If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewing.io/if-you-care-about-diversity-you-should-stop-hiring-from-the-same-five-schools/ <comment><USER2> When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR (sorry, "people ops") folks and a SWE or two talking over Google Hangouts to auditoriums full of kids at _FIVE_ different schools which they called "Long Tail". (and UB wasn't even one of them)

I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.

<comment><USER3> _> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc)._

Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't _assume_ I want to talk to you and _tell_ me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me _noticeable shade_ for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.

<comment><USER4> Google's interviewing process is incongruously uneven compared to the rest of the company, which is top-notch. I recommend giving it another thought. (Disclaimer: ex-Googler.)

<comment><USER3> Google can't offer me anything I want anymore. They could have when I was less experienced, but I have enough in my toolbox that ending up stuck in a Google ecosystem for years and losing my edge would be a net negative.

(I guess there's always the wheelbarrow of money, but they don't really even do _that_ anymore, at least here in Boston.)

<comment><USER5> If you work at google the little shits on the internet can't say "LuL ur just not good enough" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went to a non-top tier undergraduate school. I made efforts--at big companies as well as the one I founded--to recruit from my _alma mater_. I ended up defaulting to NYU, Harvard and Stanford.

Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. They said I should have gone through them first. Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job. They then suggested this CEO come to their fall freshman career fair. I said no, it's a high-profile company, they'd prefer if you curated a list for them. (MIT and NYU, amongst others, do this.) No response.

Consider, too, that 90% of recent-college graduate recruiting (in finance, at least) is less about finding brilliance than finding someone who won't make dumb mistakes. The Ivy League produces a consistent product. They hold no monopoly on genius. But the variance around others' outputs is too high for a young firm.

All that said, I never turn down an outbound email. (It's how I broke into the industry.) I also think it's important, as your firm develops, to keep an eye on broadening recruiting.

Closing note: in response to recent news, I started thinking about our workplace's gender diversity. It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.

<comment><USER7> > Career services at non-top tier schools are shit.

Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor.

Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying:

"James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of Engineering from Exxon will be taking questions." "Bring your resume and chat with recruiters." "Women's Society will be hosting Barclays tonight."

My state school had nothing. All of the leg work was done by individual students.

<comment><USER8> > I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly > emails saying: "James Dimon is coming to speak."

Interesting, and I can see it. But then again, I have to wonder if there is some degree of confirmation bias at play here?

It's likely the staff in Career Services at $ivyLeague are, on average, of a higher skill than their counterparts at $stateSchool. But by how much? Sending an email isn't exactly a massive technical accomplishment, and even being able to send an email saying Mr. Dimon is coming to speak might say a lot more about the name of the school they work for than it does their ability as administrators.

A school like Harvard has a lot more clout in name, money, and connections, in getting someone like Dimon, Blankfein, Zuckerberg etc... to speak(or even pick up the phone) than, say, New Mexico State University.

It may be organizational skills and capability, but I'm willing to bet it's also about name recognition, alumni connections, and availability of resources.

<comment><USER9> My guess is that it is about political will. If people in career services want a fief where "Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job." \-- then it will take political capital to fight that. Depending on their incentives, university bosses might not bother.

But the Ivy League schools know that their bread is buttered by their ability to get students into elite positions, so they make sure their career services department gets things right. And have been doing so for so long that these departments do things right on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious bias or anything else that is theorized/proven to exist and affect outcomes.

I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.

It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.

Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.

<comment><USER11> The underlying assumption is that, if you average over a large enough population, there should be no underlying consistent difference between subsets selected on gender, race, or class, so a difference of outcome is presumed to be a result of difference of opportunity.

The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.

<comment><USER10> Right - like I said, fighting equality of opportunity is worthy and must be pursued relentlessly.

What seems to be happening (the impression I get) is something analogous to this:

I have a game released on two mobile platforms - android and iOS. The iOS players are disproportionately scoring better than the android players.

Some are suggesting that the server is bugged/programmed to give iOS players better scores. I reject this.

Some are saying that the android user experience has conditioned those players to be satisfied with a low score. I reject this.

Some are saying iOS players are superior because they bought an apple product. I reject this.

My opinion that it is likely that the android release has a lot of performance issues which impede the player's ability to get a high score on that platform. I test this out by doing things like getting an android player to play on an iOS device, and checking if their performance improves. I do the reverse and check accordingly too. I do various tests on fps, input lag, etc.

If my experiment fails to show anything conclusive, I should be open to re- evaluating some of the things I rejected, but I refuse to do it out of zealous belief in my hypothesis. The answer must be optimization, I insist.

If my experiment succeeds, I should tweak the android code till the disparity goes away. Instead, I just hardcode +500 to the android scores and pat myself on the back.

There seem to be cases where the diversity disparity is "solved by hardcoding", and other cases where the data doesn't support the hypothesis, but there is an ardent refusal to accept it, as if it would be blasphemous to suggest otherwise. These are pretty much the only things I take issue with.

<comment><USER11> _If my experiment fails to show anything conclusive, I should be open to re- evaluating some of the things I rejected, but I refuse to do it out of zealous belief in my hypothesis._

You are arguing a straw man. The "experiments" in this case _are_ showing ample evidence of biases, so as long as those biases exist the underlying hypothesis can by definition not be falsified.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps I am not very well read on the subject. My argument was rooted in the attitude I came across when this story was trending (linked at the end of this comment). This research might have been disproved later on, I never followed up on the story. What I was referring to was the readiness with which some were willing to stop pursuing this sort of trial.

My intent wasn't to strawman - if this is in fact non-existent then I concede that point.

[http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd- recruitment-t...](http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment- trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was an undergraduate at a no-name university for various personal reasons. A Google, Microsoft and other big tech co offices were nearby. Throughout my undergrad, not a single event, talk or recruiting opportunity emerged. I understand this: the top people are the same everywhere but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people.

I am now at a world famous grad school and there are talks, events, opportunities every week. I would say the best 5% at the undergraduate school were approximately at least as good as the average undergraduate here.

Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.

How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?

<comment><USER13> I recently moved from St. Louis to New York City. The number of recruiting emails I receive has probably quadrupled (or more). In all things, it helps to be where the people you want to find you are looking.

Also: protip for people in the South or Midwest who are open to relocation: change your online profiles to say you're in the new location.

<comment><USER14> As a data scientist living in the South, I have no problem relocating to San Francisco or San Jose, but how do I signal this without letting my existing employer know? Changing my LinkedIn location from <tiny city> to San Francisco would raise some uncomfortable questions.

<comment><USER15> Maybe it's ok to let your employer know? It's not as if the desire to relocate could be solved by your current company if all of their operations are local. I suppose it depends on your manager, but hopefully if you said "Boss, I want to move to San Francisco. The growth opportunity there is too great to ignore." they might be supportive. Obviously if you think that conversation could go very badly then you might have to be a bit more low-key. Maybe try to reach out to a recruiting firm in San Francisco instead of changing your LinkedIn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _No company, not even the tech giants, can cover every school or every > resume submitted online._

Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.

But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they're in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on "hiring broadly" have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your expectations of your employees have to be so much lower.

The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why we're really proud of what we do at interviewing.io. All students have to go through a series of practice interviews, so by the time they talk to companies, we know they're great, and so far, most of the students we've presented have gotten offers, independently of their backgrounds.

With our model, we free up companies from having to worry about exactly what you described because we incur the vetting.

<comment><USER18> Do I understand correctly that on the candidate side the person can go through a sequence of interviews without the possibility of actually meeting a hiring company? Also that you only work with students?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have 2 pools: a practice pool and then a pool where you get guaranteed interviews with employers. If you do well in practice, you can book real interviews with any number of top companies who've come to trust in the quality of our users.

This goes for both senior engineers, and more recently, students.

<comment><USER19> Do you have stats on how many of your customers are in their 30's and 40's? I would think that demographic would find practicing very useful since they have been out of touch with algorithms for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Median interviewing.io user currently has 6 years of experience (we don't ask people their ages).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is true not just for engineering hires. I recently experienced this with more evolved roles such as PM and PMMs.

Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain.

Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boilerplate response without even talking to anyone. Some sleuthing revealed this big tech firm tends to recruit heavily from McKinsey. Most people at the role had this trajectory BA at Ivy League --> 2 yrs work exp --> MBA (Top 10) ---> Big Consulting ---> Big tech.

This seems to bode well who could afford either an ivy league education and an expensive MBA. Leaves little room for folks with street experience. On the other side, maybe it calls for long-term gorilla marketing tactics to really sell your personal brand.

<comment><USER21> PM and PMM at big companies are effectively middle-management. Business manager hiring leans toward the trajectory you describe because 1) its the largest, traditional low-volatility career path for top performers out of good schools 2) it ensures the candidate has passed through a number of relatively rigorous admission filters on pedigree, culture, diligence and performance, and 3) at successful large companies the senior managers/execs are mostly MBA grads and they themselves are biased to hiring younger versions of themselves as reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When we find a candidate we're interested in pursuing, we ask our recruiting operation to do two things prior to sending us the candidate's resume.

1) Remove the candidate's name/address. Replace with local-to-office = yes|no. Leave phone for screening call.

2) Replace the candidate's education credentials with yes|no on post-HS attendance, and the focus of study. No other information necessary.

It's made a huge difference to us.

<comment><USER23> Is GPA included? I bombed my first two years at school due to being totally unprepared. I took a semester off and came back to actually do well but the damage was done. I was consistently looked over at nearly every career fair interview. I never put my GPA on my resume and the moment the question would come up, I already knew they weren't going to hire me despite anything else on my resume or what we discussed in the interview. The only time I would actually get offer letters is when no one asked my GPA. I know that internships are competitive and I would only want to be judged on merit but being judged solely on one number was the most frustrating thing during school.

<comment><USER22> No.

We have yet to find a predictive correlation between GPA and performance metrics for our employees and their work.

<comment><USER24> Seeing as you've done some exploratory inference, are there any surprising correlations you _have_ found?

<comment><USER22> I lead teams of software engineers, and what we have learned is that those who bring drive and active energy in their positions excel the best. It's a performance business, and over the long haul effort matters greatly.

It's also a marathon. Tech is constantly changing, and we all need to stay current and avoid becoming a dinosaur. It requires a persistent drive to always be willing to learn new things, to challenge what you've learned in the past, and stay on top of changes in our industry.

We put our trust in those who sustain this over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't this one of the primary reasons why those particular schools are "elite". Because of the alumni base and "connections" you can make at these schools? It sucks but I feel like most students enter college knowing how this system works and therefore try their darnest to get into one of those elite schools. I went to a school that had career fairs with 50 kids standing in every line waiting for their resumes to be put into a trash pile. Save for 5-10 students who may have gotten professor recommendations it was a complete waste of time. Only now am I getting reached by recruiters from the Big 4. Honestly I can't even fully wrap my head around having that kind of opportunity at 22-23 years old.

<comment><USER23> I went to a major state research university for engineering. During career fairs, the big companies would always have huge lines for hours and the unknown, smaller companies would be doing their best to grab every uninterested kid walking past. The big companies were usually a waste of time to talk to (and waste of time waiting to talk to). They would sort resumes by GPA and pitch the bottom 90%. Then you would still be competing against everyone at every other school in the region. Unless you are just looking to name drop your previous employers, the experience is really what matters. I would usually go right to the smaller companies and be able to have actual discussions with an engineering manager or even a VP. Those companies would almost always call you back and be interested for an actual interview.

<comment><USER26> If you want to one day start a startup you should stay away from big companies, the skills and experience you get at the right startup can make the difference.

<comment><USER27> If you want to one day start a startup, the huge paycheck you get from the big companies can definitely make that a lot easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There are actually two overlapping long tail effects here: top schools and huge companies. Only one quadrant of this 2x2 grid works well for on-campus recruiting.

For everyone else, there's a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.

It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: [https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs- college](https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college)

</comment><comment><USER29> I would bet significant amounts of money that if you looked at people based on their in-job performance blinded to background you'd find insignificant contributions from education.

Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlation with school or even undergrad degree for people with any experience at all.

<comment><USER30> I can see this being true if the people work at the same company (and already passed the same filter).

I doubt it would be true over the entire university CS populations. If the only thing you know about two applicants is their university, then the student from a top tier university will on average perform much better than the student from a low tier university.

<comment><USER29> If the only thing you know about two applicants is their university, you literally don't know anything about them and need to start over.

I'm like 99% sure it's zero information. Most hiring processes don't falsify the null hypothesis :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If jobs were screened entirely by competency and personality/fit, with interviews/resumes somehow conveying those aspects of a candidate without any other identifying information revealed about the applicants (no school, age, sex, name, ethnicity, etc), how different would the end result of hiring be? That would make for an interesting study in a variety of industries and fields, if one hasn't been done already.

<comment><USER32> That's what were trying to achieve at Vervoe. Our hiring software is designed to assess candidates primarily via task-based simulations created by experts - that means interview questions that help the Employer assess your skill and judge the candidates based on their answers mostly.

When I myself was hired by Vervoe, I didn't submit any resume, because as our CEO says, resumes are documents about past and don't necessarily show how the candidate will perform now and in future. I only submitted the skill assessing questions. My school (I have none), age, sex, ethnicity, location didn't matter.

I am glad that articles and comments like this exist, shows we're not alone on our mission to show that diversity works better :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tech companies rightly or wrongly (the article doesn't make that strong of a case against) are just outsourcing part of their recruiting to elite universities.

Figuring how much investment flows from tech companies (through the companies and the employees as alumni donators) to these elite universities, it may be a worthwhile investment.

It probably is one of the few reliable signals at scale. Sure, you can pluck out a few smart people from your local podunk uni who for various reasons really are _that_ smart but, didn't get into an elite school but, if you need to hire 200 really smart, really capable engineers this year to feed your growth pipeline Stanford, Harvard, et al isn't that bad.

Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently watched part of this debate and was struck by an admission Peter Thiel dropped about school hire diversity...

"""Peter Thiel: Thank you. Let me actually just start with that question. You know, I went to Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school. Throughout the '90s, I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount. We should only hire people that went to the best schools. And - and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal. And I use this -- and I used to -- I thought this was the most important thing in our society. And over the last four or five years, I've gradually come to shift my views on it for a number of different reasons. The narrow technology context in Silicon Valley, that I saw so many very talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinary well. In some ways, they were also more creative.""" Too Many Kids Go To College- Intelligence Squared U.S. [https://youtu.be/7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468](https://youtu.be/7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468)

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, I think the socioeconomic status of your parents should be more heavily waited in "diversity" measures than skin color.

<comment><USER36> Totally agree, but as another commenter suggested it is difficult to measure socioeconomic status. I think the bigger issue is -- why are negative points applied to Asian applications on my affirmative action schemes, rather than negative points evenly distributed against the entire non-preferred pool? Is anyone seriously arguing that Asian applicants have it easier than caucasians?

Having grown up quite poor in NYC, I was always dismayed by not being able to take advantage of affirmative action programs...but getting selective _negative_ points is just plain unfair.

<comment><USER37> >>> Is anyone seriously arguing that Asian applicants have it easier than caucasians?

Statistically speaking, don't they? Isn't that the reasoning for these "penalties"?

<comment><USER36> I imagine this is a huge can of worms, there is no one answer, and any answer I give will be a broad and imperfect generalization. That said, i'll provide my viewpoint as an Asian-American born and raised in NYC. I'm comparing to others in NYC (obviously there is the broader USA where poverty abounds and knows no color.)

No, most asians of my generation did not have it easier. We rarely had an uncle at a hedge fund or lawfirm suddenly drop an internship in the middle of Junior year high school to beef up our college applications. Few had legacy connections or friends at the investment bank who could write a great recommendation. I went to a top-3 science high school in NYC and by and large, the Asians I saw succeed did it through sheer, soul-crushing hard work. In many cases we had slave masters (our mothers usually, see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_mother](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_mother)) ensuring success at any cost.

 _Sure, most of my friends and I got into ivy league schools in droves, but in many cases it was almost a pyrrhic victory._ I honestly wish I could have normal fun and social development in high school. Instead I was forced to maximize _one and only one objective function_ \-- getting into an Ivy League school.

 _So to answer your question: No, we Asian-Americans dont have it easier, most of us simply overcompensated at great personal cost._

These are all gross generalizations circa 1994-1997 based on my highly diverse high school graduating class of ~800 and another thousand people I know from my neighborhood, civic organizations, summer jobs, etc. I'd value other perspectives.

<comment><USER37> >>> No, most asians of my generation did not have it easier

Again, statistically. On average, people of all colors don't have an uncle at a hedge fund...

>>> So to answer your question: No, we Asian-Americans dont have it easier, most of us simply overcompensated at great personal cost.

In NY... The irony...

And that's if you're anecdotes are true.

<comment><USER36> >> Again, statistically. On average, people of all colors don't have an uncle at a hedge fund...

Huge numbers of people I went to undergrad with had uncles at hedge funds or big law firms. Those are the people I was competing with for entrance. You're absolutely right, I was never competing with many people in the Midwest (of all races) who had it worse than me because large populations amongst the Ivy League schools come from ~2 dozen high schools. My high school was proud to produce 71 (i think, something around that) students who proceeded into Ivy League schools from our graduating class (for whatever that is worth.) It is even more with 5 other NYC schools and a couple on Massachusetts.

Finally, You dont need to believe my anecdotes -- you can read hundreds of first-hand accounts online. When the "Tiger Mom" NY Times article and book came out, you chould see the outpouring of condemnation of some of this NY (and broader) Asian subculture -- a lot of it was from Asians like myself.

I encourage you to read the comments section of that famous article as well as the dozens of offshoot conversations and heated debate that ensued over the persoanl/emotional/psychological cost of success at any cost mentality.

<comment><USER37> >>> Huge numbers of people I went to undergrad with had uncles at hedge funds or big law firms.

Yes, in a top school in NY.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for "penalising" or "rewarding" anyone for their skin color. I hope you didn't get that message from me.

I am way more into personalised life experience reward/penalty system. And that should be limited to scholarships based on socio economic situation, not test scores.

<comment><USER36> >> Yes, in a top school in NY.

Well that is sort of my point...When Asians compete for spots at top universities, they arent really competing against the entire united states, they are competing against the _applicant pool._

Ivy League schools get more valedictorian applications than there are seats. Some get more perfect SAT scores than there are seats, so they end up using other factors like sports, well-rounded-ness, speaking ability, unique experiences, etc.

A lot of the folks in that applicant pool have all sorts of unique experiences -- summar safaris in africa, a performance at Lincoln Center, summer internship at a major law firm, internship at some Congressperson's office, etc, etc.

Those types of non-academic admissions factors disfavor most minorities (they _espcially_ disfavor those of African descent given the lack of diversity in most of those fields, which is why i can appreciate affirmative action for clearly underpriviledged groups.)

Now, things are getting better for Asians, Indians, etc and are certainly better than what they were in 1996 when I applied to college. People always tend to point at Nadella, Pandit, Pichai -- but seriously -- how much of the real power base in the US is actually diverse?

 _Looking beyond technology into the broader economic, cultural, media, and political base of the US, can anyone really argue that Asians are so well represented that they deserve Negative application points relative to all others?_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >interviewing.io evaluates students based on their coding skills, not their resume. We are open to students regardless of their university affiliation, college major, and pretty much anything else (we ask for your class year to make sure you're available when companies want you and that's about it). Unlike traditional campus recruiting, we attract students organically (getting free practice with engineers from top companies is a pretty big draw) from schools big and small from across the country.

Sweet pitch and of course a genuine problem. But companies have very limited resources and they use them at elite schools which have already stringent requirements to get in. Alternatively, I now see most companies are giving a hackerrank test as a start irrespective of your school. I guess this is a starting point to avoid the bias towards top schools.

<comment><USER39> "stringent requirements"

like "oh, one of your parents was a student here? here, you're in".

Harvard is _one-third_ legacy[1].

> at five Ivy League schools, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown, as > well as 33 other colleges, there are more students from families in the top > one percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

stringent requirements, sure, but certainly not the right kind.

[1]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class- is-o...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-one-third- legacy.html)

<comment><USER38> That alone doesn't get you an admission. When 2 students has equal test scores, GPA and everything else, your family association definitely helps. This doesn't mean, they accept not so smart people because their parents went to the same school.

<comment><USER40> Exactly, the argument is that it shouldn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hey Aline!

Regarding diversity, have you needed to steer away from any particular anonymous interviewing techniques because that technique heavily favored a particular demographic? A silly example would be that you no longer allow people to do tests at 8:30 a.m. GMT on Tuesdays because only a certain demographic did disproportionately well in that timeslot. If yes, can you give an example?

Side note, I really liked the interview you gave Software Engineering Daily. That was the first time in a long time I heard about an attempt to make technical recruiting better that actually sounded better to me! [1]

[1] [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/19/interviewing...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/19/interviewing- io-with-aline-lerner/)

</comment><comment><USER42> I've worked on a few teams at my job that only seemed to hire from GA Tech, MIT or Purdue (engineering), though I was the odd one out in coming from a non-engineering background (math) from a state school. Intellectual inbreeding is a big problem in some areas. New ideas tend to emerge when folks with separate (or even seemingly disparate) perspectives find ways to address a common problem. This can describe multidisciplinary teams, but also teams with folks who learned the same subject in different ways.

That said, I do agree that I've always been impressed with prospective hires & the students we've mentored from top-tier schools. But I also know that a great student could come from anywhere, and if they also happen to be local it can be a real value multiplier.

</comment><comment><USER43> This article is about first jobs out of school (interesting to me b/c my kid just started university).

How much does it matter after that first job? I couldn't tell you were _any_ of my co-workers went to school -- in hiring the work a candidate did previously and what people I know say about their work matters.

However I am quite conscious that people give me the benefit of the doubt based on where _I_ went to school (I hope it's obvious I mean people who can look me up on LinkedIn, not random people). I've had some absurdly far-fetched ideas, some of which turned out to be quite lucrative and some of which turned out to be stupid. I doubt I would have gotten the time of day without that brand name.

<comment><USER44> For those company where school names open the door, it's still going to open the door for later jobs. Your previous employer names may also open the door. But many companies that hire only from top schools also hire only from top companies, or at least well known companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Agreed. As someone who recently graduated from a relatively good (2100 median SAT score) school that ISN'T a top five CS school, it was absolutely insulting how often I was completely ignored by companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I understand that the median of talent is probably worse at my school than at, say, MIT or Stanford, but the top quarter of my CS year was full of brilliant people who had an unnecessarily difficult time getting hired by top tier tech companies for no good reason.

These companies could definitely improve their hiring quality by drawing top- tier students at lesser schools instead of hiring below-median talent from target top schools.

<comment><USER46> My experience is that there's almost always some top tier talent no matter what school you're in. Particularly when young, the school one goes to is often more a choice of circumstance and randomness than of deliberate thought and Oracle-like forsight on the school's behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you care about diversity stop interviewing on these stupid algorithmic questions! Getting a job literally depends on buying the cracking the coding interview book and solving these stupid problems. I know some of my course mates who worked on very interesting projects but couldn't get a job because they couldn't white board a tree balancing problem :D

<comment><USER48> I agree that whiteboard coding interviews that assess mastery of algorithms and data structures with low applicability to the role are not optimal for hiring.

However, I don't really agree that this is a "diversity" problem, except perhaps weakly so in that it optimizes against people who don't want to study algorithms for interviews. But interviews by definition optimize against some subset of the general population; unless you're defining diversity so loosely that it can be satisfied by the sets `{studies algorithms for interviews}` and `{doesn't study algorithms for interviews}` (and in that case, how are they different)? That's sort of like saying a tech company shouldn't optimize its interviews for people who like to watch baseball versus people who don't - they absolutely shouldn't do that, but that's meaningless as a diversity metric, in my opinion.

How are you defining diversity?

<comment><USER11> The article touched on this a bit. If you have a nonstandard background, you are less likely to have prepared for these kinds of situations because it's less likely you have parents, mentors, or peers to learn these things from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sending alums back to top tier schools is also part PR too for the companies. "Hey look Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are on our campus today. Great companies at great colleges gets great news coverage".

</comment><comment><USER50> Interesting, but I don't actually care about diversity. The Silicon Valley giants, often criticized for their low diversity, are among the most successful companies of all time. Apple, the least diverse of them, is the most successful. Forgive me for following the example of the Usain Bolts and not the findings of sprinting researchers.

</comment><comment><USER51> Went to no-name school. My career's been just fine, similar to peers who attended top-tier schools.

It works both ways. Kids who grow up in families who push them to attend big- name universities, will grow up to be adults who find it important to work for big-name companies.

There's a lot of opportunity outside that track too though.

</comment><comment><USER52> Further proof that SV use of the word diversity is closer to a euphemism for assimulation. That is, diversity isn't a source for different backgrounds and experiences; but a biological signal to be optimized in order to maximize public perception, while ideas remain essentially the same.

<comment><USER53> Precisely. And how could SV be blamed for treating it as such? "Diversity" is not even contextually correlated with class consciousness, and we are only confusing each other when we attempt using it this way.

If enough political pressure is placed on SV over class concerns like this, where would the measurement come from? It took statistical evidence to get movement on the more biological concerns, but I'm not sure anecdote alone could have done that. Either way, the result will be little more than a website and some youtube videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Another point on diversity: It's never going to happen to the extent that people want so long as most of the jobs are in Silicon Valley. For many women and minorities and older men (with children), it is difficult to make that move, away from their families. We can't pretend like this isn't a factor. I recently moved to Austin from south Florida and my last company had a very high Hispanic ratio, because it was located in south Florida, where the local population ratio is quite high. I knew many talented developers who couldn't or wouldn't make the move to one of the tech hubs because family. Without spreading out tech jobs over more of the country, you'll never see great representation.

</comment><comment><USER55> This isn't even a problem that's limited to hiring out of schools. I went to a pretty small school in flyover country, and (much as the article outlines) the hardest part about getting a job was certainly not the interviews, it was getting attention from anyone.

Now I'm working at a local tech company near where I went to school, because I only had local connections from internships etc. Recently I've been looking to move on to a new position and, despite having friends inside of multiple companies (Google, Apple, MSFT) refer me, I've gotten exactly one interview.

If anyone is open to suggestions on how to get more attention, I'm all ears. Until then I suppose I get to shotgun application pages endlessly.

<comment><USER56> I had a slightly different issue (non-traditional major for the field I was trying to get into), but I found that it significantly improved my response rates to put my education section at the bottom, instead of the top, of my resume. It made it less likely that a recruiter would dismiss me out of hand based on my education before forming an opinion based on my skills and experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This article hit home for me because I see it _all the time_. I go to a large state school where a 2-3 of the Big4 show up to recruit, but undergrads rarely get offers. We don't pass technical screens (partly on us, partly on the focus of our DS&A classes), and very often we don't even get interviews.

I think about this all the time and it concerns me. I'll never get into a top school now but I do have a big4 internship on my resume on an in-demand ML team - yet, I'm still going to be looked down upon compared to someone that goes to UIUC or Duke _at minimum_ , not even considering people at HYPSM.

Sometimes I wondered if there's a point in trying if I'm already so far behind.

</comment><comment><USER58> I guess I'm just speaking for myself here, but it's depressing that according to many folks in this thread my life path was essentially decided for me by the time I was 18. That being said this is far from the first time I've heard this argument, and largely a reason I decided to get into entrepreneurship. I didn't have the pedigree, my parents went to an even worse state school than I did, and my family largely had no industry connections. If I'm going to jump classes I'll have to do it of largely my own merit. Luckily the public at large doesn't care if a Harvard grad or a state school grad built the company/product they love.

</comment><comment><USER59> I feel there are money ball like opportunities worth millions of dollars per year here. You essentiall have tons of presumably similarly skilled workers who are not getting the attention from big companies. A smart company that knows about hiring should be able to pick from this overlooked group of workers and find the ones that would make their company punch "beyond their weight class".

That is to say, a purely capitalist solution is to hire all of these overlooked workers at a discount and have their output be competitive with the big companies.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Mason, the Harvard student, attends an event on campus with Facebook > engineers teaching him how to pass the technical interview.

> Emily's school has an informal, undergraduate computer science club in which > they are collectively reading technical interviewing guides and trying to > figure out what tech companies want from them. She has a couple interviews > lined up, but all of which are for jobs she's desperate to get. They trade > tips after interviews but ultimately have a shaky understanding of they did > right and wrong in the absence of post-interview feedback from companies.

This pains me every.single.time.

Being part of a specialized recruiting agency, I want to double down on how much preparation and insight before the actual interview matters.

Devs spend most of their time developing, not sitting in interviews, so every recruiter should spend at least a few minutes with every candidate giving them some heads-up.

Not like "for question 1, the answer is b", but like how to carry themselves through the interviews and generally what to expect.

</comment><comment><USER61> Universities are allowed to base their entrance on intelligence tests[1], while companies face a strong legal presumption that using such tests is illegal discrimination. The easy way to get around that problem is to hire out of the highest ranked universities.

[1] Tests like the SAT correlate very strongly with IQ, and are designed to minimize the value of preparation.

<comment><USER62> This was my thought as well. I recall reading that IQ/"G" and work products were the dominant predicative factors for good hires. Can anyone help with a source that confirms/refutes? Since new grads wouldn't have many past work products, it would make sense if employers use university admissions as a proxy for general aptitude testing, which are legally difficult to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Business Town's take on this point is as colorful as it is succinct: [http://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/post/115950267726/bu...](http://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/post/115950267726/businesstown-24-businesstown- is-pretty-darn)

</comment><comment><USER64> 10 years ago I graduated from a school that's not even in the top 100 CS schools. But it was super-duper cheap and i got my foot in the door with hardly any student debt. While I never interviewed at big companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, I have been invited to all 3 for interviews at various times throughout my career (sometimes more than once) and I know a lot of my colleagues have as well. So in my experience the choice of school i went to wasn't in any way detrimental to my career. However, I think the story would've been different if i were an entrepreneur and wanted to have access to the same network that someone in MIT or UC Berkley would have access to. That in my mind would be the biggest benefit of attending a top-tier school, but I don't know how important it is to a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've recently gone through a few rounds of interview with some of these startups (not google or facebook or apple) and I've come to conclusion, that EVEN THOUGH they interview you, they had already rejected you due to your age/school. If you don't fit a certain diversity goal they are pursuing, too bad too.

They are just interviewing you because if they don't interview, it looks bad on them. It doesn't matter because the people ops team are paid for it.

After spending hours/weekends doing the coding/projects tests, on my own time, and not getting offers at the end, AND realizing yah they never wanted you in the first place, it's very disheartening. I was nothing more than a decoration in the hiring musical chair game.

Diversity isn't just about gender/race. It's about age/school too.

</comment><comment><USER66> As a senior at a public university who couldn't afford to go anywhere else but made the most of his opportunities earning a good GPA, participating in clubs, going to hackathons, working in research, learning extracurricular subjects, etc. this topic is devastating.

I've done my best to learn the skills that companies think I should have when I graduate. But it appears many companies will reject me because of who I am not because of what I've done or what I can do if given the opportunity.

Maybe I lack some skills that you only find in candidates from the top universities. It's not from a lack of effort. Why not advertise what those skills are and give everyone an opportunity to learn them and demonstrate them?

Why play this game where you pretend I am some enemy trying to infiltrate your company with ignorance?

</comment><comment><USER67> But doesn't this fall into economics? It could be that they are just biased, but giving them benefit of the doubt, they might have done the math and said "nope the cost to make the recruiting effort to these schools are not worth it"

</comment><comment><USER68> It doesn't seem shortsighted to me to recruit only from top schools, because companies that hire graduates of Stanford or MIT or wherever can and do hire people after they've been in the workforce for a few years to prove themselves. I went to SUNY Albany and didn't even manage a 3.0 GPA, (missed it by _that_ much) and after a few years of working for a local company got contacted by recruiters from both Google and Amazon. They quickly realized I wasn't the sort of person they wanted, but there was no artificial barrier if I had been a genius who was tragically unable to attend a world-renowned school.

</comment><comment><USER69> This article strikes a particularly strong chord with me. I am a student, probably in between the second and third examples, and it is so unbelievably hard to get an interview. I wasn't even aware it was so easy for students at top schools. This is frustrating because college admission for many essentially comes down to the first year or two of high school. That can't be a good indicator of developer performance.

Maybe we need better career services for students at mid-level schools or lower, or maybe we need a company to step in between the gaps. Either way the system is broken right now.

<comment><USER26> College brand means very little for developers.

<comment><USER70> At my company, students at target schools (vt, umd, etc) are offered 20k more than non target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The same top tier schools claim to value diversity very much. Are you going to do better? If you decide to pull from another college at random to counteract only going to the same top five, chances are that college doesn't value diversity as much, and you'll get a less diverse candidate.

If you're focusing on good hires and not necessarily diverse ones, then yeah it's not smart to aggressively filter by school. Talent (even amazing talent) is not exclusive to any member of such a broadly defined set classification.

</comment><comment><USER72> Hmmmm. "tech worker shortage"

</comment><comment><USER73> There are some schools that break the mold. Particularly in Boston. Maybe not completely breaking the mold but the tail is quite longer. I went to a top-100 school and many of my class mates are at companies like NASA, Tesla, Google, Twitter and iRobot.

At the same time, as someone who has tried, the name definitely doesn't get you in the door like a top 5 school might. You need to work harder to prove yourself. (a LOT harder) And Google sure as heck has never gone to my alma mater's career fairs.

</comment><comment><USER74> Someday, people will realize that diversity on its own doesn't solve anything and that people are people. Some are capable problem solvers and some aren't. Some have great technical or leadership skills and some don't.

Hitting some kind of magic ratio won't on its own create better outcomes. If it did, you could just fire your entire company, hire based on gender and ethnicity ratios and performance would improve.

It turns out that companies aren't taking that approach...

</comment><comment><USER75> Love the article, really hit home for me. I attend UCR, which while being a UC, doesn't get nearly enough attention for its engineering program.

If your company would like to put the practices of this article into use, I would be happy to help you diversify your recruiting process! (I'm on the board for many of our engineering orgs.)

UCR has a surplus of _extremely_ qualified students that don't get internships because of the lack of active recruiting happening on campus.

</comment><comment><USER76> A friend told me about their big company's interview process for interns from Ivy Leagues, which was getting flown out to a party and then getting an internship. The candidates weren't asked any technical questions, since they were assumed to be smart enough to learn how to code in bootcamp. It made me feel confused about myself for a while, since I didn't have a job or much experience and it was hard enough getting a phone screen.

</comment><comment><USER77> From what I understand a certain large UK pharma company has already been running an AI based, video conference only recruiting program. So far its been a massive success as the pool of applicants they recruit from grew from just 3 top tier UK universities to about 30. They also noted that the applicants stayed longer in the firm, were a better fit and were marked as a success within the first year of employment.

</comment><comment><USER78> Wouldn't this require at least implicit acknowledgement that top tier schools are not diverse? Subsequently all existing people already at companies need to acknowledge this as well. (Since they are from those schools) It would require breaking the illusion that's it's those "others" who are the "real" problem, both by schools and companies.

</comment><comment><USER79> This graph is goofy: [http://blog.interviewing.io/wp- content/uploads/2017/10/thres...](http://blog.interviewing.io/wp- content/uploads/2017/10/threshold-4.png)

If I'm reading it right, the X-axis is backwards from normal convention (origin in lower-left), but the axis isn't really labelled.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right! Will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I've witnessed the imperfection of using the brand name of a degree as a measure of ability. Numerous times throughout my career as an engineer, I've seen someone from [INSERT WELL-KNOWN DEGREE HERE] outperformed by [INSERT LESSER-KNOWN DEGREE HERE], or in one case by an engineer without a college degree.

I've also witnessed the corruption of the college admissions process first- hand. I went to a high school where many of the students came from privileged families. I've witnessed a student cheat on multiple exams, including an AP exam, get caught multiple times, and have nothing happen to her -- only to later be admitted to an Ivy League. I've seen students who could barely pass AP Calculus get into Stanford and other Ivy Leagues, because their parents had the right name / connections. The bright students also got into good colleges, but the ratio was shockingly close to 50/50\. Unsurprisingly, one of the college admissions counselors for the high school was later caught fabricating admissions materials, and was fired, but only because he became extremely brazen in his lies. If he had been less lazy, he probably would never have been caught. And who knows how many admissions counselors are out there that are just a bit less lazy than he was...

I'm not the only person who feels this way. Look at this Quora thread about MIT admissions: [https://www.quora.com/If-MIT-only-admits-people- with-a-4-0-u...](https://www.quora.com/If-MIT-only-admits-people- with-a-4-0-unweighted-gpa-and-2300+-test-scores-why-doesnt-everyone- with-a-4-0-get-in-and-why-do-people-with-low-GPAs-get-in). An admissions counselor admits to rejecting students who have higher GPA's and test scores. The reasons for doing so may or may not be valid, but that's not the point. The applicants who got rejected in this manner have the potential to become better engineers than many of those who were accepted. And all the brand name universities suffer from this same problem.

The university one attends is a noisy signal that can and should be improved upon. That's why I respected Google's Foobar initiative. It is an unbiased measure of a prospective engineer. The Foobar test doesn't know what college you went to. All it knows is whether you can handle some pretty tough engineering problems. But I think Foobar is only the beginning. In the age of MOOC's, increasingly comprehensive, unbiased tests of this nature should only become more prevalent.

</comment><comment><USER81> Not CS/Engineering related, but I went to a pretty mediocre design program in my country (top of my country but compared to others world wide, not that exceptional), yet studying with designers who ended up being far better than some of the designers I worked with in NYC who graduated from notable (and more expensive) institutions like RISD and Parsons.

</comment><comment><USER82> So maybe I'm missing something, but the graph of the "distribution of school tiers on interviewing.io" is nearly identical to the 1% line in the "where 25 year olds went to school" chart.

Not sure how this is really any different than just sourcing from top schools?

</comment><comment><USER83> The reason they are hiring from top schools, is to raise the barrier to entry into their field. If founder came from school X, they see any future grads from there as a threat. Why not buy all the top talent, to prevent competition? Given unlimited cash (unicorn) why not?

</comment><comment><USER84> The problem is that it is hard to hire, and if you can pick a criteria up front that makes at least some sense then it can help a lot. Justice Scalia explained why he only takes people from the Ivys:

"I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they're probably going to leave the best and the brightest."

In this way you are just taking advantage of the hard work that some college admissions committee put in to sorting your candidates.

Of course my current employer has even less diversity. Out of the 50 people in the IT department here I am one of two that didn't go to school here. When I pointed out that fact my boss defended herself and said that she doesn't consider herself to be from here either because she didn't come to to U-M until grad school. That is what qualifies for an outside hire here.

<comment><USER85> Except, of course, for the legacy admissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I feel all I can offer to this discussion is the revelation of my own sense of hopelessness that I'll likely never pass the watch of the statistical gatekeepers and be permitted entrance to the Kingdom of Success.

</comment><comment><USER87> Might be off track, Is there anyone who used interviewing.io and landed a job?

How was the experience using interviewing.io?

I tried signing up some 2 years ago, it said they are in a private beta and they have been there ever since.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoot me an email, and I'll gladly get you an account. email@example.com

<comment><USER88> Just tacking a question on here - when creating a student account, should I be setting my location to where I'm attending school or where I'm planning on being after graduating?

Looks like interviewing.io is tackling a big issue. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please put your current location. We'll be asking about where you want to work later in the flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> If they miss a lot of talent doing this, there sure is someone smarter hiring all this lost talent! I bet they're going to be billionaires in a few years!

</comment><comment><USER90> This issue is most particularly in India. Here most tech companies even post job ads which specify tier 1 college degree as requirement

</comment><comment><USER91> This article treats "CS graduates" as interchangeable cogs, where the only variables are race, parents' income, and where they grew up. The reality is that particular tech companies have very specific needs around the _kind_ of training someone has. CS curricula vary widely in terms of technologies and depths covered, and applicability to real world problems.

A company like Apple has litte use for someone who has only ever worked on IT- focused Java development. A company seeking the latest AI talent will never find it at a school that trains students on the latest web middleware. And once companies realize they're getting a lot of well- _prepared_ candidates from a particular program, of course they're going to focus on those schools. It would be a waste of time and scarce resources to do otherwise.

<comment><USER92> Im sorry, but this is where you need to check your own biases at the door.

For example, your statement "A company like Apple has little use for someone who has only ever worked on IT-focused Java development.".

Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail infrastructure is a Java backend ( i believe webobjects moved to Java, then was deprecated as an outside project, but kept for internal use, my knowledge is dated on this). Take a look at their jobs site[1]

Now my point wasn't about apple and java. But our own biases that we bring, at every level. We all have biases, but most direct way to effect biases in hiring, is to close your pool down. You need a really wide opening at the beginning of your sourcing funnel to have diversity ( and i mean diversity at every level ).

I work at one of the "big 4" and went to an ivy, but guess what, some of the smartest people I have ever met, had to go to schools based on what their parents could afford. Thats a HUGE selection bias.

So yes, widen your funnel, and recognize your biases ( that we all have, and that basically boil down to having less knowledge ).

[1] [https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=112907897&openJobId=112...](https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=112907897&openJobId=112907897#&ss=java&t=0&so=&pN=0&openJobId=112907897)

<comment><USER57> > Actually, Apple has a need for people like these. Their whole web/it/retail > infrastructure is a Java backend

Not only this, but most new grads are hired in a pool and not for specific skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen The truth is they don't really care about diversity, it's all a PR exercise.

</comment><comment><USER93> Which five schools are they talking about? Harvard, MIT, Stanford,???

</comment><comment><USER94> What if they are 5 highly diverse schools?

</comment><comment><USER95> This is an ad. "We built a better way to hire."

</comment><comment><USER96> In my experience, major companies are aware of this problem, and would love to find a solution.

Frankly, the problem is that, ultimately, they want to hire the best people. Most of the time, the best people are sourced from the top-tier schools.

On the other hand, in my experience, they pride themselves on finding great people from outside of that small circle. When they do find such a person, it's not uncommon for he or she to excel.

<comment><USER27> Define "best".

<comment><USER96> What's your definition?

<comment><USER97> This seems like a deflection.

It's totally legit to ask you what your definition of the 'best' candidate is, because you made a claim: that the best people come from the top schools.

How are we to conclude that your argument has any worth whatsoever when you aren't able to even define the components of the claim you are making?

<comment><USER98> Asking OP to define 'best' is a red herring and it would steer the discussion away from the topic. Deflection is the correct response.

<comment><USER27> No, it isn't. Their entire argument was predicated on "these companies need to hire the best." So they need to define what "best" means in this context. Cause so far, for the likes of Google, it's "Went to an expensive school, and can do whiteboard problems."

<comment><USER96> That's an unfair characterization of Google's hiring process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> > While enjoying a nice free meal in Harvard Square, he has the opportunity to > ask these successful engineers questions about their current work. If he > likes the company, all he has to do is accept the company's standing > invitation to interview on campus the next morning.

What? That sounds almost comical. It seems obviously false, but just in case I will ask:

Is that really what happens at Harvard?

> Anthony goes to a state school near the town where he grew up. He is top in > his class, as well as a self-taught programmer, having gone above and beyond > his coursework to hack together some apps.

Are these "todo list" apps or legit impressive feats? If the former, it almost has no value. If the latter, they will have absolutely no problem getting hired.

<comment><USER100> > Is that really what happens at Harvard?

Yes.

> If the latter, they will have absolutely no problem getting hired.

The whole point of the article is they _won 't_.

<comment><USER99> The whole point of my comment is the article is _wrong_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Wait, what's all this talk about how I could learn all the software technologies and get a job without a degree? I'm 32, highly skilled at algorithmic thinking, and studying to go into the tech industry. After reading this stuff, I want to just go back to doing 3D art. These people sound insufferable.

</comment><comment><USER5> Everyone resents these guys. I don't blame you. There's some serious hatred from ivy leaguers. Serious hatred.

</comment><comment><USER101> Seems like an obvious point, and yet. And yet.

</comment><comment><USER102> The only solution is a government mandate. LAW: No American company can employ more than 5 individuals that graduated from the same university. Problem solved.

Herein lies the beauty of government.

<comment><USER103> So a company with 100,000 employees would have to find 20,000 different universities?

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?

<comment><USER105> Then you would be objectively wrong, because there is no fiduciary responsibility to _maximize_ anything for shareholders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Real diversity is like fine art: you hold some attributes constant and vary other attributes.

For instance, you can keep a similar texture and color palette and use unexpected patterns and geometries; or keep the structure of a symphony but use unexpected instrumentation.

If you stick to expectations too much you will be boring. If you vary too many attributes, it will be chaotic and meaningless.

Similarly, if you choose a random collection of people from around the world and try to make a business, it won't go anywhere. But if you hire all people who followed a prescribed life path, you probably won't be very innovative.

Interestingly, even a single person can be diverse in their ideas. Consider Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

"Diversity" is such a loaded political word now and lost all meaning. It's just cover to whitewash lazy thinking in political correctness. It's common now, in the same breath, to want both diversity and equality of outcomes, which shows how ridiculous our politics have become.</comment>


Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-to-sue-vuze-limewire-and-sourceforge-081114/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the impact of lawsuits on public opinion is evolving in the age of the Internet?

I don't know the specifics of this suit other than having read this article, but it seems that going after SourceForge is the kind of litigious over- reaching that damages the reputation of the plaintiff. I would make the same argument recent RIAA cases, SCO v. IBM, etc. I recognize that there's legal posturing going on here, and that strictly from the lawyers' perspective, public opinion may be nearly irrelevant (in mundane corporate law, anyway).

But the visibility and transparency of these cases has changed. Vast groups of people can follow these cases in minute detail, get the advice and perspective of interested lawyers, even change the course of the cases themselves (Groklaw). I can't imagine this kind of public involvement with corporate legal cases existed twenty years ago.

My question is this: has the Internet made the position of "suing everyone" -- at least as an opening move -- too risky?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why stop at SourceForge - they should probably sue Dell, Microsoft and Tim Berners-Lee as well, as I heard a lot of people use PCs, Windows and the internet for activities which potentially infringe record companies' copyright...</comment>


Reducing the Roots of Some Evil - <AUTHOR> http://codeascraft.com/2013/07/16/reducing-the-roots-of-some-evil/

<comment><USER2> This is a great post, in which the lead security person at Etsy built a system to determine which HTTPS/TLS CA's actually got used in traffic from their office to the Internet. Less than 29% of the CAs their browser trusted actually saw any use!

This sounds like something to be outraged about but is actually constructive good news: if more people repeat the experiment, someone could invest some engineering time into building a tool that would prune out CAs from browser trust stores. Every CA removed from your browser is one less attack vector.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a job for the SSL Observatory? [https://www.eff.org/observatory](https://www.eff.org/observatory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems ok if you have a tech-savvy user base that understands how to re- add a root certificate if they later hit a legitimate site using one of the removed root certs. If you user base isn't that savvy, I'm afraid you would just be training them to ignore SSL errors, which is not great.

Also, I assume the OS and browser vendors do some sort of verification before adding a CA to their list of root certs. Is the message that we shouldn't trust their verification efforts? If so, we should probably use something other than popularity to do our own independent verification.

<comment><USER5> It's not about extra verification, it's about reducing the attack surface.

If your browser trusts 100 different CAs, I can MITM you after compromising any one of those 100. If you only actually use 10 of them, then you can remove the other 90 from your trusted list and make my (the attackers') job 10x harder. More-or-less regardless of which individual CAs take security a bit more seriously than the others, since they're all held to a reasonable minimum standard.

<comment><USER6> "since they're all held to a reasonable minimum standard."

Except the ones that are too big to fail right?

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have done this by hand by manually "untrusting" all CAs and then enabling them one by one as I go along. I never found a good way to move the lists of CAs across browsers. However for ssl-certificates in Debian propagating the list across different machines was a breeze with etckeeper. Being able to apt- get install cawatch would be a lot easier.

Do you really want to rely on China's CNIC to make the decision if you should trust a certificate?</comment>


Some problems of URLs - <AUTHOR> https://noncombatant.org/2017/11/07/problems-of-urls/ <comment><USER3> _But you can get a glimpse of a better naming future by trying out Safari._

 _First, we can remove parts of the URL we don't need or which exacerbate our problems._

I'll be the first to comment and say this: No, no, _NO!!!_

Hiding information from users is _never_ a good thing! All it does is make then even _less_ aware or likely to learn, and that only perpetuates the vicious cycle of ignorance and vulnerability to being tricked.

Incidentally, I was recently forced to use Safari briefly, and absolutely hated the opaqueness --- imagine many tabs all with the same only-hostname in the address bar --- the constant feeling of "where am I, really?" made it very unpleasant and disorienting.

There is plenty of good discussion on this topic here several years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677898)

<comment><USER4> As far as I know, the only browser that shows real URLs is Firefox, and you have to visit about:config and set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false in order to see them. Hiding how URLs work is a terrible trend.

Users should be educated, not treated like they are stupid.

<comment><USER5> Huh? I'm seeing full URLs with browser.urlbar.trimURLs=true here (FF 56).

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what is happening there. When my FF 56 (Ubuntu 16.04) is has it set to true I see: example.com

When false, I see [http://example.com/](http://example.com/)

<comment><USER5> Ah, so this only refers to the trimming of "[http://"](http://")? Maybe I haven't noticed because more are more stuff goes over HTTPS.

<comment><USER4> That's another problem with URL trimming by browsers -- users sometimes see the protocol and sometimes don't. It doesn't make much sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It was initially difficult to understand the motivation because the first half of the post failed to establish "the problem" clearly. I hard to read the entire thing before I had some idea who this was written for and regarding.

The second half clarified most of this but I think the article could do with some revision.

Under any URL-ish scheme, including any simplifications suggested here, nontechnical users will be unlikely to do anything except clicking and copy/pasting. So it really doesn't matter at all to them what the actual text string's structure is. It seems like maybe the article is trying to suggest "advanced" users would benefit from a better system.

Notice that in the screenshots posted, each browser varies somewhat in how it displays the current location. Regardless of the syntax used in a URL-ish string, the browsers can certainly improve the display of this important information.

What about something like this:

[https://i.imgur.com/PTs55Tl.png](https://i.imgur.com/PTs55Tl.png)

Where you only show "nonstandard" portions if they are present, and they can be given special coloring to help alert the user.

When the user interacts with that portion of the UI, they can paste in a URL like normal, just when it is displayed, the parsed version can be shown instead to help them see clearly what they are looking at.

<comment><USER7> I agree, the substance was there, but the story could use some editing and organization. If it were me, it'd look something like:

      1) How people think URLs work, the good parts that people see every day
      2) Abstract problems with URLs, followed by concrete examples, maybe links to prominent related bugs
      3) Suggested fixes for the problems, including what browers are doing at a UX level
      4) Honest look at tradeoffs involved for end users
      5) Remaining complications and unanswered questions

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not showing complete URLs and de-emphasizing URLs are not good ideas. Safari's way of doing things is terrible. Chrome hides the HTTP and chops off trailing slashes. Firefox puts the <title> text before the URLs in the completion dropdown now and it's easier for malicious sites to trick users that way.

The URL is not [https://www.tesla.com](https://www.tesla.com) it's [https://www.tesla.com/](https://www.tesla.com/).

Instead of treating users like they are stupid, educate them. Show them the entire URL and teach them how the WWW works. People are going to encounter URLs anyway (when pasted), so trying to hide their structure is just going to keep making things worse.

<comment><USER8> What's wrong with the first one? It seems perfectly legimate since you can use them interchangeably.

<comment><USER4> The first one is not the real URL that you're visiting. Go to Firefox and turn off URL trimming or open the browser console and type window.location.pathname. The server will add the trailing slash, but the browser will pretend that it isn't there.

Or go to [http://example.com#123](http://example.com#123) or [http://example.com?123](http://example.com?123) and see where you end up.

It makes things more confusing, by hiding what is really going on.

It leads to things like otherwise technically-savvy people leaving off trailing slashes on longer pathnames, which can cause other problems. For example, [http://example.com/some-path](http://example.com/some-path) can be much different than [http://example.com/some-path/](http://example.com/some- path/)

Some browsers were also hiding trailing slashes on longer pathnames, which seems to have stopped (possibly due to breaking sites).

By hiding the real URLs, even programmers get confused, not just the end users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting concerns about URLs! I've looked into better ways of addressing recently too, but coming from different problem spaces:

1\. how to decouple content from location, i.e. location-addressing vs. content-addressing 2\. how to accept more network connection constructions than what URLs permit (proxying, domain fronting, tunnels, etc.)

> We could also imagine a new URL syntax, with fewer and less ambiguous > syntactic meta-characters.

That's part of what we're attempting for network addressing with the multiaddr format: [https://github.com/multiformats/multiaddr](https://github.com/multiformats/multiaddr) \- If the author of the article is reading here, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

We're going with encapsulation and a posix filesystem compatible plan9-ish syntax and approach there. multiaddr describes the semantics of networking namespaces, and then various content systems bring their own namespaces. IPFS brings the /ipfs and /ipns namespaces for its content.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't agree more that URL syntax is overcomplicated. Even existing URL parsing libraries behave inconsistently and lead to security vulnerabilities [0].

[0] [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Tsai-A- Ne...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Tsai-A-New-Era-Of- SSRF-Exploiting-URL-Parser-In-Trending-Programming-Languages.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Without commentary these slides are entirely unhelpful. Someone would have to agree with you already and have a head start on the purpose this presentation in order to understand what is going on here.

Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER12> Blackhat/Defcon videos aren't up yet but Orange Tsai gave the same talk at HITBGSEC and that video is up:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1S-G8rJrEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1S-G8rJrEk)

He also has a blog post about it:

[http://blog.orange.tw/2017/07/how-i- chained-4-vulnerabilitie...](http://blog.orange.tw/2017/07/how-i- chained-4-vulnerabilities-on.html)

The premise is that URL parsing is complex and libraries get it wrong. This problem is pervasive and leads to server side request forgery vulnerabilities, which Orange was able to escalate to remote code execution on Github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh wow. I didn't realize that some browsers accept straight hex or decimal representations of IP addresses.

It _does_ seem a bit silly to have two orthogonal directory structures smooshed together in a single format, especially with different nesting directions. In a way, URIs are a sort of serialization of the application layer packet headers.

I'm curious what a redesigned "address" could look like when optimized for user-friendliness.

<comment><USER14> They shouldn't exactly be optimized for friendliness. In a sense, that's the problem we have now. They should be optimized for security, but right now they're optimized for developers and network administrators.

It'd be interesting to see research on how many laypersons understand which way around the "chain of authority" goes for domain names. I can easily imagine somebody not Internet savvy thinking that "facebook.hackable.org" was a legitimate Facebook domain. (And it doesn't help that _some_ organizations spread their site over many domains that - even to a skilled user - <USER2> indistinguishable from phishing domains.)

It is unclear how a domain like that could be optimized to ensure a novice user understands that what they're looking at isn't Facebook, even though the domain starts with "facebook" and the page they're looking at looks exactly like Facebook's login page.

One general, slightly off-topic, notion: there should be a protocol whereby a password manager can ask facebook.com what sites are legitimately going to ask for your Facebook credentials - not entirely unlike SPF for passwords. Then even if you search for Facebook in your password manager, it should refuse to automatically provide the credentials to the site.

(More off-topic aside: Password managers should be _properly_ integrated into all browsers. Knowing your passwords should be considered unusual, and actually choosing them yourself downright stupid.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not allow spaces in the URL? Much easier to read than %20 and file systems have been ok with spaces for decades.

<comment><USER15> Probably because spaces have long been an important delimiter in queries and shells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps there are issues I have not considered, but I always appreciated the fact that original netcat accepts "serialized" IP addresses, as the author calls them. For example, 127.1 as shorthand for 127.0.0.1.

<comment><USER17> Would 127.3.1 become 127.0.3.1 or 127.3.0.1?

<comment><USER16> Working examples:

184.108.40.206 (www.usenix.org) can be abbreviated as 23.185.4

22.214.171.124 (hackaday.com) cannot be abbreviated as 192.79.32</comment></comment></comment>


Parity Wallet Hacked. $105m ETH Stolen - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ParityTech/status/887747980719206401 <comment><USER2> The wallet was not hacked. This is a software vulnerability that affects one of the contracts that the Parity wallet helps users create, the enhanced multi-sig. Some helpful information about this issue:

\- The vulnerability is in Parity's "enhanced" multi-sig contract

\- This affects Parity 1.5 and later

\- Parity 1.5 was released on January 19, 2017 (have you created any multi- sigs in Parity since then?)

\- The canonical multi-sig contract used in Mist / Ethereum Wallet does NOT have this vulnerability

[https://blog.parity.io/security-alert- high-2/](https://blog.parity.io/security-alert-high-2/)

<comment><USER2> Also, 0x1db is a community "white hat" sweep effort and not an attacker (See: [https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba2384641...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba238464159892252d3a) )

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Massive (seperate?) hack ongoing. 75 million USD so far

[https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba2384641...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba238464159892252d3a#tokentxns)

<comment><USER3> That account is labeled MultisigExploit-WhiteHat so may be an attempt to protect funds. Looks like a lot of ICOs may have used this multisig contract.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Auto-Update Twitter Location from Swarm - <AUTHOR> https://nomadbase.io/location-update/

<comment><USER2> Its fascinating to see new tools merging for nomads by nomads, I am curious about how wp-api is being used behind the scenes for this app.

Looking forward for more to more tools at nomadbase.io</comment>