Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!"
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
This has got to be satire. You don't trust schools outside the top 4-5? Harvard is 16. Dartmouth is 49. Maybe if you had said the top 50 or 100 but this is so out of touch lol.
Everybody says the only hire the top 10%, or 5% or 1% but this conveniently tip toes past the fact that the top 80% are rarely looking for jobs and the true top 25% never applies after their first job.
We run high-touch recruiting programs with a small number of schools. We send people to their career fairs. We take multiple years to build a strong presence on campus. Our recruiting team has finite resources and time.
As a result, our hiring program only directly targets Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, UW, UM, and a small set of other US schools. Recently, we dropped Northwestern from our list, because it just wasn't yielding a good number of candidates.
We obviously hire candidates from a variety of other schools and backgrounds, but we don't seek them out. For example, we'll reach out to you if someone already at Palantir makes a strong recommendation. But we are absolutely not looking for you as a first priority ahead of our college hiring.
None of the Thiel Fellow recipients listed on Wikipedia have any mention of a completed undergraduate or postgraduate degree. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them do but being a college dropout is definitely more common than having completed college in any normal terms.
Choosing to use your limited recruiting resources wisely is one thing. Saying that most schools outside the top 4-5 are diploma mills where students hire people to do their classwork is straight up lying, and deserves to be called out.
I thought that the HN crowd, on average, strongly believed that CS programs filled students' heads with theoretical garbage, and that most students just parroted back the textbook to get through assignments and rode each other's coattails to get through group projects.
This is our experience with our candidates. If you think there's an arbitrage opportunity here, best of luck to you in your recruiting endeavours.
> ... believed that CS programs filled students' heads with theoretical garbage
I'm not sure I'd call my algorithms, operating systems, and core CS classes theoretical garbage, but I guess I value not dedicating semesters to the front end framework or GitHub repository of the week. If anything, I now regret not paying more attention during my undergrad.
I don't want to extrapolate this too much for obvious reasons, but did this firm also view math, physics, etc. degrees as full of theoretical garbage?
It's just such a shame to see in practice. It's not like these company's workforces are doing something extremely innovative to warrant 1000s of engineers from elite schools; it's always the same web app, written in the same libraries, interacting with the same type of backends.
I don't know who said the quote but it went like "The best minds of my generation are working to get people to click ads." The same idea plays out here as well. You want all the prestige candidates to work on your CRUD apps.
I kind of understand the political backlash against tech now...
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 undergrad. My own personal background is a bit fascinating in some ways as well, but it never comes up in interviews - I'm at a FAANG with most of the achievements notched for a promotion to staff SWE, and my brother was promoted to staff research scientist at another FAANG for an extraordinary business-wide accomplishment. Neither of us coded before trying to get into the tech industry (my brother has a PhD in Chemistry from a reputed program).
I've learned throughout my life that focusing so much on where people went to school might cause you to miss smart and/or revolutionary people. People don't really talk so much about the schools people like Steve Jobs went to. Lots of very smart people are rejected by the likes of the Ivies, or not gotten the head start in life that would've gotten them placed at the most prestigious schools or programs. Some people's lives took a different turn for reasons that may have caused them to miss out on opportunities earlier in life, but life events created resolve & the will to make a switch & become successful. I think it's very unfair/silly to pass judgment on someone just due to what school they went to (I certainly don't really care when I'm interviewing someone) - there are actually a lot of very smart people who never had any such privileged background out there. We should be striving to find them not only because it could be very beneficial for business, but it's also the right thing to do.
Do you only hire from CS programs? I’ve worked with a wide variety of developers, probably only 50% of which had CS degrees, and they weren’t any better than anyone else.
The best software developer I’ve ever worked with was a graduate from an architecture program. A close second was a guy who was a middle school teacher before turning to software. I’ve also worked with some really excellent CS people.
A lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci.
I still look for developers from computer science programs mostly because that’s an easy place to find people who really love creating software and systems.
> lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci.
Indeed, I studied Maths & Philosophy and I always tell people that the Philosophy was a lot more useful to my career as a software developer than the Maths. (Analytic) Philosophy involves a lot of probing people's assumptions until you get to a clear idea of what they truly believe. Which is rather similar to the process of teasing clear requirements out of stakeholders.
>> Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
This isn't just reporting Palantir's hiring, this is offering a personal assessment that the majority of CS programs are crap and their graduates are likely as not to be cheaters. It's very pretentious and presumably offends most people here, who probably went to "lower-tier schools." Not really surprising that it would provoke a negative reaction.
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.