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Paradoxish posted:It also just makes practical sense. If you're desirable enough as an employer to be competing for only the best potential hires, why bother sifting through a huge number of potential applicants when you can just recruit graduates who will definitely want the job from the "best" schools? There's nothing particularly bad about doing this, it's just that the effect it ultimately has on the rest of the labor pool is horrible. Two things: 1) CV screen - Is an average Harvard graduate really better than a top Pitt graduate? I come from a target school so I can't complain personally but I think the monoculture of backgrounds at a place like a Goldman or McKinsey or Google is a) incredibly boring and b) arguably impedes work (some interesting work on org. behavior) 2) Interview process - Most of these firms have a structured 4-5 round quant/fit interview process. You get a lot of resources (alum practice interviews, interview consultants, peer practice) at target schools that drill you that kids at normal-tier schools don't get access to. I've been on both ends (interviewer/interviewee) and my sense is that mastery of this process doesn't really say anything about how effective you are at the job. There's nothing wrong with having arbitrary recruitment hurdles to filter candidates. I'm just not sure if you actually end up with an hiring pool that's objectively "good".
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Mar 13, 2016 21:54
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Paradoxish posted:You people really need to stop talking about literally the biggest, most desirable tech companies in the world as if they're representative of anything. Even SV pay scales aren't representative of the industry as a whole. $60k/year is pretty close to the nationwide median salary for software developers so, no, companies don't "universally" pay their interns that much. Yeah, this. I made $65k as a mid-career programmer in Michigan. All the world is not Silicon Valley.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:55
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The truth is that it is not that hard to train someone with some programming proficiency to be a reasonable programmer for your team, so any tool reducing the amount of applicants you need to pay attention to, including screening by school, or just throwing away 90% of applications at random, is probably going to help with your hiring process just in terms of shortening it.
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Mar 13, 2016 22:09
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The idea that winnowing candidates by haphazard measures is fine, the results are good enough and doing things differently would be too much effort kind of undermines the idea that these companies require and are fiercely competing for the absolute best and brightest
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Mar 13, 2016 22:15
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joe football posted:The idea that winnowing candidates by haphazard measures is fine, the results are good enough and doing things differently would be too much effort kind of undermines the idea that these companies require and are fiercely competing for the absolute best and brightest At the undergrad level, there's not much to designate the "best and brightest" except undergrad rank and prestige.
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Mar 13, 2016 22:30
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joe football posted:The idea that winnowing candidates by haphazard measures is fine, the results are good enough and doing things differently would be too much effort kind of undermines the idea that these companies require and are fiercely competing for the absolute best and brightest Yes. As far as the entry level goes "best and brightest" is bullshit, because the only real way to judge how well someone does a job is have them do this job.
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Mar 13, 2016 22:44
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I have a STEM degree from last year and the interview for the job I have now was "You live up the street? gently caress it, you're hired." YMMV
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Mar 13, 2016 23:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Yes. As far as the entry level goes "best and brightest" is bullshit, because the only real way to judge how well someone does a job is have them do this job. This. You can filter for assholes to some degree though. The company I work for has a strict 'no assholes' hiring policy that actually works. And it's great. Every company should have such a policy.
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Mar 13, 2016 23:12
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:This. You can filter for assholes to some degree though. What rear end in a top hat metric do they use?
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Mar 13, 2016 23:14
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It's mainly having a realistic self image and being able to take criticism.
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Mar 13, 2016 23:20
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joe football posted:The idea that winnowing candidates by haphazard measures is fine, the results are good enough and doing things differently would be too much effort kind of undermines the idea that these companies require and are fiercely competing for the absolute best and brightest I'm actually not sure where you think the inconsistency is here. There is a very real and significant monetary and time cost associated with giving technical interviews for candidates. As a senior IC, I'm expected to do 2-3 interviews per week on average, plus the time it takes to write up my feedback and sit through the debrief for candidates with sufficiently good feedback. This represents over 5% of the week for me, to say nothing of roles like sourcers, recruiters, etc. I've also done over 100 technical interviews in the last couple of years and a disturbingly large number of those have been with candidates not even close to meeting the hiring bar. Our offer rate is well, well below 10% among those who even make it to a phone/VC screen so it's not like there's much value in widening the top of the funnel. In general recruiting shouldn't be aiming to capture literally all good candidates (as there are massive diminishing returns associated with that) but to optimize the ratio of quality candidates converted to amounts of money and time spent doing so (while meeting your hiring targets). Arsenic Lupin posted:Which planet are you from? Even the best colleges require students to take out loans, and don't allow them to live at home. Kids who graduate from the best colleges on financial aid graduate hundreds of thousands in debt. In any case, there are a lot of personal circumstances that don't let students go to target schools even if they get in. Family responsibilities (to parents, not just to children). Ability to live at home (free) versus paying for dormitories and food service. Ability to stretch out degree over multiple years so you can earn money in the off-terms. Your guidance counselor never even mentioning that your GPA/SATs/student history would qualify you to apply to a target school. FWIW I went to a top 20 (not top 10) public school in North America for grad school, turned down one of the best schools in the world for undergrad to attend a no-name school that offered me a lot of scholarship money, and my parents were thoroughly middle-class growing up. I work with a lot of coworkers who didn't go to top schools either, including people at the director/VP level and above. Tech is much less picky about 'pedigree' than, say, finance. Internships are definitely the best way to get a new grad job, and they do give a pretty big advantage to target schools (which are not quite the same as the most elite schools -- for example the University of Waterloo probably has more interns at top companies at any given time than any school in the US does). Internships at good companies also pay so well right now that they actually reduce the barriers to entry in tech in many regards (i.e., doing 3-4 internships can pay for all or most of your undergrad education).
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Mar 14, 2016 00:04
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Paradoxish posted:Not really. They're saying that they can still find enough qualified hires even if they limit their pool to top universities only. I'm not familiar enough with Google's hiring process to say this for sure, but I assume they literally don't just look at top schools and offer jobs to every single graduate with the right degree. It's perfectly fine as a hiring practice even if you assume that the distribution of talented graduates is identical at all schools. Of course all of this is somewhat irrelevant as Google/Facebook etc are not going to be the ones who suffer when the bubble finally pops (at least not compared to the 10k startups that have a questionable concept, no profit in sight and are burning millions a year in VC funding).
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Mar 14, 2016 00:16
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15-ish years ago I heard pretty consistently (when people were speaking frankly at least) stuff along the lines of "a great programmer is worth a LOT more than a good one". That is probably a little less true now, though I'm not super confident in that, it's just a sense that it's easier to make something slick with existing tools and libraries etc. than it used to be. I'm not a developer I just tell every recruiter and headhunter to stop showing me dev. jobs which they blithely ignore.
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Mar 14, 2016 00:27
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A great programmer is still worth a lot more than a good one, but a good programmer can get a lot more done than they could 15 years ago. (Neither Google nor Facebook have hard-line lists of colleges from which they'll accept applicants for internships or new grad positions, though both of them only do outreach recruiting at a finite set of schools.)
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Mar 14, 2016 00:50
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pangstrom posted:15-ish years ago I heard pretty consistently (when people were speaking frankly at least) stuff along the lines of "a great programmer is worth a LOT more than a good one". That is probably a little less true now, though I'm not super confident in that, it's just a sense that it's easier to make something slick with existing tools and libraries etc. than it used to be. I'm not a developer I just tell every recruiter and headhunter to stop showing me dev. jobs which they blithely ignore. Like I said earlier, it's probably more that people realize that "rockstar programmers" don't actually do that much on their own. It's like they hammer into us in engineering - a decent engineer with great people skills will do orders of magnitude better than an exceptional engineer with no people skills. This is because most work is team oriented.
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Mar 14, 2016 00:59
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quote:It's like they hammer into us in engineering - a decent engineer with great people skills will do orders of magnitude better than an exceptional engineer with no people skills. This is because most work is team oriented. Also, 50% (arbitrary) of any given engineering project is convincing the people controlling the checkbook to get out their pens. That's another place where having 'people' skills is essential.
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Mar 14, 2016 01:37
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shrike82 posted:1) CV screen - Is an average Harvard graduate really better than a top Pitt graduate? I come from a target school so I can't complain personally but I think the monoculture of backgrounds at a place like a Goldman or McKinsey or Google is a) incredibly boring and b) arguably impedes work (some interesting work on org. behavior)
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Mar 14, 2016 03:14
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computer parts posted:Like I said earlier, it's probably more that people realize that "rockstar programmers" don't actually do that much on their own. An exceptional engineer is very likely one with effective people skills in one form or another (even if they aren't necessarily pleasant). Has your experience with your co-workers supported your school's lesson that there isn't significant variation in technical effectiveness? I've worked with one of the most famous rockstar programmers in the world, and he is definitely several standard deviations away from his peers in the breadth and depth of his capabilities and his ability to deliver great stuff with little support. Talking to others who worked with him decades previously, it is not solely a function of experience.
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Mar 14, 2016 03:59
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Subjunctive posted:An exceptional engineer is very likely one with effective people skills in one form or another (even if they aren't necessarily pleasant). Under a different definition of "exceptional". In fact, you then contradict this definition in your next paragraph, by saying that some people are so awesome that they don't need to work with others.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:29
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computer parts posted:Under a different definition of "exceptional". Just because you don't need it doesn't mean you don't have it...
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Mar 14, 2016 04:35
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Hughlander posted:Just because you don't need it doesn't mean you don't have it... Then how do you accurately determine that you don't need it?
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Mar 14, 2016 04:37
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FWIW the 3 year minimum experience for every entry level position is often not true at all and shouldn't discourage you from applying to a company.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:41
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computer parts posted:Under a different definition of "exceptional". His people skills are fine (though his reputation is for being somewhat antisocial; I never really saw it), but he is also massively more capable technically than his peers. He can motivate others, negotiate with people, be a liaison to partner companies, speak publicly, all that. But he can also as an individual perform feats of technical creation that are pretty stunning. It is not unusual to find that he has advanced the state of the art when he takes on a problem. He can absolutely "do that much on [his] own", and he's pretty much the poster child for "rockstar programmer". You left my question unanswered: have you in your professional experience not seen meaningful variance in the effectiveness of different programmers working largely independently? computer parts posted:Then how do you accurately determine that you don't need it? Because you're incredibly effective when working on a problem on your own?
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Mar 14, 2016 04:48
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Subjunctive posted:His people skills are fine (though his reputation is for being somewhat antisocial; I never really saw it), but he is also massively more capable technically than his peers. He can motivate others, negotiate with people, be a liaison to partner companies, speak publicly, all that. But he can also as an individual perform feats of technical creation that are pretty stunning. It is not unusual to find that he has advanced the state of the art when he takes on a problem. He can absolutely "do that much on [his] own", and he's pretty much the poster child for "rockstar programmer". Then you found a literal unicorn, congratulations. In general, teamwork is a skill that must be honed as much as any skill, and many technical people do not see the value in it (at least historically). They suffer, even if individually they're all rockstars. This isn't even specific to technical fields - in sports you can have lots of high talented people that still fail against less talented teams because they don't work together.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:49
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computer parts posted:Then you found a literal unicorn, congratulations. Are you just not going to answer the question about what you've observed about the variance of programmer effectiveness on individual tasks? (Yes, he is a unicorn.)
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Mar 14, 2016 04:50
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on the left posted:Why are sob stories relevant to corporate recruiting? There are plenty of poor people that do manage to get into these schools and do well. Maybe these costs mean that students on the margins won't get be able to go, but most top universities have stellar financial aid. Bullshit. Most poor people can't even get into college due to their situations. From the rung of the ladder I started on I got extraordinarily lucky to get in at all. The only way I could do it was to take a mountain of debt even though I went to a public school. Now that college is becoming increasingly profit-driven it's just getting more and more expensive every year. Yeah, some poor folks get to go to good schools but they're the exception rather than the rule. To many, many poor folks "get a college degree" is an insurmountable obstacle. Poor kids also may not have easy access to SAT prep or a non-lovely high school in the first place which just further reduces their potential to go to college.
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Mar 14, 2016 05:32
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Bullshit. Most poor people can't even get into college due to their situations. Something like 80% of schools in the USA are enrollment driven, meaning they are not selective at all and live or die by sales. Also, pretty much every state has a good public university with a program that automatically admits you if you can get decent grades at a community college for 1/2 years
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Mar 14, 2016 05:43
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Oh, well if it's so easy then I guess poor kids not going to college is really their fault entirely when you think about it. Perhaps they should find a pair of bootstraps with which to pull themselves up.
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Mar 14, 2016 05:47
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ohgodwhat posted:Oh, well if it's so easy then I guess poor kids not going to college is really their fault entirely when you think about it. Perhaps they should find a pair of bootstraps with which to pull themselves up. Yes, pretty much. Lots of poor kids get the grades and test scores necessary to go to top schools and do so. Sorry that middling IQ underachievers from poor families can't go to Tufts like middling IQ underachievers from rich families can.
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Mar 14, 2016 05:54
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Then the question for a poor kid is, OK great, you got through college! Now what? One thing that so many non-poor people take for granted is having a place to crash if you don't find a job right away or being able to move a long distance to accept a job. If you can leave all your stuff at your parents place and get them to help you pay for the move you have something the poor kids don't. Not everybody has parents that can let you crash there for nine months while you job hunt. Being poor has some harsh realities that non-poor people don't even know exist. "Well just move to the bay area!" Yeah, good luck with that if you're 2,500 miles away and only have $75.
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Mar 14, 2016 06:54
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:FWIW the 3 year minimum experience for every entry level position is often not true at all and shouldn't discourage you from applying to a company. Exactly. If you are fully qualified for a job, you will be bored. If in the long list of qualifications you are at least 50% of the way there, you should be fine.
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Mar 14, 2016 09:24
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Subjunctive posted:A great programmer is still worth a lot more than a good one, but a good programmer can get a lot more done than they could 15 years ago. Which, to be fair, is functionally identical to a set of hard-line lists. There's a reason we in HR call applicant tracking systems 'post and pray'. There is just way too much noise in these systems at large companies to make finding a 'qualified' candidate worth it. I don't work for Google or Facebook but it's a fairly well known tech company and that's how it works here, I would be rather surprised if Google or FB actually have a better ATS than the industry norm.
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Mar 14, 2016 12:37
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on the left posted:Yes, pretty much. Lots of poor kids get the grades and test scores necessary to go to top schools and do so. Sorry that middling IQ underachievers from poor families can't go to Tufts like middling IQ underachievers from rich families can. Lol, yeah what the gently caress, that starving kid from a broken home is just an underachiever when he doesn't turn in his homework because his mother sold his textbook for drugs. 
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Mar 14, 2016 12:51
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Then the question for a poor kid is, OK great, you got through college! Now what? Paying for moving costs yeah, your parents letting you stay while you job hunt or whatever isn't really a function of class though (maybe you're expected to working part/full time at some lovely job for rent depending). It's also pretty common that you don't need to live in the area at all to apply for jobs there.
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Mar 14, 2016 13:23
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:FWIW the 3 year minimum experience for every entry level position is often not true at all and shouldn't discourage you from applying to a company. Then why the hell is it included? Because I see it with paralegal/legal assistant positions too.
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Mar 14, 2016 14:18
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Spacewolf posted:Then why the hell is it included? Because I see it with paralegal/legal assistant positions too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3kQyqMFpQ Eli the Computer Guy explains it pretty well.
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Mar 14, 2016 14:34
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Spacewolf posted:Then why the hell is it included? Because I see it with paralegal/legal assistant positions too. Because most companies are absolutely terrible at talent sourcing and staffing. HR has little to no control over the procedures and policies that they are told to execute in most companies. Liz Ryan and Lou Adler are worth reading about this.
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Mar 14, 2016 14:43
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Recruiting is actually a pretty exciting field ripe for disruption. There're a bunch of start-ups applying data mining and analytic techniques on topics ranging from candidate scoring to talent management. And firms are willing to pay given the amount of money they throw at recruitment e.g., you're paying 40-50 grand to a head-hunter for a successful conversion etc.
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Mar 14, 2016 14:51
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I like the job descriptions for mid+ level positions that are full of misspellings and bad grammar. I mean it doesn't stop me from applying if I would otherwise but it always makes me smile. Yes you would like to hire a "consumate professional".
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Mar 14, 2016 14:51
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Spacewolf posted:Then why the hell is it included? Because I see it with paralegal/legal assistant positions too. "Entry level position" refers to how much they're willing to pay you.
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Mar 14, 2016 16:18
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