Comment by aroundtown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aroundtown | Hacker News Reader

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Certainly, what I mean here is people that have been helped out to get where they are, then not pay it forward or in fact go out of their way to not help out their peers.

I've seen this happen many times. Not just to friends, but co-workers and people that I have met along the way.

In one case I had a friend who was hired by a former classmate to a local firm. After a year there they started hiring more programmers company wide. This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.

I'd wager that it's just a feature of my particular network and people I've come across. As my partner is the opposite, and their network helps each other out.

> This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.

I'm not doubting your story for an instant, but this is incredibly strange behaviour and not something I'd consider normal.

Companies I've worked at love hiring referrals because you generally get higher quality and skip all the hassle of dealing with external agencies, dozens or hundreds of applicants, etc. Something like half my team is made up of people I've worked with at other companies in the past - I was overjoyed when they applied for jobs with us - and I still keep a mental rolodex of people I was at university with 20 years ago who I'd be happy to work with.

Cambridge is a bit of an odd place, in that plenty of companies have a bias for Cambridge graduates. That's fine as far as it goes, but I'm generally happy to hear from anyone with a CS background from any university, and am absolutely open to other STEM graduates who demonstrate that they can do the work.

I've seen the opposite.

Employee from University X would make a referral for everyone from University X that would apply. And let me just say the signal to noise ratio from that institution was horrible to say the least.

If X makes a recommendation for Y then X's reputation is on the line. These are the rules of the game, why weren't they communicated?

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