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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Can you elaborate on those last two bullets? Are they always in demand you mean?

I mean, check out his company on wiki..Probably doing most people a favor.

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.

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.

You're moving the goalposts here.

> ... 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?

Ironic that Palantir was founded by the guy who encouraged high school students to skip college [1].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2017/03/03/peter-thiel-fellowship-c...

I should point out that most Thiel fellows have already completed college and were doing graduate studies before 20. They're not high-schoolers.

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.

Seems like a great way to have an engineering monoculture, what with all the good old boys at the Ivy Leagues

It's not him it's his company lol. And it's definitely not unheard of for companies to say they only hire from top 5-10 places.

About 10 years ago when I was still going to San Jose State University I began applying to SDE internship openings at various places in the Bay Area.

I recall one of {Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, Doordash, other similar place} having a drop-down on the application for the university I was attending.

There were roughly 10 universities. I can't remember all of them, maybe Stanford, CMU, Brown, Berkeley, etc. (typical top universities for CS/EE).

At the bottom of the list was "Other".

I was rejected within an hour or two of submitting my application. I don't want to say it was an automatic filter situation, but...

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...

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