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Comment by joedev | Hacker News Reader

Despite the consensus that college has little value to hackers, Stripe team members come largely from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other major universities. Is this and the fact that Stripe's products are highly regarded just a coincidence? Would it be the same team and products without the team members' Ivy league credentials?

I think the answer is no and no. The benefits of college education are widely underestimated.

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If their most successful recruiting channel (by far) is referrals, as they say, then dominant clusters of particular schools isn't surprising or all that telling.

To be fair, many of those Harvard and MIT people are dropouts. I think there's some signal in having graduated with a degree, especially from a well regarded university, but it isn't really something we specifically look for and it definitely isn't a requirement.

If it has no bearing, wonder why it's even mentioned in employees' bios. Just out of convention?

Correlation does not imply causation. If they're hiring the brightest, it shouldn't be a surprise that there is significant overlap with universities that only admit the brightest.

Or the benefits of self-discipline, academic excellence and selection bias before such individuals get into "Stanford, Harvard, MIT".

For your argument to work, you'd need to find someone who's below average, lacks passion and under achieves on a regular basis. Then they enter "Stanford, Harvard, MIT" and become a highly regarded passionate professional.

The truth is that most of people who enter top-notch institutions are so far ahead of averages on a bunch of levels, that you could pull a bunch of them out during freshmen year, and they would still do well.

A large number of people at Stripe (I want to say more than half, but that might be wrong) dropped out of college or didn't go at all. Given that a bigger portion of our peers outside Stripe do have college degrees, I think that suggests a different correlation entirely.

On my part, I dropped out of school almost immediately (I was an Econ student at Suffolk in Boston). I joined Stripe right after graduating from Hacker School batch[2].

College is not the only source of pre-determined differentiation.

The fact that you went to Hacker School is also indicative of superior financial position and accreditation. Hacker School is a very well known and respected program that is (anecdotally) incredibly hard to get into. Moreover, since it is in NYC and is effectively equivalent to a full-time job, doing it necessitates a large amount of savings or a really generous network.

Hacker School is about as close as a training program can get to emulating the inhibiting factors of "top colleges."

While many of us did go through Harvard, MIT etc, about half of us don't have degrees - I dropped out of high school.

Are there companies with engineering teams and products that are equally as highly regarded without the Ivy League pedigree?

If the answer is yes, then it seems like your assertion is incorrect.

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