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Comment by 6DM | Hacker News Reader

Even funnier, coming across companies that don't accept anyone who doesn't have a degree from xyz university.

It's a way to easily filter when you get 1000 applicants for 1 job posting. Not the fairest but it's quick.

And an even easier way to filter out the company.

There is bias in the risk of their decision: hiring someone given that (s)he is good is not important - the important thing is that (s)he is good given (s)he is hired. That's why they are conservative in their selection process.

That's the case for some elite finance institutions, but does it happen with programming?

Oh yes. While this might not be a hard, publicly facing requirement, I have seen resume review processes that took into account things like school or whether you have worked for a hip, big name tech employer.

If your sensible resume with 10 years of experience doing work on an in demand field doesn't even get a recruiter call back, it might be because you did it for an enterprise company the recruiting team doesn't really know anything about. Chances are that no engineering manager ever got to read it.

I for one have worked with people coming from all kinds of backgrounds, and I don't think that the filtering makes any sense. My favorite software engineer hire had a Physics degree from Missouri-Rolla, and whose career highlight was work at a company that makes billing software for telcos. She would not have been given the time of the day in a lot of big tech companies.

If I was leading a company's recruiting strategy today, I'd aim at those kinds of candidates: If I aim at pedigree, I am competing, both economically and prestige-wise, with all the big names in tech. If instead I aim for the kinds of people that the market undervalues, I'll close more candidates and keep them longer.

Sounds like a good movie in the making (Coderball?)

I once got a rejection from an internship application late one night a few hours after I applied. I wouldn't be really surprised if I had been automatically rejected. And my rejection might have been because the state university I went to was not specifically mentioned in the drop down list of schools, it was in the "other" category. I think I might have not gotten a rejection so quickly if I had been going to a target school like MIT or Stanford.

Sure, that's fair. Do you think you would've gotten at least a phone interview had you had a lot of experience and a good resume (aside from the non-target school)? I have friends who have such experience in finance and firms won't even look at them because of the university name in their resume.

I don't know what their criteria was. I guess they could have skimmed it for a few seconds. I actually just had a classmate tell me that they just had an interview for an internship at that company.

But I can say I do have a good resume. I have a little bit of full time experience (before I decided to go to school full time for cs) and an internship at a company they recruit from.

So it's technically not an immediate disqualifier. But I did get a rejection quickly enough that I think it might have been automatic, and my school is still listed as "other - please specify" on their internship application.

More likely their internship program was full already.

It's definitely possible. It was a startup, I think they only had a few thousand employees. But I think applied in the fall. So their intern program probably filled up really fast if it was full.

I can't remember specifically, but my area is really huge on government contracting so I doubt it was a finance institution.

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