University Prestige in Hiring

I’m sure Harvard and Yale say the same thing when accepting applicants to their university. I think the thing to consider is how prestige gives an applicant a considerable amount of more sway in an interview process. Also, I worked with a person that moved on to working at Google after working in our project and that individual was considered to be a very poor programmer unfortunately.

> 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

This sounds very shortsighted.My own grad school happens to have a top 4 CS program (UIUC), but I went there for math (was top 15 at the time, not sure how it has done since). Some of the stories of people I met in my grad program were fascinating, there were people there who were likely smarter than most students at most of the elite universities - one particular extremely smart person I met even turned down top math programs in favor of a full scholarship at a lesser known public school for

A) usually if you're fresh out of school they filter on your school name because the average MIT cs grad is most likely better than the average cs grad from university of kentucky.B) if you have work experience, they filter on where you worked because the average google engineer / HFT engineer is probably better than your average engineer who works at missouri national bank.C) if you've done something great that everyone knows about (like being the author of popular librarie

Worse yet, it's a tiered system where to get the plum jobs, you have to graduate from Ivy/Stanford/MIT. But the reality is that a passionate hard working kid from UCLA or UTexas is no less qualified to fill the same role as a similarly educated one from Princeton. Employers are simply lazy, and rather than truly vet candidates for talent, they just assume that if the candidate has an Ivy on the resume, that's good enough.

The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alma mater, I don't exactly know how to evaluate it -- there&#x

I don't understand why considering degree and reputation of the university when hiring so frowned upon ? It seems perfectly logical to me. Afterall, when you have 1000s of resume a day to sift through (not unusual for big companies like Google, etc), what criteria should you use to filter the candidates ? It's easy to fill a resume with lot of crap which is often fake or exaggerated. A degree and university reputation is a very objective measure that can used to quickly identify a pote

This is standard across the world, in professional and engineering jobs. Hiring can be filtered by where you work, what your major is, what school you went to. Not all jobs or education are made equal. Its not what I'd do, but saying, we'll only consider candidates with CS degrees from these top 25 schools seem like a valid strategy to recruiting. Esp. if you consider their professors can be renowned in certain research topics.

It doesn't seem shortsighted to me to recruit only from top schools, because companies that hire graduates of Stanford or MIT or wherever can and do hire people after they've been in the workforce for a few years to prove themselves. I went to SUNY Albany and didn't even manage a 3.0 GPA, (missed it by _that_ much) and after a few years of working for a local company got contacted by recruiters from both Google and Amazon. They quickly realized I wasn't the sort of person the

I used to recruit for tech start ups and can confirm that school is just about always the most important thing to get you in the door, particularly early on in your career.It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it.There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be to