> The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring candidate

> The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring candidates will still be fairly inaccurate. For young firms in software industry, this is not true. Neither Google nor Facebook (disclosure: my employer) hires exclusively from top schools. These companies do spend more effort recruiting interns and new graduates from top Computer Science programs (which is a rather different set of schools than top schools in general), but the reason puzzles, participating in competitions like TopCoder or ACM ICPC, research, open source contributions, etc... matter is that they give smart people everywhere a chance to stand out and be noticed. On the other hand, the technical interview process in these firms is known more for false negatives than false positives. These companies all explicitly track the relationship between interview scores and employee performance and tune the interview process accordingly. Finance, management consulting, etc... firms do recruit exclusively from top schools -- but they have other reasons for doing so. If you're in technology business but only hire from top-tier schools and fail to setup a meaningful technical interview process, you're more than welcome to -- I would highly encourage all of my potential competitors to do so :-) I made fairly silly choices as a high school student (as well as not-so-silly, e.g., interning at a startup junior and senior years of HS) which led to me having to "hack" my way through a higher education despite having high SAT scores: after high-school I attended a community college for a year, got a near 4.0 GPA, transfered to a university no one heard of (I had a chance to stay one more year and transfer to Berkeley or UCLA, but I jumped the gun out of fear that my performance was "illusory" as I've never had such a high GPA before) while interning at yet another startup. More traditional companies (think Cisco, Symantec, etc...) ignored my resume (unknown school, internships only at startups), but nearly everyone I actually wanted to work for gave me a shot and I had plenty of good offers. I'm now 29 and I don't feel my career suffered as a result of silly choices (e.g., getting modest grades in high school, transferring too soon from a community college) I made between ages of 14 and 19.