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Comment by netheril96 | Hacker News Reader

The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools.

Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.

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3/4 of our engineers aren't from top tier schools.

Several of our best never even graduated.

There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.

> programming contests

Programming contests aren't anything like actually working at a software company. If you select for the wrong skills, you'll lose lots of good people.

I once encounter someone on reddit who says he purposefully ignore personal projects and open source projects contributions when making hiring decisions, because he thinks it is a white male privilege.

I object to the racism and sexism in the sentiment, but it is a sort of privilege to have access to computers and time to create personal projects on them. But, it's still a good predictor for job success, so unless it results in discrimination against protected groups, it should still matter for hiring.

On the flip side, even if personal projects don't matter for hiring, everyone interested in the industry should be pursuing personal projects, even if it takes buying garbage computers (as I did as a kid) and repairing them to get a learning platform. Personal projects and open source are more accessible than people might think.

That seems like a cartoonish summary, or maybe they're just a cartoonish person. But I think there's some truth in there.

It's undeniable that open source is mainly white dudes. There are plenty of women who will tell you that they don't feel welcome in open source, and so don't participate or have stopped participating. So if you use open source participation as a hiring filter, it will have a bias.

Personal projects are a sign of having time and money. That is also correlated with being a single white guy. Parents, and particularly single parents mostly just laugh when you talk about free time. Making humans from scratch is their personal project.

That's not to say that these aren't good things to look for. I look for them myself. But if you use them as a filter (as opposed to one of many positive signals), then you definitely are biasing your hiring to middle- and upper-class white males.

Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas.

I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.

Engineering != computer science, at least not all the time.

What you're thinking of is pretty different than engineering which is essentially applied math.

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