
Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? - MicahWedemeyer
I saw your top requirement for recruits:<p>* BS / MS / PhD in Computer Science or related disciplines from a top CS school (Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, CMU, etc.)<p>I went to etc. and graduated top of my class.  Can I work for you?  No?  We'll, it's back to my job flipping burgers, I guess... :(<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313311  &#60;-- (for those saying WTF?)
======
rantfoil
This was a total oversight by us -- we didn't really mean "REQUIREMENT" in the
sense. Of course that's insane. This is something that we actually discussed
with our friends (some of them from Hacker News too). The top CS school
discussion DID come up.

Here was our thinking: the true hacker badasses out there will see that and
not really give a crap. They know they're good, and will just glide over that
line.

What we really mean is: we want people who are smart and amazing.

I can show chat transcripts with dcurtis if you care to follow up with me
directly (we really did discuss whether that line should stay or go).
garry@posterous.com

But the point is: Mea culpa, we posted it at 2 AM and it was a mistake to put
this down as a "requirement". It's absolutely a 'plus'.

~~~
jmatt
The best hackers I know didn't necessarily graduate top in the class. A few
did and a few didn't. The ones who didn't were usually contributing in other
ways - open source or small businesses (sometimes startups but not
necessarily). As you stated, most hackers who didn't would ignore any
requirements and apply because they wanted to work on posterous.

Here are some of my own personal opinions on hiring / schools / etc.

Which school you graduated from and rank is rarely even discussed when hiring
coders with a few years experience. After 2 years no one will ask you where
you graduated in your class. After 8 years no one will care where you went to
school, other than possibly as a plus. It's not a decision maker at that
point. What the applicant did between graduation and applying to the job is
really what matters. This seems to be different for other areas of study (and
graduate degrees of course). But this is my experience with coders (bachelor
degree holding computer scientist and the like). Both hiring and being one.

An individual's family situation, both financial and otherwise, can effect
their decisions on schools. Some oft overlooked hackers went to state or local
colleges for reasons outside of their control. An example - I knew someone in
high school that got into MIT and Northwestern (Chicago area). They ended up
cranking through the local college (Northern Illinois University) in 3 years
instead. His family had a business and he had to be there to run it. After he
finally found someone to manage the family business he ended up being
successful and promoted up the chain in a huge company. There are plenty of
opportunities outside of the norm. But the burden is on the person applying to
show that they are worth investigating further.

[EDIT: Syntax]

~~~
rantfoil
Agree 100% -- these are all significant considerations.

------
cowmoo
Like a true hacker, hack the system.

I agree, the company HR and recruiting are totally arbitrary and incompetent -
most recruiters don't come from a technical background, and will only match up
the buzzwords from their position requirement with those on your resume + the
"name" of where you got your education (bingo! we have a winner!!)

But there are ways to get around to it:

a) Do a lot of open-source projects; it's actually not very hard to get
involved in some of the top-tier projects. This spring, I was applying for
jobs at hedge funds and investment banks. Before I put on my resume: "Google
Inc. - Summer of Code," none of them wanted to talk to me. After I did, I re-
sumbitted my resume to all of the same banks, suddenly, everybody wanted to
talk to me. The world is a prestige whore.

b) Do a demo project specifically tailored for the job that you were shooting
for. Send it along with your resume/CV from the get-go. This shows even to the
HR people, extra-enthusiasm for the job - and might even get forwarded to the
technical hiring manager, who's the person that's going to matter the most
anyway.

c) F the system. Apply to YC. Corporate Serfdom is only a temporary sinecure
for starting your company anyways. It's a means, not an end.

~~~
jhancock
"The world is a prestige whore."...

...you said it. If you have lots of funding you can afford to pay the price
premiums for people with resumes with prestige shwag on them. If you don't
have that kind of funding and need to pay lower rates and are outside of the
valley, you are better off being able to identify great programmers in other
ways (which has been written about much).

I am a startup founder, <http://shellshadow.com>. I'm in Shanghai. Even if I
had the funding to throw at prestige resumes, the supply of such isn't
available in Shanghai. I have to rely on the fact that I maintain my own deep
programming skills as a 40 year old programmer and therefore have the ability
to identify and manage top developers without the aid of keywords on a resume.

But hey, if you've got the cash, go ahead and pay the price premiums...it
can't hurt, right? ;)

------
Maro
"Yeah, I went to Stanford and got the $200k education so I can work as a
JavaScript+HTML+CSS coder at Posterous.com. I'm a real genius."

~~~
menloparkbum
It isn't uncommon for highly educated computer scientists to be working in
roles "beneath them" in silicon valley.

The "softer" stuff is usually more fun, better working environment,
potentially impacts far more people, and often pays more.

~~~
pg
In fact I'd argue that is one of the defining qualities of a startup. At YC we
have a tenured MIT CS prof as our sysadmin.

~~~
Harj
the single most important quality of a founder is having the discipline to do
work "beneath" them. at auctomatic we had two oxford grads figuring out what
sizes of t-shirt to buy and decorating stalls at ebay live.

------
smoody
The guy who started Tumblr, the leading tumblelog, didn't even go to college.
I guess he'll be working the fry machine.

~~~
apgwoz
Tumblr also had that severe security hole back a few months ago that allowed
anyone to go to /admin and see _everything_.

~~~
johns
Yeah, that was definitely because the founder didn't go to college!

~~~
apgwoz
I can see how my comment comes off as that, but in actuality, the question to
ask is, "Does going to college give you the knowledge to forsee a situation
like that?" Or, "does one acquire this knowledge only from experiences in the
real world?"

I was trying to imply that _maybe_ going to college makes you more aware, but
I have no clue if this is really true or not... (my assumption is no)

~~~
johns
Your assumption is right

------
shafqat
Thats the one line that stood out in the Posterous job announcement. Sounds
pretty elitist to me. I went to one of those schools, but I can tell you that
I've met far many brilliant hackers who didn't go to these schools.

~~~
wheels
Here's I think a much better way of saying it:

 _"Awesome at what you do and have some way of showing it."_

I personally prefer links to past projects and code samples. Whether or not
somebody knows their way around theory you can sort out in an interview (and
having a degree from a top university is unfortunately a frustratingly bad
indicator of such). Figuring out if they can code is a lot harder.

~~~
rantfoil
Agree 100%. We want projects and code samples... the school itself doesn't
matter.

------
hooande
Whatever dude, everyone knows Etc U was a total party school

------
greenagain
I can see them poring over their US News and World Report rankings right now.

Might I suggest another requirement?

* Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot

~~~
mixmax
_Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot_

That would be me. I do a decent bowtie too...

aah the advantages of a classical education come to bear once again...

~~~
tomjen
Out of curiosity, were does one obtain a classical education?

~~~
maxklein
If you need to ask, then you don't need to know.

~~~
tbeseda
He means "... you needn't know."

------
diggydo
Are they serious? To parse an email and post the contents to a web page?

~~~
babul
Maybe for today. But what about tomorrow as the product grows and they start
to tackle other verticals?

~~~
nailer
They might need someone with practical experience, rather than an academic.

~~~
brent
Those sets are not necessarily disjoint.

------
webwright
I love the Posterous guys (and their product), but I think they are wrong to
require this. It would disqualify everyone on my team (which hurts my
feelings) and also disqualifies some of the most brilliant/hardworking geeks I
know.

If it's a buyers market for employers and you're buried in candidates, it's a
great line to throw in to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In a market like
this (where every good coder I know is buried in job offers), you're not going
to be too buried in candidates.

~~~
rantfoil
Mistake! Sorry! =/

------
menloparkbum
This one's funny. In 1998 I built an app that does maybe 80-90% of what
Posterous is doing under the hood. That is, a huge multiuser system that
parsed incoming email, ripped out what's inside, stuffed that into the right
places in a database, and displayed the right stuff to the right users via the
web.

The experience at the time, dealing with email parsing, buggy DB drivers and
crazy deadlines was so horrible that when it was finished, I specifically went
back to school to finish my degree so that I would never have to work on an
application like that again.

That said, I love Posterous - just wanted to suggest that degree from Stanford
or not, one man's dream job can be another's worst nightmare. :)

------
babul
When reading that line, I too thought it was somewhat elitist but if you are
hiring you want the _best_ talent you can get and more often than not this
means people who went to an elite school. Most of the early hires in all the
outstanding tech companies followed similar pattern.

However, if you can prove strong or exceptional skill and achievement in
whatever you have done tech related, I am sure it won't matter if you went to
an elite school or not (and if it does, you probably won't like it there
anyway).

For most businesses (startups in particular) that do not have the time or
resources to filter candidates, an elite school is a general simple quality
filter, but the world is full of examples of people who did not go to school
let alone an elite school, from Richard Branson to Dyson to Jobs to the mass
of not-so-famous.

Worry not, shine and hopefully you will be noticed.

~~~
jfarmer
You can probably still get hired, I'm sure, but it reflects poorly on the
culture there.

~~~
rantfoil
a) It was a typo to put it under 'requirement' (see above)

b) Joining Posterous is actually a cool way to avoid bad culture because you'd
have a key hand in creating the what the culture would become. Say if you
joined us at Posterous -- it would be you, me and Sachin, making great
software and building a great company.

So, how about it? =)

~~~
jfarmer
No.

------
nostrademons
It's funny, almost the exact same conversation is going on at Reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_work_at_reddit/c05j8hi)

~~~
pius
I found this comment particularly interesting from the Reddit thread:

 _I think it's interesting that I see a lot of people saying that computer
programmers don't need degrees, but I rarely see anyone saying the same thing
about physicists, biologists, mathematicians, or zoologists. I wonder why that
is._

 _Maybe there really are people decrying degrees in those other fields and I
just don't hear about it because I'm a computer programmer. But I suspect that
degrees are actually required and respected in those fields. What is it about
Computer Science that makes people think you can read a few books on your own
and you are qualified? What is it about the other fields in math, science, and
engineering that make that not the case?_

~~~
zacharydanger
I think it's a misconception.

Computer Programming !== Computer Science

~~~
jaydub
I once heard someone say, programming is to computer science what skating is
to ice hockey.

(Just don't tell that to a theorist)

~~~
fhars
Show me an ice hockey player wo can do a Bielmann spin or a triple Lutz jump.

~~~
briancooley
You're not familiar with Doug Dorsey?

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104040/>

I'm a little embarrassed that I know that movie, but I have an excuse; it's
one of my wife's favorites.

------
pius
Haha, I found that part of the job posting to be a joke for multiple reasons.

For example, given that their enumeration of the top CS schools doesn't
include the best computer science program in the world, I wouldn't worry too
much about being in the "etc." :P

* [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/c...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/comp)

* [http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-d...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-doct-engineering)

------
calvin
I became an expert at queuing theory during a summer of employment at
McDonald's.

~~~
brk
I hear the Starbucks program is a little more advanced though.

------
ced
It works in the same way as the Google Minimum GPA. The probability that you
are wasting your time reading/interviewing a candidate from Etc. U. is simply
higher. Is it a better criteria than other bits of info on the CV? I don't
know, but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand. If you get a very large number of
candidates and time is short, why not?

Everything you have on your CV is ground for similar discrimination. Judging
from the response, this is a politically incorrect statement around here (cf.:
What You Can't Say). Maybe they should have silently trashed all documents, if
!doc.contains(topUni)

Before anyone points it out, yes, this line of reasoning supports gender and
racial discrimination. Indeed, anti-discrimination laws make hiring a less
efficient process. We have them because discrimination against gender leads to
other social evils. Can anyone make such a case for university-based
discrimination?

~~~
run4yourlives
>Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination?

That's not too much of a difficult case to make. You'd do it the same way you
highlighted gender and racial issues: measure levels of income, access to
schools for their children etc etc.

I think that those that don't have university degrees are "discriminated"
against is an accepted given. This is why you see such an uproar over tuition
fees and the like.

------
icey
I can't think of any real hackers who honestly think that this is required to
be good at the art of writing software. That being said, I'd imagine that a
number of very highly skilled software people probably have an interest in NOT
working somewhere that fosters such blatant snobbery.

------
gojomo
Maybe they were expressing an extra preference for CMU's Entertainment
Technology Center grads:

<http://www.etc.cmu.edu/>

------
menloparkbum
What I want to know is how to get the telecommute job working on Final Cut Pro
from my NYC apartment, now that you guys are working on Posterous...

------
jfarmer
If I were interviewing there I'd just ask straight-up, are there any major
universities, elite or otherwise, whose graduates you wouldn't consider?

------
a4agarwal
relax guys. we just want smart people. that's all. if you are smart, please
apply. simple as that. why all the fuss? stanford has an amazing cs program
and has been where some of today's greatest companies started (google, yahoo,
etc). But of course not all of the great engineers out there go to these
schools.

maybe this was all a test. do you only apply to jobs where you fit the
description perfectly? When it says 3-5 years experience, do you skip over it?
if i had followed all the rules, i wouldn't be where i am today. "video
experience required" - ok so much for final cut pro. "discounted computers 1
per person only" - gee, i paid for college by selling many of those on ebay
since I couldn't afford it otherwise. "cs degree required" - my cousin didn't
even get a cs degree (he's EE from UCSB) and now he's a director at yahoo.

some people want to be challenged. they want to take positions that are above
them, and then work hard.

------
dpapathanasiou
If you had graduated top of class from _/etc_ that would be a different
story...

------
KirinDave
Soooo.... politics is not "things hackers would find interesting" and causes
numerous histrionic fit news items, but some random guy begging for a job gets
16 points and numerous discussion comments?

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Random guy? I'm offended sir! I graduated top of my class at etc. Could any
random Joe do that?

~~~
KirinDave
Geez, these lines of inquiry are murder on my karma. But I'll continue because
I'm hardheaded, and because I'm not nickb with a bazillion points to lose.

Micah, that's fine and congratulations. But, uh, do you really think that your
request for a job deserved >30 points and a hit on the first page? Meanwhile
the very interesting Project 10^100 link has 19 points and is falling off
rapidly?

And this isn't the first time Posterous-related contentless posts have shown
up on the first page: [http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-
tm-wit...](http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-tm-with-
hacker-news)

I don't have anything against you, but if everyone did what you just did,
Hacker News would be worse than useless. And crazily enough we can't seem to
flag your post down. I'm baffled why so many vote for this story, but your job
hunt is not "news" nor is it something that a vast majority of hackers should
care about.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Your deadpan delivery makes me think that you didn't get the sarcasm. I'm not
_really_ asking for a job. That's clear, right?

~~~
KirinDave
I didn't realize you were being sarcastic. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Either way, I don't care. Posterous is surrounded by an aura of crap news.yc
posts and I'm tired of it because that aura shines in my eyes.

------
rokhayakebe
You just wasted 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back. But somehow
you still made me laugh in the morning.

------
andy
maybe you could, but why in the hell would you want to?

------
time_management
The one that always makes me laugh is when a job spec asks for a "PhD from an
Ivy League university". Apparently, no one only told HR that:

(1) "Ivy League" means absolutely nothing in the context of graduate programs,
as the rankings are discipline-specific and many Ivy League grad programs are
mediocre. For example, Harvard's computer science program is strong, but not
remotely in the same league as CMU or UIUC.

(2) In any case, "Ivy League" is not a synonym for "elite college"; well-
regarded universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Michigan are (surprisingly?)
not Ivy League.

(3) Related to (2), emphasizing "Ivy League" pisses off nearly everyone who
went to a good college. Those who went to non-Ivy elites (like me) consider
themselves excluded when they see these ads. Those who went to Ivy League
colleges generally dislike the snooty, stuffy connotations of "Ivy League" and
don't like the sorts of people who emphasize "Ivy".

~~~
nostrademons
Eh, I never feel excluded when a job ad says "Ivy League" (I went to a top
liberal-arts college). If I like the company, I'll just apply anyway. Most job
ads are more like guidelines, anyway.

~~~
humanlever
I'm the complete opposite. If I think a job looks interesting and see that the
company has elected to limit their candidate pool by putting a lame qualifier
like, "a degree from a top-tier university," I don't waste my time. It shows
that the company is more concerned with how their employees are perceived than
what they can accomplish. Pass.

I sometimes have similar reservations about companies that list arbitrary
experience requirements too, especially when they're clearly just going off
some industry norm. That's just me tho. YMMV.

~~~
nostrademons
That's how I feel if, given an obviously qualified candidate, they _then_
reject him.

But I try to give them the benefit of the doubt on the initial job
application. They have to put _something_ down, and as spez pointed out on the
Reddit thread, it's an easy way of disqualifying people who like to complain
instead of do something about it. It's an unfortunate filter that probably
turns off a few well-qualified candidates, but nobody's perfect.

