Fog Creek's Intern Hiring Process
behindthescenesrecruiter.com
behindthescenesrecruiter.com
I'm not sure how I feel about how many interviews and how long this process is. I know some of my fellow students would be completely blindsided by such a long process unless it was clearly laid out. The compensation seems nice from the companies that hire around here (I go to a predominately STEM university in the Mid-West and all the companies I interviewed with came to our career fair in February, which is pretty late in the process). I'll make just over half that much monthly, but it'll be June-December and in STL. The highest I've heard from my classmates is 7k/month, but that was from Exxon Mobile and there was very little technical parts of the interview. He did have to take a hair test for drugs though. Ideally, I believe most of the larger corporations, like Boeing, Monsanto, etc, (like the article said) start interviews after the fall career fair.
Another side note about compensation: Seems to be pretty wide spread between 13-30/hr (without adding in housing) at companies around the Midwest. I don't exactly have the greatest academic credentials though (3.0 gpa), so some of the more selective companies may pay more, especially for graduating seniors. Exxon-Mobile being the highest, Boeing right in the middle of that range, and a local ISP looking for a non-coding cs major on the low end for the curious.
edit: Just adding in details as I get time.
FORGOT THE MOST ANNOYING THING
I was given the offer on Friday and he needed an answer on Monday, else he was going to extend the offer to other candidates. This was pretty obnoxious to me, but I ended up taking the offer because I was interested in it more than my other potential offers, but seriously, recruiters, a weekend is not enough time to get back to you with an offer, especially when other companies are asking you to keep them notified with enough time that they can either speed things up or not waste time on a candidate.
A weekend is plenty. You're an intern: there are many, many more of you to choose from. As you pointed out, nobody wants to waste time. The person that offered you the placement wants someone who wants to be there, not someone looking for an backup offer.
All in all, a weekend is certainly not "plenty". I sympathize with crazypyro.
With regards to the decision around where you might spend months of your life, it's not like the location of the internship was a secret before crazypyro interviewed. The question about whether the company will treat the intern well is more nuanced, and you'd have to go with your gut.
Given the competitive nature of the market for CS interns and the quick decisions needed, the Secretary Problem might offer a good solution for crazypyro and others in that situation.
Well, I tend to think a bit about these matters before applying.
The differences in compensation aren't that huge, and it's just a summer, and the interns themselves are usually still living off of their parents. So, usually anyone that's agonizing over nickel and dime stuff that early in their career likely has no enthusiasm for what they would be working on (which by itself is reason enough for not taking an intern), and might be super entitled on top of that, also not a good thing. Because, again, we're talking about mostly CS undergrads here. A very small number of them might have a big impact over the course of a summer, but for the majority of them it is practically charity for these companies to take them on- they're not getting anything out of it other than giving a potential future employee some hand-on experience.
And, it's an employer's market- there are plenty of equally qualified interns to choose from in many cases, as well as a small window of time in which they either have to pick an intern or not get one at all. If they gave everyone weeks to make a decision, they could easily end up taking so long to even find an intern that they would run out of time in which to do it.
I don't really think there's a justification for exploding offers that prevent people from considering alternatives, it's mainly just a way for employers to attempt to get the upper hand. From what I've seen it's often a) arrogant employers who can't comprehend that they're not the only attractive place to work b) game-playing employers who know that most college-age people aren't going to stand up to unreasonable demands and that these sort of gambits can prevent them from having to actually compete directly with other employers c) employers who do have an urgent need to fill a position (i.e. who aren't hiring an intern).
This is known as an "exploding offer". In fact, Joel Spolsky (founder of Fog Creek, the company featured in this article) has a great post on this practice[0] (spoiler: he's against it).
What is such complicated product that Fog Creek makes that it needs graduates from top 10 universities? Serious question.
I doubt that they met all of their applications at the Job fairs, and even if they did, it appears that Fog Creek also attended the SBU CS Fair (which is decidedly not an Ivy League).
http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2012/07/15/rockstars-went-where/
For all the advice on hiring Joel has given (and its annoying tone for what is, basically, a very simple app company, and not even a very exciting one at that), you'd think they were coding for the space program or something.
The answer, I think, is because they are in the unique position of being able to get away with it. In the normal course of events you'll do worse looking for candidates from Ivy League universities than from people who haven't gone to college because you're fishing in a pool that has already been thoroughly fished by your competitors. But Fog Creek frankly doesn't have very many competitors in this regard, at least not ones remotely in the same league. They seem to be so much better at hiring interns than almost anyone else (in the sense of having a strong brand name to attract attention in the first place, a rigorous selection process and generous offers to those selected) that they will probably be able to pick the cream of the crop no matter where they look, so they have no need to look further afield.
So I think it's a case where the number one player can get away with something the rest of us couldn't.
I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.
If you are on a student visa (which clearly a full time employ isn't), then there are some hoops to jump through in order to work, but I am not familiar with the necessary steps.
That doesn't really jive with the not caring "about which school you went to" bit. If that's the criteria it eliminates all but 2 of the top 25 public universities which is flat out ridiculous.
In an interview the school you go to doesn't really matter if you can't code.
A great github account would probably help you more in our interview process than a degree from MIT.
That doesn't mean you have to go to one of those schools to get in - which school you went to is treated as a weak signal in the resume reviews, and is ignored for the rest of the process. I went to a public school that falls outside of the 30% rule, for example, and another from my school will be joining us this summer.
At the graduate level, there are only two ivies in us news's top cs list
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
I couldn't find specific CS rankings at the undergraduate level, but for engineering in general, the same thing (this time, only one ivy on the list, Cornell)
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
I understand that there are problems with methodology here, and I have no doubt that many ivy programs are excellent, but it's still strange that people would use "ivy league" as shorthand for elite CS programs.
My guess is that Fog Creek's perspective is heavily influenced by its east coast location? Also, general education tends to matter more for undergraduates, so it could be that the general prestige of the "ivies" is a bigger factor than the specialized nature of departments where it comes to raking graduate programs or specific majors.
$6,000 a month comes to a shade less than $40/hour. Bear in mind that most full time students work only in summers so although considerable federal tax is deducted from this amount, the intern is likely to receive most of it back when filing taxes next year.
Also, catered lunches plus an apartment in NYC plus two amazing events in twice a week (which likely include dinner) means that the only money that needs to be spent is a handful of weekday dinners plus weekend fun, and I haven't even gotten to the thousand dollar signing bonus yet!
Being in college, I knew about 10-12 others who interned last summer in the Bay Area. With most companies in the SF Bay Area you're looking at about $27 to $34 at most large companies in the south bay and $35 to $40 in SF. Plus an hourly pay scale means that interns don't get paid on holidays like 4th of July, Labor Day, or when they get sick (didn't know anyone who got paid monthly instead of hourly in the Bay Area). I haven't heard of housing benefits in the south bay much and heard of only one company in SF that threw in free housing.
(Sorry about a long comment focusing only on the financial aspects of an internship program but it is an important factor that debt-ridden students take into account).
A couple of points I'd like to touch on:
* Be sure to provide your interns with a ton of guidance, and promote this in during your recruitment process. Many of my fellow students are turned off by the bigger companies since they feel like they won't be able to make an impact. As a smaller company, this is your ace in the hole. Use it to your advantage.
* Personally, exploding offers leave a bad taste in my mouth. Everyone knows how long the recruitment process takes, and you should give the intern the common courtesy to make an informed decision. The last thing you want is a disgruntled intern on your payroll for a few months.
* You should consider internships as an investment. Build a relationship with your intern, and it will pay numerous dividends in the long run. They might return for a full-time position or they may refer a friend that they respect. A good way to support your intern during the school year is to sponsor a hackathon or an interview workshop at their school. This gets you face-to-face with some of the most motivated hackers at any school, where you can begin the courting process.
Just some quick thoughts from the student's side of the table.
I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan, UIUC, or Purdue it's clear that there is a lot of talent in the midwest. Just because someone wasn't born on a coast or with a connection to an ivy league school doesn't mean they don't make a cut for selectiveness.
If you have zero time to weed a large pile down to a small one and thus no other choice, I can see this being a logical step. However, if you're hiring for any engineering position and the application form doesn't ask for a link to something the candidate has built (be it on Github, Sourceforge, or just on the web in general), you're likely missing out on the most important metric.
The other turnoff in this was the weeding out of candidates based on resumes. We hired an excellent employee out of a batch of horrid resumes- what a great hire, though.
Rutgers is The State University of NJ[2]. It is a very old institution (8th oldest), and that may be where the confusion comes from, since all the other Ivy's came from that time period.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Members [2] http://www.rutgers.edu/
I personally think this is silly.
1. *Going to recruiting sessions.* Going to recruiting sessions
is expensive and time-consuming, as Liz noted. To go to
recruiting sessions, therefore, you have to optimize your bang
for the buck, and *that's* where the selective schools show up:
Fog Creek simply did get a better pool of applications when
going to selective institutions. There are other things that Fog
Creek can do to optimize for candidates who actually build things,
and it turns out they do those things, too (sponsoring intern events,
sponsoring OUTC, and so on). But career fairs at selective schools
can be enormously effective, and are a bit easier to come by.
2. *Evaluating applicants.* When Fog Creek does résumé screening, a
whopping *one out of seven points* is awarded for going to a
selective institution. Everything else--having a portfolio, having
passion, demonstrating follow-through, etc.--has absolutely nothing
to do with where you went to school. And that's *only* used for the
résumé screening. Once you get your foot in the door and talk to
a human, it never comes up ever again, in any context. (When I joined,
Fog Creek even did double-blind interviews to enforce that!)
Outside of that, school selectivity has been only a mediocre predictor for individual candidates. You shouldn't ignore it outright, but you shouldn't be entranced by it. We've had MIT candidates who couldn't really program and a guy whose school I don't even remember who killed it.
There's no way I would've turned down the Fog Creek opportunity back then, though, it sounds like a very well planned program at an awesome company. There were many internships in the Philadelphia area, for developers, that paid half that salary with no perks on top of the pay at all. On the other hand, the interview process at nearly all the companies consisted of sending a resume and sitting down for 30 minutes to talk about past experience. I interviewed at 4-6 companies a year to get my 3 internships, with a ~75% acceptance rate (offered the internship), and not one involved multiple interviews or a single code screen. The west coast interview process just doesn't exist out here.
I didn't find the groceries/food to be all that expensive.
Palantir - 7,500 - 1,200 for housing if you choose
Facebook - 6,200 + free housing
Salesforce - Varies per year, 34.50/hr for rising junior, housing.
Cisco - 22/hr
Quora and Dropbox are both missing from this list but they both have higher salaries than Palantir, but not by too much.
[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/25-highest-paying-companies-in...
Also, there are other places in the industry that pay even higher. But I'd include those with Quora and Dropbox as Tier 1.
In short, Fog Creek is at most Tier 2, along with Google / Facebook, etc.
As covi mentioned, Palantir, Quora, Dropbox all pay about roughly the same but are very willing to negotiate and pay more if necessary.
Are 4 interns really more useful than 3 seniors? Really?
You're paying for more than the intern's time - you also get first crack at hiring them full time (with a 3 month interview to decide who you want). In the current job market, that's worth quite a bit.
Those interns will turn into salaried FTEs whose first three year's annual compensation – amortised signing bonus, stock grants, and performance bonus included – will be ~150k. Compared to new graduate FTEs, interns are positively cheap!
The ~6.5k, housing inclusive, perks out the wazoo also all come from highly profitable, competitive companies falling over each other to recruit from a highly constrained pool. There are only so many Stanford, MIT, and CMU graduates a year, and an even smaller number of hackathon winners, open source contributors, inveterate interns, etc. For many, this is the last time they'll ever openly be on the job market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
I admit it could have been edited a bit better (read: more interesting), but it was still fun to get a bit more of an inside view of a process like this.
I'd assume having year round interns and a continuous recruitment process would be less disruptive to the team's work velocity and give you a bit bigger reach for students too.
Plus, I'm a bit jealous of some of the summer-only internships at a lot of interesting companies. Can't complain about graduating with 18+ months of interesting work experience pretty much guaranteed though.
I'll take my standard $50/hour rate and avoid these rat-races. 400 applicants and only 8 hires!? YIKES. Are these fellas going to the moon?
(I have no connection to the firm, though I have read pretty much everything that Joel has written)