Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Of course she is going to get internal flak: she's basically saying the current management is incompetent and needs to raise the bar because she can't continue to blindly trust the hiring decisions that are being made on a day to day basis.

Brutal but how else will you separate the wheat from the chaff?

View on HN

By looking at their code? Testing? Hiring based on their university instead of their chops is pretty narrow minded. I would be livid if I found a great candidate but was refused the approval to hire them just because they didn't graduate from MIT or Stanford.

To be fair Google has had a similar unofficial policy for ages and it has worked well for them =)

(Not supporting it either way...a bit undecided myself)

Yahoo is not an algorithm company

Has it though, really?

Google's company-defining products are (in my opinion):

  Search - not relevant to hiring practices, Search came before the company
  Gmail - initial version made by Paul Buchheit - 
    Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
  Adsense - created by Oingo and acquired by Google
  Android - created by Danger and acquired by Google 
    (Andy Rubin - Utica College, Utica, New York)
  Chrome - basically Webkit, created by KHTML project and Apple

As far as I can tell, the breakthroughs Google has had are completely unrelated to any Ivy League hiring practices.

In addition to having a few key products, a company also needs hordes of smart, hardworking and reliable people to keep things running and add incremental improvements. Top grades from a good university is a pretty good filter for "smart, hardworking and reliable."

Agreed -- it's a good filter for a higher probability of better talent (note: I say "probability" and not "guarantee") and their stock price and potential for growth speak for their human resources strategy.

The YHOO investors whose interests lie along those of the top-20 universities can be placated with a policy like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com