Demand for talented engineers out of college who bring a different lived experience to tech has never been higher, yet companies are passing on precisely these students via traditional methods. Confounding the issue even further is the fundamental question of whether having attended a top school has much bearing on candidate quality in the first place
.. The focus of companies on elite schools has notable, negative implications for the diversity of their applicants. In particular, many schools that companies traditionally visit are notably lacking in diversity, especially when it comes to race and socioeconomic status. According to a survey of computer science students at Stanford, there were just fifteen Hispanic female and fifteen black female computer science majors in the 2015 graduating class total. In this analysis, the Stanford 2015 CS major was 9% Hispanic and 6% black.
.. the Harvard CS major was just 3% black and 5 percent Hispanic. Companies that are diversity-forward and constrained to recruiting at the same few schools end up competing over this small pool of diverse students. Meanwhile, there is an entire ocean of qualified, racially diverse students from less traditional backgrounds whom companies are overlooking.
.. “four in 10 students from the top 0.1 percent attend an Ivy League or elite university
.. The article finds that the few lower-income students who end up at elite colleges do about as well as their more affluent classmates but that attending an elite versus non-elite college makes a huge difference in future income.
.. Career-wise, it’s that first job or internship you get while you’re still in school that can determine what opportunities you have access to in the future.
.. Not having an internship at a top tech company already — quite the catch-22 — puts her at a disadvantage. Anthony has little to no chance of hearing back from employers via his applications online
.. Mason, the Harvard student, attends an event on campus with Facebook engineers teaching him how to pass the technical interview.
.. Given that technical interviewing is a game, it is important that everyone knows the rules, spoken and unspoken. There are many practice resources available
.. Because of our completely blind, skills-first approach, we’ve seen an interesting phenomenon happen time and time again: when a student unmasks at the end of a successful interview, the company in question realizes that the student who just aced their technical phone screen was one whose resume was sitting at the bottom of the pile all along.
.. With interviewing.io, a mid-sized startup can staff their entire intern class for the same cost as attending 1-2 career fairs at top schools… with a good chunk of those interns coming from underrepresented backgrounds
Ask HN: Any way we can find the job opening and closing trend of any company?
It would be interesting to see the data about when a company posts a job post and when it gets closed.
We can then use that data to create “trends” graph for that company.
- Job websites are, for some companies first and foremost, a signal to the investment community. Hey look, series A, and now we have these 12 job listings open. Meantime they’re trying to figure much more important things out than who to hire at that level (like who they can get who knows how to hire). Any emails sent in go straight to nowhere.
- Job listings are also a political tool. Say you have an organization with 1,000 employees and 90% of them are low-skilled H1B’s. While you might ordinarily need about 50-100 job listings to keep pace with employee turnover, putting 1000 job listings out there helps give cover to politicians to expand, rather than curtail, the H1B program. Recruiting someone is expensive. Pretending to recruit someone is almost free, and unreasonably effective. Vaporware for fun and profit.
- Recruiting someone is expensive. Pretending to recruit someone is almost free, and unreasonably effective. Vaporware for fun and profit.
The Maddeningly Simple Way Tech Companies Can Employ More Women
We recently set up an interview at a major company for a senior African-American woman software engineer. After meeting with the hiring panel, she withdrew her application, telling us she felt demeaned by the all-white male group that failed to ask her any questions about her coding skills. She described how one of the men had made it clear to her that she wasn’t a cultural fit and that therefore they didn’t need to proceed with technical questions.
.. executives don’t give as much thought to are some of the simplest determinants of how successful a company will be in hiring diverse candidates.
- Will women have any input in the hiring process?
- Will the interview panels be diverse?
- Will current female employees be available to speak to candidates about their experiences?
Many times, the answer to each of these questions is no, and the resistance to make simple changes in these areas is striking.
.. I often see companies work to make themselves appealing to candidates by emphasizing perks like Ping-Pong tables, retreats and policies that let employees bring their dogs to work. Those things can be appealing to candidates of any gender. But one size doesn’t fit all:
We have to tell these companies to talk just as proudly about
- their parental-leave policies,
- child-care programs and
- breast-pumping rooms.
At the very least, they need to communicate that their workplaces have cultures where women are valued
.. I remind them that when it comes to gender, they have to play catch-up, after long histories of eroding trust by grilling women about how they’ll be able to do the job with children at home
.. Silicon Valley companies are in love with themselves and don’t understand why the love isn’t always returned by the few women to whom they extend employment offers.
.. they’re so proud of so-called boomerangs — candidates who have left a company for reasons that may or may not be related to how it treats women and, after advancing their careers elsewhere, return.
.. Last year, we worked with a company that set a goal that women would make up 50 percent of the engineers on one of its teams. They did it by holding a webinar led by female employees, with 100 female candidates who asked questions about how the organization was changing to become more inclusive to women.
Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something was ‘a little off’ and finding out that you were going to die in three months. Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the same disease.
Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn’t until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.
It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a massive amount of damage to the industry.
You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during 2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc… Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you’ll often see no sympathy for the ‘talent shortage’ complaint. Five years after cutting everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers demanding to know “where are all the people with five years of recent experience”