instead pointing the finger at Google, incentives, feigned helplessness, everyone else doing it, and it being "the real world". Fuck that. We can do better, and these are shite excuses for not doing better. > I see nothing so far that is outside the bounds of average conversations with people I know. That says a great deal about the quality of people you surround yourself with. > I try to keep abreast of US 'mood' in various ways, but that jumped at me. Do you have anything to back up that statement? "In 2015, a Pew poll found 71 percent of the country had a positive view on tech, and 17 a negative one. A 2019 follow-up found only 50 percent had a positive view, with 33 percent having a negative one. A Gallup poll from 2020 put positive views of tech companies at just 46 percent and found that 57 percent of US respondents wanted more regulation. In 2022, Morning Consult found 67 percent of respondents favoring regulation, and agreeing tech’s benefits did not outweigh the power the industry had accrued." - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-big-tech/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/silicon-valley-... "Silicon Valley also ranked as the least certain confidence-inspirer on the list: Another 24 percent said they were “unsure” how much confidence they had in it, while 49 percent said they had “some or very little.”" - https://tech.co/news/millennials-dont-trust-silicon-valley-2016-09 https://tech.co/news/millennials-dont-trust-silicon-valley-2... Note that the criminal justice system did better in this poll than Silicon Valley. And the group that did the worst was "Corporate America" which just might overlap with some other folks here.
adamsb6 4y ago
Parent income may be correlated but it is not an input. As someone who grew up poor, big tech was my best way of building wealth. I didn’t need connections, didn’t need to work unpaid internships. I just had to get an interview and pass it.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< He had chosen to attend an affordable local public university, not a top computing school, and he did not know anyone in the industry who could put in a good word for him with tech recruiters. I am not in tech-tech, but in my volunteer work I had a kid, who could likely do well in our paid internship program ( and it is not a bad place to work at ). I encouraged him to apply, but I have heard nothing since. In a week, I forget about it altogether, but it is always a shame to let a mind go to waste. But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get. I don't know. I just don't understand the point of this article at all. edit: added paid
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  > But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get. It's fairly obvious we need to fix our recruiting process for internships: engineers generally don't give a fuck about which school you went to (unlike say, in consulting), but recruiters do, and they'll filter out anyone who didn't go to a target school, it's a real issue.
slavboj 4y ago
Every tech conference of a reasonable size I've been to has had special events for diversity demographics. Most BigCos have recruiting resources targeted at historically black colleges, despite being unwarranted by the colleges' academic performance - in fact the article mentions them! If you're a white or asian male candidate from a second string college you are of course out of luck unless you have some other signaling mechanism.
avasylev 4y ago
> longstanding inequities in Silicon Valley recruitment and hiring Maybe for intern postions or higher positions, but for regular software developer positions "longstanding inequities" is just not true. From my observation 80% of SWEs are immigrants, we graduated schools nobody heard of in the US. For interview purpose it didn't matter. For all the hate (rightfully) have for leetcode interviews, it doesn't care about your background.
lr4444lr 4y ago
BREAKING NEWS: being poor is harder than not being poor. Full story at 11. </sarcasm> Yes, we need to do better as a culture at scouting out high potential that wasn't raised with the advantage of having mentors who know how to build a career. But there's this implicit assumption that the companies offering these jobs and internships have endless resources to spend on talent scouting. Schools and local community organizations that exist for these people need to step up their efforts to actually learn what's current and build these bridges: pipeline programs, guest speakers, hosting their own hackathons, career/interview prep courses, etc. Everyone is expecting the tail to wag the dog.
gchallen 4y ago
I find this unsurprising. But I think the problem is upstream. Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its applicants. Our CS program admits 7%, and a demographic profile that bears no relationship to the broader university population. Relevant to this article, far more out-of-state students, and therefore students from wealthier backgrounds. (Because our out-of-state tuition is insane.) So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place. And from where I sit, the situation is even more frustrating, because we have thousands of data points showing that students drawn from the general university population can and do succeed in our CS courses—at least those required for the minor, which has become increasingly popular. But a lot of CS departments have felt increasingly besieged over the past few decades, as we've been swamped with students and frequently not been provided with appropriate resources. (Although there's also plenty of programs out there insisting on doing things that don't scale well, which exacerbates the problem.) So increasingly the "answer" is to clamp down on admissions, in ways that usually disproportionately affect certain populations. We have a lot of ongoing BPC and DEI efforts in my department. But there's very little if any focus on admissions. I asked recently, and apparently we don't even know the demographic breakdown of our applicant pool. Regardless of what aspects of diversity you care about, one of the biggest sources of inequity in CS today is in university admissions.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place. Sure. But every big tech company has relationships with universities, and has billions of dollars to invest, and would easily recover in the form of talent if they invested in education, even before the undergraduate level. I've worked at small consulting firms that were able to provide a few scholarships on much smaller budgets. You're right to hold academia responsible as well, but a big reason that systemic problems like this aren't fixed is that the responsibility for fixing them is spread out across a lot of different groups. This lets any individual group point the finger at another group not doing their part in fixing the problem and use that as an excuse for not doing their part in fixing the problem. People are doing that all over this thread. Kudos to you for doing your part and acknowledging university admissions as part of the problem, but I'd be less eager to hold big tech blameless.
alexchantavy 4y ago
I didn’t go to a prestigious school for CS so I had a zig zaggy path through the defense industry before ending up in big tech. Yes, it’s true that you simply don’t get the same opportunities as someone who went to a reputed CS school and honestly I can’t blame the companies: as an interviewer, people with good schools on their resume tend to succeed a lot more at the interviews. That said, if I went to a better school I’m not sure I would have had the chance to study CS in the first place. At places like the University of Washington for example it is extremely competitive to get in to the CS major - I know that I definitely did not have the grades to be competitive as a freshman. So, at my not so great school that lets everyone in, I had the opportunity to learn something I was genuinely interested in and eventually (with a bit of luck) turn that into a zig zag path into a job at a big tech co. The way I see it, tech companies should keep whatever bar they have. Interviews suck but they’re a great opportunity equalizer (yes, people from prestigious schools fail these too). People from low income backgrounds can and absolutely do make it in big tech, and I’ve known many capable colleagues without degrees.
stagger87 4y ago
It is always important to maintain some amount of self-awareness. Applying to 200 internships and not getting a single response should signal something in your brain. I'm not saying some form of discrimination is not at play, but at some point you have to be realistic. It seems in the same vein as people being postdocs for 20 years while waiting for a instructor position to open up. Crying foul isn't going to help. That doesn't mean it's not worth writing articles like this one, but I don't think it's going to change much. As long as there is some notion of "prestige" it's going to attract far more people than there are seats, and someone has to get turned away. Meritocracy is a pipe dream.
fortran77 4y ago
I used to work at a large prestigious tech company in Silicon Valley that makes very popular, widely-used software. And despite all the talk about inclusion and fairness and how we need to hire a diverse bunch of people, each year, without fail interns--some even high school seniors--would show up on our team. So if I'd talk to these kids, who usually had names like "Bretton Pinkerton III" it would always turn out that they were the grandchild of a board member, or the kid of some venture captialist that the CEO or CFO was working with for another company that he was on the board of, etc. Never once did they get interns from say, East Palo Alto high school, or one of the community colleges, or College of San Mateo, or any of the schools that a poorer kid was more likely to be at. Never. The company, desipte their "diversity officer" was actually elitist as they come. (Oh, and these rich kid interns rarely had any interest in what they were doing either. If they were high school, it was just resume padding and then they were off to Harvard or Stanford.)

49 points by jpn 4y ago

https://archive.is/AnGnM https://archive.is/AnGnM

I liked the story about the girl from the Colorado School of Mines because I went to New Mexico Tech and they were our rivals. We were successful in the early 1990s of changing their "M" to read "NMT" but when they tried to do the same with us they found that our "M" is inside a weapons testing reservation. (I really saw an M-1 tank parked by the road in there once.) There was an old sci-fi movie where an astronaut said he was say he was from CSM and we'd always boo.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marcellus23 4y ago
> We were successful in the early 1990s of changing their "M" to read "NMT" but when they tried to do the same with us they found that our "M" is inside a weapons testing reservation. What does this mean?

TrackerFF 4y ago

It sucks, but what can you do? Wealthy peers do have their advantages, but that's the case in almost every field out there. This is not unique to tech.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Yep, would love to see a comparison to journalism internships at places like NYT.
- ericmay 4y ago
  What do you hypothesize that this would uncover?
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    If this is a tech specific issue.m It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that.
    - ericmay 4y ago
      > It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that. Do they not support asking this question? > If this is a tech specific issue Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
      - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
        > Do they not support asking this question? Who tf knows? Have they published an article on it? > Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or? I am not saying anything about that. All I am saying is this: For a fair and logical/scientific comparison, the article should have included other rich and powerful industries that folks want to work in, but I guess NYT doesn't believe in fairness.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Just because the NYT does the wrong thing, doesn't make it right for us to do. Stop pointing the finger at other people and take responsibility for your own actions.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    The NYT started pointing fingers and not taking actions. Please stop the easy moralizing.
    - 4y ago
lantry 4y ago
what can we do? maybe we could try to reduce wealth inequality, instead of just shrugging our shoulders.
- ausbah 4y ago
  yeah it's not like we don't know the majority root causes for most of society ills. being poor just perpetuates throughout every other part of a persons life in really nasty feedback loops. criminal justice, health, income, opportunities for advancement, etc.
owlglass 4y ago
You're right, we should just let inequality fester and wealth disparity grow. I'm glad that early doctors and engineers working on difficult problems didn't just shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do?"
kerkeslager 4y ago
> It sucks, but what can you do? Hire lower-income candidates? The #1 thing I would do if you're doing unpaid internships, is get rid of unpaid internships, which should be illegal anyway. Unpaid internships mean that you will only get candidates who come from high-income backgrounds, because low-income candidates can't afford to work for free for any significant amount of time. I also won't give money to nonprofits that use unpaid internships. If you won't help the people in your own house, that tells me you aren't fundamentally invested in helping people, and I'd argue that remains true no matter what the mission of your organization is.
- stu2b50 4y ago
  The subject of the article are internships which pay very well. Big tech internships are usually between $45-50/hr. Some people I know make more money at internships than their entire annual PhD stipend.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    Sure, I'm pointing out a separate problem. YCombinator is a startup incubator, so ostensibly a lot of people here aren't in big tech, and startups do often use unpaid interns. Programmers might not have the full impression of this, because programming internships are usually paid in my experience, even at small startups. But lots of internships in (for example) marketing or administration/HR are unpaid.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    Well, the stipend is traditionally shit, but the graduate programs like to remind you about the generous tuition waiver. STEM students are so lucky. I have no idea how humanities students justify their situation to themselves.
- Kalium 4y ago
  "Big tech" internships are almost always paid, so the good news here is that they're well ahead of you. With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes? The story is tragic, painful, and heartbreaking to read. My heart and empathy go out to these struggling and ambitious people. Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
throwmeaway1212 4y ago
Business can :- - ...sure they focus university reach out programs/recruitment teams on less wealthy universities. - ...start 'apprenticeship' type programs to specifically target groups less represented in their current recruiting pipeline. - ...ensure their current hiring practices don't have biases that might contribute more to this.

Arborealist 4y ago

[flagged]

C-x_C-f 4y ago

> [An applicant prepared] for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the company’s guiding values, known internally as leadership principles. Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for undergrad internships? [0] https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

savanaly 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised Amazon did have questions along those lines for its internships, but I don't get how you could spend 2 weeks on solely this portion of the interview prep unless you were procrastinating hellaciously.
- C-x_C-f 4y ago
  If you're reserving 10 hours a week to set up distinct dog-and-pony shows for, say, 10 companies, that's 1 hour per company per week, so in this case it's 2 hours to write down about 16 "leadership principles," so 7 1⁄2 minutes per principle. That's not a lot of time per se, though it's certainly wasted if you ask me.
- bena 4y ago
  I've gone through the full-job interview with Amazon recently (right as they were laying off thousands, so weird timing) so I can relate my experience. They want you to have stories prepared for each of the principles. That's 16 anecdotes you have to prepare. They all have to follow a certain format as well: the STAR method. Situation/Task, Action, Result. You have to describe the situation and tell how it relates to the principle, what you specifically did and how it reflects the principle, and finally the results of your action. Each anecdote needs to be about 5 to 10 minutes long. So you have to prepare roughly two hours of material total. I can see it taking two weeks.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Also some people need more practice and memorization than others. And some people are way more apt to shit talk their former coworkers, while others realize that you can frame any negative as a challenge for the future.

sokoloff 4y ago

> Critics say the typical recruitment process at high-profile tech firms often gives an advantage to students at top computing colleges Isn't that exactly what makes them top computing colleges? This seems like the least surprising feedback loop ever. If Google prefers to hire interns from Stanford than from Pasadena City College, is anyone really surprised? If you were in Google's shoes, wouldn't you do the same?

TylerE 4y ago
This assumes the "top colleges" actually are better, and not just bigger good ole boy's clubs.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Their point is more around the fact that schools vary in quality. You can change the schools in their example as you’d like
- qwytw 4y ago
  Well they are better as long as they attract better students. This is the most important factor when trying compare educational institutions from the perspective of a potential employer. Actual curriculum is secondary (as well.. it should be to be fair).
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    > Well they are better as long as they attract better students. Which is debatable, given the prevalence of legacy admissions. Of course, universities with an established name would also attract the best and brightest. That doesn't mean they produce the best and brightest, though.
    - david38 4y ago
      It’s not debatable. Those who attract the best students will be considered top, of course provided they have the resources to give the students. What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school. You can say the same about affirmative action. Nobody believes colleges produce the best from nothing. They produce good results by starting on third base (great students) and letting them run as fast as they can. Some of those will become the best. That’s how it works.

Swizec 4y ago

Have people not been saying for years that BigTech is like a finishing school for the elites? You finish your fancy degree, get a job at a name-brand BigTech, pay your dues for a few years, then leave as part of a founding team (or the founder) of a VC-backed startup. At worst, you go be an exec at a later stage startup thanks to the wonderful connections you’ve built in BigTech.

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oofta-boofta 4y ago

I love how tech claims to love diversity among it's employees but then they snatch up the Asian, White, African American, etc, students who also just so happen to be all be wealthy and go to the best CS schools.

whitemary 4y ago
> the Asian, White, African American, etc, students who also just so happen to be all be wealthy In other words: the wealthy students The racialization here is so silly. Your suspiciously included categories account for the overwhelming majority of the US population. Also, as we all know, completeness would have required listing every single race.
- oofta-boofta 4y ago
  > The racialization here is so silly. That's exactly the point: big tech's silly tokenization/racialization only provides superficial diversity. They almost exclusively hire people of means.

adubashi 4y ago

The good news is this year very few are getting big tech internships, so problem solved.

lordleft 4y ago

Before I attended and graduated from an ivy, I attended a CUNY school for a year. I remember speaking to a classmate in my calc I class who explained to me that he was taking a full course load on top a 20 hour a week job at a local department store. All while commuting from the depths of Queens. Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).

david38 4y ago
How is this a surprise to anyone? Wouldn’t you be more surprised if this weren’t the case? Imagine rich students not realizing they didn’t have to work 20 hrs/week. These are all life choices. I’ve seen many un-optimal college decisions. Going to college out of state. Taking out too many loans. Studying something with poor ROI. Not going to community college. Looking at what others have instead of concentrating on your own situation. Not realizing the game isn’t over with graduation, you still have to hustle hard core. Funny how even poor immigrants tend to rise above these obstacles very frequently. It’s largely a mindset issue.
- bumby 4y ago
  >These are all life choices. I think the point is that some of these are not life choices for some people. A wealthy student may have the choice to work or not, while a low-income student may not. If we value meritocracy, we also need to value opportunity. This means not creating a system that is arbitrarily that erodes that opportunity. The top whatever-percent of a society will always find a way to succeed, but I tend to think we want a society that doesn't make it very hard for a large swath to make a middle-class living. Even then, I'm not sure creating a society that forces the masses to "hustle hard core" to manage a middle-class life is a good tack. I tend to agree with you on some aspects though. There's a mindset and life choices that impact the outcome. I generally say there is a path to middle-class for anyone if you 1) avoid substance abuse, 2) avoid having children before financially ready, and 3) avoid large amounts of debt on depreciating assets. Unfortunately, we've created a system that breaks rule #3 for a lot of people. Some would also argue #2 is getting harder, given the amount training required to become financially stable in a modern economy.

jawns 4y ago

I recently read this interview with Judith Spritz, who runs "Sprinternship" programs for women in tech. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/lessons-in-leadership-removing-barriers-to-get-more-women-in-tech https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector... Basically, participants do a 2- or 3-week sprint during an academic break, and then companies have the option to bring them on for a full summer internship. Why is this important for representation? > All the research shows that the single largest predictor of a student landing a job within six months of graduating is whether they had a paid tech internship. But what challenges were underrepresented students facing? > What it boiled down to is that all those things are the result of the “privilege of free time,” when you’re not working one or more jobs as you go through college to support yourself, sometimes to support your family. In essence, the companies were looking for things on résumés that were more attributes of privilege than they were of potential.

endisneigh 4y ago

I wonder how the job market would look like if looking at education was no longer legal (of course, you could look at the existence of a degree or credential, but not where it was conferred from).

sokoloff 4y ago
My guess: first, it would be swamped with candidates from fly-by-night institutions granting degrees that would make the University of Phoenix look like Harvard. This would lead to a call for for gatekeeping of degree-granting institutions, only we'd call it accreditation rather than gatekeeping. Once that cycle completed, you'd find that among the many candidates who all had BS in Computer Science from some unspecified (but accredited) universities, some of them came with an additional verifiable credential that they had earned the prestigious "Leland Stanford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Computing", while others had verifiably won the "William Barton Rogers Award for Excellence in Engineering and Physical Sciences" each granted to the several hundred of the top students each year...

whitemary 4y ago

This applies to every aspect of education and early career advancement, by design. It is ludicrous to think so-called meritocracy could sustain under capitalism. At best, we get hope and anecdotes.

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kerkeslager 4y ago

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A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Can you define what you find a reprehensible position and break it down for me? I see nothing so far that is outside the bounds of average conversations with people I know. edit: << And you wonder why people don't like you. I try to keep abreast of US 'mood' in various ways, but that jumped at me. Do you have anything to back up that statement?
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > Can you define what you find a reprehensible position and break it down for me? "Google does the wrong thing because it's good for them, wouldn't you? Doing the wrong thing is fine if it's good for you." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482297 "We can't do anything about this. And: Everybody else is doing it, so that makes it okay!" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482248 "Welcome to the real world." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481970#35482260 What we have here is a refusal to take responsibility for their own wrong actions, instead pointing the finger at Google, incentives, feigned helplessness, everyone else doing it, and it being "the real world". Fuck that. We can do better, and these are shite excuses for not doing better. > I see nothing so far that is outside the bounds of average conversations with people I know. That says a great deal about the quality of people you surround yourself with. > I try to keep abreast of US 'mood' in various ways, but that jumped at me. Do you have anything to back up that statement? "In 2015, a Pew poll found 71 percent of the country had a positive view on tech, and 17 a negative one. A 2019 follow-up found only 50 percent had a positive view, with 33 percent having a negative one. A Gallup poll from 2020 put positive views of tech companies at just 46 percent and found that 57 percent of US respondents wanted more regulation. In 2022, Morning Consult found 67 percent of respondents favoring regulation, and agreeing tech’s benefits did not outweigh the power the industry had accrued." - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-big-tech/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/silicon-valley-... "Silicon Valley also ranked as the least certain confidence-inspirer on the list: Another 24 percent said they were “unsure” how much confidence they had in it, while 49 percent said they had “some or very little.”" - https://tech.co/news/millennials-dont-trust-silicon-valley-2016-09 https://tech.co/news/millennials-dont-trust-silicon-valley-2... Note that the criminal justice system did better in this poll than Silicon Valley. And the group that did the worst was "Corporate America" which just might overlap with some other folks here.

adamsb6 4y ago

Parent income may be correlated but it is not an input. As someone who grew up poor, big tech was my best way of building wealth. I didn’t need connections, didn’t need to work unpaid internships. I just had to get an interview and pass it.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

<< He had chosen to attend an affordable local public university, not a top computing school, and he did not know anyone in the industry who could put in a good word for him with tech recruiters. I am not in tech-tech, but in my volunteer work I had a kid, who could likely do well in our paid internship program ( and it is not a bad place to work at ). I encouraged him to apply, but I have heard nothing since. In a week, I forget about it altogether, but it is always a shame to let a mind go to waste. But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get. I don't know. I just don't understand the point of this article at all. edit: added paid

thatfrenchguy 4y ago
> But this brings me to the real part of this post. Lower income students have all sorts of disadvantages to overcome. Big tech internships can be hard to get to anyone. What is the argument of this article here? Add parity? Racial quota? If it is a problem, but it is a demand problem, because it is as THE thing to get. It's fairly obvious we need to fix our recruiting process for internships: engineers generally don't give a fuck about which school you went to (unlike say, in consulting), but recruiters do, and they'll filter out anyone who didn't go to a target school, it's a real issue.

slavboj 4y ago

Every tech conference of a reasonable size I've been to has had special events for diversity demographics. Most BigCos have recruiting resources targeted at historically black colleges, despite being unwarranted by the colleges' academic performance - in fact the article mentions them! If you're a white or asian male candidate from a second string college you are of course out of luck unless you have some other signaling mechanism.

avasylev 4y ago

> longstanding inequities in Silicon Valley recruitment and hiring Maybe for intern postions or higher positions, but for regular software developer positions "longstanding inequities" is just not true. From my observation 80% of SWEs are immigrants, we graduated schools nobody heard of in the US. For interview purpose it didn't matter. For all the hate (rightfully) have for leetcode interviews, it doesn't care about your background.

lr4444lr 4y ago

BREAKING NEWS: being poor is harder than not being poor. Full story at 11. </sarcasm> Yes, we need to do better as a culture at scouting out high potential that wasn't raised with the advantage of having mentors who know how to build a career. But there's this implicit assumption that the companies offering these jobs and internships have endless resources to spend on talent scouting. Schools and local community organizations that exist for these people need to step up their efforts to actually learn what's current and build these bridges: pipeline programs, guest speakers, hosting their own hackathons, career/interview prep courses, etc. Everyone is expecting the tail to wag the dog.

gchallen 4y ago

I find this unsurprising. But I think the problem is upstream. Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its applicants. Our CS program admits 7%, and a demographic profile that bears no relationship to the broader university population. Relevant to this article, far more out-of-state students, and therefore students from wealthier backgrounds. (Because our out-of-state tuition is insane.) So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place. And from where I sit, the situation is even more frustrating, because we have thousands of data points showing that students drawn from the general university population can and do succeed in our CS courses—at least those required for the minor, which has become increasingly popular. But a lot of CS departments have felt increasingly besieged over the past few decades, as we've been swamped with students and frequently not been provided with appropriate resources. (Although there's also plenty of programs out there insisting on doing things that don't scale well, which exacerbates the problem.) So increasingly the "answer" is to clamp down on admissions, in ways that usually disproportionately affect certain populations. We have a lot of ongoing BPC and DEI efforts in my department. But there's very little if any focus on admissions. I asked recently, and apparently we don't even know the demographic breakdown of our applicant pool. Regardless of what aspects of diversity you care about, one of the biggest sources of inequity in CS today is in university admissions.

kerkeslager 4y ago
> So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place. Sure. But every big tech company has relationships with universities, and has billions of dollars to invest, and would easily recover in the form of talent if they invested in education, even before the undergraduate level. I've worked at small consulting firms that were able to provide a few scholarships on much smaller budgets. You're right to hold academia responsible as well, but a big reason that systemic problems like this aren't fixed is that the responsibility for fixing them is spread out across a lot of different groups. This lets any individual group point the finger at another group not doing their part in fixing the problem and use that as an excuse for not doing their part in fixing the problem. People are doing that all over this thread. Kudos to you for doing your part and acknowledging university admissions as part of the problem, but I'd be less eager to hold big tech blameless.

alexchantavy 4y ago

I didn’t go to a prestigious school for CS so I had a zig zaggy path through the defense industry before ending up in big tech. Yes, it’s true that you simply don’t get the same opportunities as someone who went to a reputed CS school and honestly I can’t blame the companies: as an interviewer, people with good schools on their resume tend to succeed a lot more at the interviews. That said, if I went to a better school I’m not sure I would have had the chance to study CS in the first place. At places like the University of Washington for example it is extremely competitive to get in to the CS major - I know that I definitely did not have the grades to be competitive as a freshman. So, at my not so great school that lets everyone in, I had the opportunity to learn something I was genuinely interested in and eventually (with a bit of luck) turn that into a zig zag path into a job at a big tech co. The way I see it, tech companies should keep whatever bar they have. Interviews suck but they’re a great opportunity equalizer (yes, people from prestigious schools fail these too). People from low income backgrounds can and absolutely do make it in big tech, and I’ve known many capable colleagues without degrees.

stagger87 4y ago

It is always important to maintain some amount of self-awareness. Applying to 200 internships and not getting a single response should signal something in your brain. I'm not saying some form of discrimination is not at play, but at some point you have to be realistic. It seems in the same vein as people being postdocs for 20 years while waiting for a instructor position to open up. Crying foul isn't going to help. That doesn't mean it's not worth writing articles like this one, but I don't think it's going to change much. As long as there is some notion of "prestige" it's going to attract far more people than there are seats, and someone has to get turned away. Meritocracy is a pipe dream.

fortran77 4y ago

I used to work at a large prestigious tech company in Silicon Valley that makes very popular, widely-used software. And despite all the talk about inclusion and fairness and how we need to hire a diverse bunch of people, each year, without fail interns--some even high school seniors--would show up on our team. So if I'd talk to these kids, who usually had names like "Bretton Pinkerton III" it would always turn out that they were the grandchild of a board member, or the kid of some venture captialist that the CEO or CFO was working with for another company that he was on the board of, etc. Never once did they get interns from say, East Palo Alto high school, or one of the community colleges, or College of San Mateo, or any of the schools that a poorer kid was more likely to be at. Never. The company, desipte their "diversity officer" was actually elitist as they come. (Oh, and these rich kid interns rarely had any interest in what they were doing either. If they were high school, it was just resume padding and then they were off to Harvard or Stanford.)