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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Sounds like the dean of the college you were in needs to get a new job. I have a very similar profile to yours and my undergrad career services doesn't look too bad compared to my current post-grad career services.
ditto for the amazingness you see across different functions at an elite university. I remember being impressed that any cross cut I made, landscaping, financial aid, administrations, whatever the department was seemed plush with competent people who enjoyed their job.
Unfortunately career services is one of those areas of "administrative overhead" that legislators and pundits love to gripe about when complaining about the increasing costs of a higher education. It's no wonder they can't do as much as they used to.
It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs.
It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.
>It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.
I don't understand this. If you're matching the diversity of the market, that would seem to me that your recruiting practices are unbiased, which is good, right?
They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts. So yes, you could say they are (perhaps) unbiased vs their input, but their input has problems. In other words, their selection of schools to recruit from means they are outsourcing the distribution of your their candidate pool, and the GP poster is not happy with that aspect of the result.
If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you think those things are important (I do), then it's bad.
(The reasons why I think it's bad are complex, so I won't belabor them here.)
I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.
> I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem
The goal isn't to add bias. It's to seek out the source of a bias we think might exist and then remove it.
For example, if we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are, and find similar quality in both pools (keep in mind, when you interview graduates you get to select for quality), then it makes sense to recruit from both pools. By excluding the latter pool, even if not for discriminatory reasons, we're implicitly biasing our inputs.
> we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are
I agree with the sentiment, but isn't the situation exactly the opposite of that? Top-tier schools work to balance gender distributions, and many of them succeed well above industry averages. Other schools spend less effort, and get predictably thinner results.
Compare, say, RPI and MIT. (I know RPI is uncommonly skewed, but I wanted to compare tech schools to one another. Otherwise specific stats are swamped by the ratio of tech to non-tech majors.)
- RPI, overall: 32% female
- MIT, overall: 46% female
- RPI, computer science: 16% female
- MIT, computer science, 32% female
As I understood the stats, a company that pulls students at the same rate as their candidate schools will see worse gender diversity as they broaden their pool. (Among CS programs at 4 year US colleges; outside that I don't know.)
MIT's computer science program is 31.7% women. MIT's school of engineering is 39.87% women. I think even comparing tech school to tech school, non-tech majors have a significant impact. MIT especially has a surprising number of non tech majors.
Rather than try to counteract the bias with an opposing one on the input pool, the answer can be to try to find new less-biased input pools to draw from.
We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language.
Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a problem and I applaud people making an effort to rectifying that. Unless the universities the OP was pulling from are really out of synch with the industry I have a hard time understanding why being proportionate is a problem. In fact, it seems like the right place to want to be.
> We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased
Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision.
We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on your product teams (at the very least).
Randomly picking the last paper you cite for example, we learn that Spanish companies with more women on the board have better financial performance. Seems like an open and shut case! But then buried deep in the paper, we also learn that the Spanish government has passed lots of sexually discriminatory laws that financially advantage companies that achieve arbitrary gender quotas, most notably, only companies with a certain level of female presence on boards can bid for public contracts.
The Spanish economy isn't the best. Big chunks of the Spanish economy is propped up by government spending originating in ECB quantitative easing and it's been that way for a while. If companies with male-only boards are being discriminated against in public procurement contracts, that by itself is sufficient to explain part of the difference.
That's a common problem with papers that argue more women on boards = more financial performance. Invariably they are studying countries that artificially tip the playing field towards such companies already, making it difficult to disentangle the different factors.
If it's a business decision to hire more females, then who are we to demand top tech companies expand their college search range?
Could it not be a business decision to minimize risk?
(I, for one, am in favor of getting rid of all diversity quotas. Companies should be allowed to hire 100% black LGBT disabled women as much as they should be allowed to hire majority males out of elite universities.)
If you want to bring more women into your firm because you think they have some biological or sociological advantages over men in some areas then that's fine, do so. But look at the majority of posts in this thread, they're all about reducing gender bias. These other posts don't make sense in the context of an employer whose payroll is already proportional to the pipeline.
You're saying the opposite, that increasing gender bias will provide you with some economic benefit. At least what you're saying is rational and consistent.
"Bias" measures deviance from a parameter. Without agreement on the population being measured and the parameter in question, the term--and quibbling over it--is meaningless. You are defining the population as something close to "people who possess the relevant skills," i.e. the pipeline. Others are using "people who possess the relevant skills but aren't in the pipeline" or "people who could possess the relevant skills if factors out of their control were accounted for". Others, still, disagree with how you're measuring "possess the relevant skills". This is all reasonable disagreement.
In universities that don't consider race or gender in admissions (notably the UC system and Caltech), the minority rate tanks (except for Asian-American rates, which double).
It is matching society, however: CollegeBoard testing statistics reveal that in high school girls take AP Computer Science much less frequently than boys - at proportions fairly close to 1:3.
Given that anyone is free to take an AP exam provided they can spend $100, the only plausible explanation is that fewer girls choose to pursue computer science as a major.
Alternatively, you could suggest that there is nationwide collusion between CollegeBoard and amongst computer science teachers to limit girls from taking the APCS test - and that no one has found out or exposed it.
What I mean by that is there exist no gender barriers to take an AP exam - that fewer women are studying CS in college or working a technical role is not a result of a biased system, but of an individual decision that comes down to fewer girls DECIDING to learn computer science.
> If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you think those things are important (I do), then it's bad.
Mismatch between company demographics and society/customer demographics is common in all industries. It is not a unique phenomenon. Before asking what we can do to change the discrepancy at tech companies, we must first ask why this is a problem in the first place when tens of thousands of companies in different industries have the same problem.
Well, for one, 3 schools do not the market make. For two, it means they're not making any effort to reach out to those in disadvantaged populations. It's a large problem that a lot of companies have.
>For one, the candidate pool is artificially limited.
The candidate pool has an artificially inflated number of women due to the success of nearly universal outreach among STEM programs towards women. I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing, but let's not throw shade at universities where it's undeserved.
>And, like I said, 3 schools does not the market make.
If the 3 schools OP was recruiting from have gender bias against women then let's call them out.
Once upon a time, UT Austin CS department has its own recruiting program. They were good. They even got me my first job and I'm the worst interviewee you've ever heard of; I have the interpersonal skills of a sea cucumber.
Then the college of natural sciences took over. I'm glad I was gone; from what I hear, it sucks.
Is there any way you can think of for working around this? Some actual method of recruiting outsiders of the system in a realistic way?
I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.
If you can find a student organization for Computer Science / Software Engineering students (like an ACM chapter), they might be able to help you set up a recruiting tech talk. We did this when I was an ACM officer at WUSTL. As did Engineering Council.
Even at my theoretically high-end school, our career services department was completely unfit to handle CS recruiting. They made a decent show of the annual career fair, but everything else was a disaster. With no tech knowledge and no one to answer to, they sent us a steady stream of terrible offers: work-for-experience, unethical businesses, and everything else bad you can think of.
All good CS recruiting happened through the student Computer Science association, which organized tech talks, mock interviews, and all kinds of other high-value events.
Companies that contacted the student group directly got reliable, personalized support and no charges until they showed up; companies that contacted the university got billed for the chance to be lumped in an email listing with scammers.
If you can host X companies over the course of a semester / year, then selecting large, well-know, well-paying companies maximizes the total salary of all students you are able to place in these companies
There should be a level playing field. The opportunities at a midsize growing tech company will outweigh the extra pay at a large org if one can move up in the company at a faster rate.
Your chances of being the next cto of google in 40 years is extremely low but your chances of joining a startup or working up the ladder and becoming a cto are much higher. You could be earning a lot more.
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.