HR has policies in place to screen fairly, i.e. that obey the law in every country where the company operates.
There is no such thing as “fair” in recruiting, i.e. the company has an obligation to spend the same amount of time reading every single resume. I am under no obligation to tell my recruiters to evaluate a CS major from University of New Haven with the same degree of interest as a CS major from Cal Tech. I can take every single sociology major or physics major resume and send a turndown email without even reading them. As long as I am not systematically excluding women or veterans or African Americans, etc. by doing so, I can set up whatever system is the most efficient and cost effective in order to cull the pile.
I cannot legally ask a person with a “foreign” sounding name where he or she was born, if I am not also asking every “Joan Brown” where she was born. However, there is nothing to stop me from deciding that College A’s CS program is weak and therefore I’m not going to find graduates who can contribute to a sophisticated AI research program if I hire from there. There is nothing to stop me from deciding that College B’s accounting and finance program is a lot of “fill in the blanks” but not a lot of analysis and sophisticated modeling, so I’m not going to hire from there if I’m looking for a strategic planning/M&A analyst.
Who told you that HR is fair? It’s not. In most companies, HR works hard to obey the law AND to deliver what the shareholders are paying for, i.e. the best possible hires at the most efficient cost.
It’s promising to know that CS is such a booming industry. I am definitely targeting schools that are well rounded in other aspects in case CS isn’t the degree for me.
I understand that I don’t have to make the decision today, but I wish I could get the whole college search things behind me, so stressful!
I think the best thing I can do now is sit on everything y’all have said and wait on scholarship dollars to come in and honors program acceptances which could change my circumstances.
Thanks again for everyone help. I’ll keep y’all posted for when I come to a set decision
^I think they’re one of the best schools in the country to go to for cyber security, although the school’s overall reputation falls into the category of just another state flagship.
You could look into “scholarship for service” program by NSF. I think the scholarships can be for three years in return for working for the government the same amount of time.
@CourtneyThurston Courtney, you seem to have a lot of experience with how companies hire. What are your qualifications?
I can tell you my experience with the MIT grad was at the time, with a company that compared well with Google and Microsoft for software engineering talent and was a very large company with a large HR department.
At the end of the day, you are still dealing with actual people who have biases toward what type of schools they want their talent to come from.
BTW, lots of screening of applicants occurs by HR before I as the hiring manager every get my pile. However, once I have my pile, I can screen however I choose. That is the real world. Ignore it if you choose.
Well I don’t have a chance getting into cal tech or MIT as I did not apply.
I’ve found everyone’s comments helpful including @CourtneyThurston I do not see a reason for her being called out multiple time for giving good advice.
Sorry if I offended Courtney or anybody else. I just felt Courtney mis-represented my post in one of her responses and felt the need to clarify that my experiences were not from some small no-name software engineering firm, as I felt she had suggested.
If you read my original post, you’ll actually see that I agree with most of the others on this thread that most of the schools being considered are all equivalent and “prestige” doesn’t really come into play for that set of schools, so the OP should choose the best fit for him/her.
Our family was in the same fortunate situation as yours–our children could afford to go anywhere. Their college searches therefore were all about best fit. Both decided on private schools, for which we were/are full-pay. Both took/are taking full advantage of experience. We, the parents, feel it was/is worth the money. If you are accepted everywhere and your parents truly are fine with the cost, weigh cost if you wish, but don’t make that your deciding factor. If you go somewhere more expensive, make the commitment to squeeze out as much juice from the experience as possible.
A different view: D1 graduated from a school that’s not in the Caltech/MIT/UCB/Stanford CS pantheon. Her first job right out of college was at one of the Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft firms. Her second job was at another one of those firms. Her experience with job interviews always started with a phone interview. If that went well, there was a follow-up coding interview on Skype or similar. If THAT went well, there’d be a site visit (whoo hoo, all-expense paid trip with fancy hotel to the other coast from Boston, or even just up to NYC!). This was true for every firm she interviewed with, both large and small. ColoFatherof3’s firm uses a different method (as does my employer, for that matter), but as far as I can tell based on D1’s experience and what she knew from her classmates and coworkers, this three-part system is far more common.
blossom, the way in which Google does some of their recruiting is actually an attempt to be “fair”…in the sense of trying their damndest to eliminate interview bias after folks have gotten through a certain level. Everyone who’s come out for a site visit, or for those who’ve been made an offer which was turned down, or for those who Google is stalking for a specific expertise, is contacted by a recruiter on a regular basis “hi, just checking in to see how you’re doing”. If someone in these categories is re-interviewed, the interviewers have access to every bit of data from the interviewee’s previous interviews. They make sure to avoid any questions asked before; they look at HOW you answered questions before so that they can see if there’s been an increase in the interviewee’s knowledge and ability. Only after getting through that technical screen is the interviewee’s name handed on to possible hiring managers–that way, those managers already know the person meets their technical competence screen, so they don’t need to look at school names. Everyone’s equal at that point.
Google can do this because they’re huge and they’re about data. A small firm can’t do that. Still, it’s an interesting approach.
Slithey- you are talking about the assessment process-- and Google’s is terrific but is not the be-all and end all of hiring. But I was referring to Courtney’s comment that HR is “fair” and reads every single resume with avid interest, regardless of where someone got their CS degree. And that’s just not true. HR isn’t fair- not at Google, not at DE Shaw, not at Bridgewater, or fill in the blanks on any other elite employer. All of these companies obey the law, but there is no law requiring a company to give a first round interview to someone who majored at CS at Southern CT State college.
You aren’t talking about “fair”- eliminating interview bias isn’t about fair, it’s about systematically excluding women, Latino’s, African Americans from your hiring pool. Once someone has advanced to the interview stage, the selection criteria and the reasons why someone gets dinged are completely different vs. the resume reading stage. Why bother doing a phone screen with someone who graduated from a sub-par CS program when you are being inundated with kids from UIUC et al???
Do you honestly think shareholders want to spend millions of dollars interviewing marginal candidates- whether by phone, skype or in person?
They don’t. And a recruiter would last exactly one year in his or her job if their numbers got so out of whack that it took twice as many interviews to cull the pile and get to the target number of hires.
“But I was referring to Courtney’s comment that HR is “fair” and reads every single resume with avid interest.”
I never said every resume is read with avid interest, and I said HR at big tech companies has policies to enforce fairness [to the degree possible, echoing Slithey above]. I don’t appreciate you completely misrepresenting my points, in a way I feel is very deliberate and not in good faith. Good try though.
“All of these companies obey the law, but there is no law requiring a company to give a first round interview to someone who majored at CS at Southern CT State college.”
I’ve worked at multiple major tech companies alongside kids from community colleges in some cases. No-name schools. Not-flagship state schools. You need the skills to get into elite places, not the name.
“Why bother doing a phone screen with someone who graduated from a sub-par CS program when you are being inundated with kids from UIUC et al???”
This comment alone show you know absolutely 0 about hiring practices at Silicon Valley/big tech companies. Zero. Nilch. Nada.
Believe it or not, sometimes kids with amazing experience DON’T end up going to UIUCs. Sometimes kids at CCs have amazing project experience. No sane Google/Microsoft/etc quality company will, nor does, sacrifice those qualities for a 4.0 from a big name school who’s done nothing but study.
At least in their original post, the OP said they wanted to work in cyber security. If that’s true, there’s a vast world outside Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook. There’s big companies like IBM, Intel, and their subsidiaries heavily involved in security. There’s specialized companies such as FireEye. There’s the offensive side of cyber at companies which develop and sell zero-day exploits.
blossom, I agree that Google’s process is more assessment than initial recruitment. However, I also agree with Courtney that there are CS employers–including Google–who are looking at the entire resume that comes in, and not just the school. There are other CS employers who will use school as the first cut. There’s no one size fits all approach. We’ve been able to give the OP a variety of viewpoints about the process, which can only help.
Courtney- thanks so much for your helpful comments about my chosen career (corporate hiring, recruiting- and talent management for several international companies over the span of 32 years and counting.) I will make sure to remind my boss tomorrow that I know Zero, Zilch and Nada.
I agree that some jobs are by invitation only. However, there are other ways of getting noticed than just going to a top tier school. For example, someone could present at Blackhat or Defcon and get noticed in cyber security.