

Ask HN: Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? - rdr

Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know, but sometimes I sense a sort of backlash against our peers who went to so-called 'name-brand' colleges by those, like the vast majority of us, who went to non-luxury colleges.  Do you see this as well in your workplace?  If so, please discuss reasons you think this might be happening.  How much differently do you treat people based on where they went to college?  Thanks!
======
_pius
There's jealousy sometimes, but ultimately if you've got skill commensurate
(or better) with the name brand of your degree, it's not a problem at all.
Most people are cool. If you're an arrogant ass, you'll get treated like one.
If you got hired by management based on your school, but you can't code very
well, people will look down on you.

Actually, the broader backlash by far seems to be from some self-taught
hackers against people who've gone to school for computer science. There seems
to be this idea out there that a computer science program is worthless for
becoming a good hacker. For crappy programs, this is true. For great ones, it
couldn't be further from the truth.

Anyway, do expect some people to try to test you though and embarrass you if
they can. Of course, those people probably would have tried no matter where
you went to school.

~~~
rdr
thanks for the quick reply! i'm curious about your statement about "skill
commensurate with the name brand of your degree" ... does that imply that
certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to
college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably
elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations
since they don't have a name-brand diploma). if 2 people are in the same
position at the same company receiving the same pay (working as peers),
shouldn't others expect something similar from them regardless of their
degrees?

~~~
JoelPM
Is it really unfair to hold someone to a higher standard because they went to
a 'good' school? I think part of the way we estimate future performance is by
examining past performance, and performing well at a name-brand school should
indicate ability to perform well at tasks for which their education prepared
them.

On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another
person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as
easily how well they'll do.

If you give an easy exam and everyone scores 90% or better you don't know much
more about the person who scored 100% than you do about the person who scored
90%. If, on the other hand, you give an extremely difficult exam that results
in a curve with the 90% cut-off at 80% and the 10% cut-off at 20% you know
much more about the abilities of those who did well compared to the abilities
of those who did poorly. I think people tend to view a name-brand college as a
the very tough exam and a non-name-brand college as the easy exam. Whether or
not this is a safe assumption is another question.

~~~
_pius
_Is it really unfair to hold someone to a higher standard because they went to
a 'good' school? I think part of the way we estimate future performance is by
examining past performance, and performing well at a name-brand school should
indicate ability to perform well at tasks for which their education prepared
them. On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean
another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite
as easily how well they'll do._

I agree with this, which is why I put "unfairness" in quotes in my other
response. There's a certain political correctness that makes people uneasy
about comparing two candidates based on the schools they went to. The fact is,
the rigor of training for the same degree varies wildly depending on the
school you attended.

If you're comparing two seemingly equivalent unknowns who've got no body of
work other than a degree, I think it makes perfect sense to bias towards the
person who completed the better program.

~~~
JoelPM
I should have been more clear about what I was responding to - this commend by
rdr:

"does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to
where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have
unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered
expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma)."

I agreed with both your original comment and the follow-up. The question of
fairness got me thinking, though, and I wanted to present one way of thinking
about it.

------
philwelch
I'm more worried whether there's a bias against hackers from non-name-brand
colleges, especially in the startup community.

~~~
rdr
really? isn't the startup community supposed to be more anti-establishment and
not worry about paper credentials as much as, say, a large corporation or
government organization?

------
mmc
Hopefully I know enough about a co-worker's skills to form a good opinion of
them before I find out what college they went to. If you bring it up in our
first conversation, I'm going to wonder why.

On the other hand, if you went to grad school, research is such a small world
that this kind of thing comes up more often - I might ask who your advisor
was, etc, to find out whether we have friends in common. It's less about
skills.

------
grinich
It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's
where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and
Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could
sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
-Paul Graham. "How to Start a Startup," March 2005.

------
russell
A brand name helps in getting job interviews and it helps open doors. Backlash
is very uncommon, unless you are a jerk.

------
ashishk
It's a good question, but tough to answer because its impossible to generalize
the behavior of "hackers".

That said, I have heard of backlash against 'name-brand' colleges at a
startup, but it was, interestingly, not by hackers but by business dev.
people.

I think at the end of the day, you're a jerk if you judge a person by their
college. And you're a jerk if you think going to a good college actually means
you're inherently more capable than other folks.

------
edw519
"Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know..."

Maybe you need to meet some new hackers.

I have never seen this. Ever.

30 years. 90 companies. 1,000,000 lines of code.

Maybe it's just because people who know me know better than to bother with
details instead of issues.

Your "pedigree" is a detail. Your work is an issue. Don't waste your time with
those who don't know the difference.

~~~
mmelin
Your reaction to this suggests to me that you may have mistaken what
meritocratic and egalitarian mean. People with these qualities do not usually
care about things such as ones "pedigree", thus the GP's confusion that
hackers look down upon people who've attended "name-brand" universities.

If not, please elaborate on your post as I do not understand how you in 30
years can not have met hackers with these qualities.

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meritocratic>
<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/egalitarian>

~~~
edw519
Sorry. The part of OP's post I have never seen was that "backlash" part, not
the "meritocratic and egalitarian" part. I see now how that could have been
misinterpreted because my manual string extraction was off by 62 characters.

But thanks smacking me with 2 dictionary links. That oughta fix it.

~~~
mmelin
No offense was intended, I simply did not parse your reaction to what you
quoted.

