

Where Do Googlers Go to College? A Look at Tech Companies' Top Feeder Schools. - rpm4321
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/23/tech_company_feeder_schools_stanford_to_google_washington_to_microsoft_sjsu.html

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mindcrime
I'm firmly of the mind that there are Really Good People to be found all over
the place, not just traditional "powerhouse" schools.

That said, at Fogbeam now we have one founder (me) who attended UNC-Wilmington
and 3 different community colleges and never finished his bachelors, two UNC-
CH grads (and one of those two has returned to school at UNC-CH to take
graduate classes) and one guy with a community college degree in business
administration who's now studying C.S. at UNC-CH. So UNC Chapel Hill is
heavily represented among our team, and it's hardly a bad school. But I've
always maintained that when we have money to start recruiting "real
employees", I intend to recruit at places like NCCU (North Carolina Central
University), NC A&T, Fayetteville State, UNC-Pembroke, St. Augustines,
Meredith, Shaw, William Peace, UNC-Greensboro, Wake Tech, Durham Tech, etc.

Why? Well, because I believe that are good, smart, talented people to be found
there, and with the bonus that we're less likely to be competing against
Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. for talent there. And furthermore, I
find that you sometimes find people from the less touted schools who have
something of a chip on their shoulders, have something to prove, and are just
plain hungry to achieve. And those are people I like working with.

Anyway, sure, if you have a chance to go to Stanford or Berkeley or MIT, go
for it. Why wouldn't you? But by the same token, if you don't go to one of
those schools for whatever reason, it hardly means you can't still have a
great career and accomplish things.

~~~
timr
Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've
subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my
experience, there's not much difference between a top MIT/Stanford/Berkeley
undergrad and a top student where I went to school. The difference is in the
distribution: the best schools can pick amongst great applicants, and
therefore have a better average student.

The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are
dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb
recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs,
and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads
from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.

But to the extent that this turns into a bias _against_ students from other
schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on
good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market
is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have
faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as _every other
accredited program_. Even the books are the same.

But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone
else. More candidates for the rest of us.

~~~
jhonovich
"In my experience, there's not much difference between an
MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school."

So the average student at a top school is roughly equal to a top student at an
average school?

~~~
hkmurakami
As a former average engineering student at a top school who's befriended and
worked with a good number of top students at good but not top schools (ex:
students on full rides in state school engineering programs), top students at
these schools are probably somewhat better than the average student at a top
school.

Of course, this is just an anecdotal perspective. Your mileage may vary.

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hkmurakami
I'm guessing that the reason the percentage of CMU alums going to Google is
high compared to say, MIT/Berkeley/Stanford is because CMU is predominantly a
CS school while the latter group is a bit more balanced towards other
engineering disciplines such as EE/ME?

edit: realized that this is because these firms don't hire nonengineers from
CMU because the school is not local.

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jds375
Interesting article. Although to say this is for 'Tech Companies' is a bit
off. A lot of the schools on that list are likely only on there due to
geographic location (Bay Area or greater California area). There are plenty of
Midwest and East Coast schools that feed plenty of Tech Companies, just not
necessarily the few big ones out in California used for this infographic. If
this were better accounted for I'd imagine there would be more big name
Midwest schools and Ivy's alike.

~~~
michaelochurch
Pedigree is industry-specific. Bankers think of Stanford as a mediocre party
school. (I'm not saying it is, but admitting Duplan and Speigel didn't help
their case.) The Valley thinks of Yalies and Princetonians in similarly
negative terms: third-rate artsy goofs. (Again, I'm not saying that it's an
accurate perception.) Good-ol'-boy blue bloods (who still populate F500
boardrooms and attend Davos, but aren't relevant to any industry we care
about) hold mediocre-but-rich northeastern schools in high regard, but don't
think much of MIT (or, more accurately, they despise it).

School snobbery isn't rational and there certainly isn't a linear ordering (it
being the parochial prejudice of pseudointellectuals too dumb to actually
judge people as individuals). But the Yale and Princeton students (disliked by
the Valley) can easily find good jobs outside the Valley, and do.

Usually, however, they go into something like management consulting, which
means they come in a bit later and clean up the messes resulting from badly-
architected California companies and a decade or so of man-child management.

~~~
hkmurakami
Increasingly, the route seems to be shortening, with many of my classmates
going the Finance (3-4 yrs) -> MBA (2 yrs) -> VC/PM/Mktg in tech as they burn
out, whereas I think they used to arrive a bit later in their careers.

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theboss
In high school, I didn't know there were such things as "top colleges". I knew
Harvard and Yale existed and were good...but beyond that I honestly didn't
even know MIT existed. It's probably because my family has been in America for
only about 60 years now and my generation is the first to go to college
(honestly just guessing here..)

So I applied to college and went to a pretty big state school (for my area).

I'm really blessed to end up where I've ended up after graduation. I know so
many really really good classmates who have a lot of talent and never even get
a glance when looking for jobs at some of these companies. It really just
isn't fair sometimes...

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tedkalaw
They based this on an interestingly small amount of data. The 5,318 Google
employees, for example, is a pretty small fraction of the 49,829 employees
they had in Q1 of 2014.

~~~
sytelus
Stats 101: Sample size alone describes only variance in measurement and I
think even the sample size of 1000 would be pretty acceptable in this case.
Whether these numbers are biased or not depends on if sample was drawn
randomly (i.e. if it reflects actual distribution).

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santaclaus
It would be interesting to see this data broken down by geographical office
for the larger tech companies. I would expect to see more students from
northeastern schools at Google's NYC office than in the Mountain View office.

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knappador
Wow. Employees tend to have gone to college nearby their employers'
headquarters. Sources monitoring the unfolding pattern indicate that people
also tend to enroll in universities near where they live. Film at 11.

~~~
jfoutz
Or perhaps all the commitment to "hiring the best" is just posturing and they
really take whatever is available that happens to meet the arbitrary standard
imposed on Tuesday afternoon

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andrewflnr
One thing I found weird about this was all the UT Austin people going to
Facebook, since as far as I know there's no geographical reason (does FB even
have satellite offices?). Can anyone explain why that occurs?

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thoraway
It seems strange that my school (University of Waterloo) shows no people going
to Google. Especially since there is a large Google office less than 5km from
campus.

~~~
awda
Yeah. UW feeds a lot to the local Seattle Facebook and Google offices, not
_just_ Microsoft. But I guess those satellite offices are a small portion of
the larger companies.

~~~
michaelochurch
The top-5 cutoff really throws it off. For the non-tech roles that are a lot
less selective, pedigree isn't that important and geography will dominate.
Where the data is actually _interesting_ is in high-level roles where the
competitive frame (for companies and for people) is national.

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michaelochurch
Interesting data, but the focus on the _top 5_ from each company isn't going
to indicate much (too corrupted by geography) and the more informative
question is what kinds of positions each school is feeding into. Especially if
non-technical positions are included, the locality bias is exactly what we'd
expect. Google doesn't demand elite degrees for its lower-level HR functions.

My observation is that school pedigree doesn't actually matter that much for
getting in the door, but (rather disgustingly) has more of an effect once one
is in. It's relatively easy to get a referral that bypasses the resume wall
(as long as you're in the geographic area) and then interview performance
trumps pedigree. However, pedigree matters _a lot_ after getting the job,
especially when it comes to project allocation. If you have pedigree, tech
companies know you have other options and will give you decent projects. If
you're from SJSU, you might be very good but they'll assume that you don't
have other options and you're more likely to get grunt work.

Getting the job is the much easier battle in which pedigree doesn't matter
much. Getting good projects once in the door is, in large tech companies where
it's impossible to prove oneself in a meaningful way until already having
favorable project allocation, very strongly influenced by pedigree. People who
believe in "meritocracy" will argue that it's possible to succeed on the crap
project and gain recognition, but in reality that only gets a person more crap
work. This long-lasting and completely inexcusable pedigree effects is one of
the dark, ugly secrets that few people will talk about. (People are, morally
speaking, OK with the fact that Harvard resumes get more attention than SJSU
resumes. The idea that pedigree would _still_ matter among the pool selected
for jobs, if better known, would inflame them.)

~~~
nostrademons
My experience was the opposite - the degree makes them take note of your
resume, but once you're in nobody cares (or often knows) where you went to
school.

FWIW, one of my interviewers went to SJSU. He wrote the JS styleguide, and was
a key contributor to Closure and GChat (back when it didn't suck). Another of
my interviewers went to UMich/AnnArbor and then toured around the country in a
punk rock band; she was the Docs TL before doing a bunch of important work for
Search Infrastructure and Chrome. Important work goes to people who seek it
out and have a track record of delivering.

~~~
michaelochurch
The problem is that in these large tech companies, the ability to "deliver" is
not scarce. Almost everyone is good and the people on bad projects are
hideously underemployed, so the rate of "delivering" is 98%. To get a good
project, you need a track record of delivering _on good projects_. Otherwise,
you just proved that you're a good grunt. That doesn't buy you anything.

Delivering on a bad project just gets you typecast, and that's in the good
case where you do well. Then there are the bad projects that are bad (and
might not be delivered) because they're impossible or pack the bad kind of
challenge (i.e. hideous legacy code, which won't get the same respect as
building a new system).

The luck of the first project determines everything in the types of companies
that we're talking about. And a lot of it is luck: sometimes, as you've noted,
people from less prestigious schools land well early on and kill it. However,
pedigree is a variable that people (at least, in theory) have some control
over. For example, if I wanted to go back and get a PhD, I'm sure I could, and
I could probably get that pedigree. (PhD admissions are actually competitive,
but I'm certainly smarter than 95+% of those getting into Harvard/Stanford MBA
school.) But do I want to deal with an archaic, slow application process and
pay 5 years of opportunity cost, given that I'd be 32 at the earliest point
that I could start? Probably not, and I shouldn't be penalized for it.

~~~
nostrademons
Again, my experience was very different from yours, and I believe the
difference was due to career choices we made and not strictly random chance.

All of the high-priority, high-visibility projects I got _because I
volunteered for them_. My first task at Google was fixing unit tests; my
second was writing a signup dashboard for my first project's internal dogfood.
It took me about 8 months to end up on a highly-visible project [1], but when
I did it got me exec attention, a reputation as someone who was an expert in
the department, and a cameo appearance in BusinessWeek. 8 months after you had
started at Google, you'd already left in a huff.

I know someone who spent 4 years working with the bowel's of Google's cluster
management system and transferred successfully to Search, and now to Loon. I
know someone who worked for 4 years doing all the grunt work for a project
that got canceled; he transferred to Search and now leads a department. I know
someone who built his entire career on refactoring "hideous legacy code" \-
actually, several someones, but the first one I thought of was reliably
promoted, every 18 months or so, from SWE 3 to Distinguished, and the other
ones are all around Staff or Senior Staff level.

Now, whether you're happy or not is a different question, and there are good
reasons not to waste 4 years of your life doing something you find boring. But
external constraints are not one of them. People judge you based on how well
you perform relative to the opportunities in front of you, not what those
opportunities are.

[1] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-
metamorphosis-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-
metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html)

