My recruiting team knows the relative strengths and weaknesses of universities all over the world. We know which fellowships are competitive; we know that the GPA’s in some countries are out of 10.0 and which ones are closer to the US model (MIT being a notable US exception); we know which universities admit solely based on scores and which ones have broader admissions criteria, etc.
How do you staff a new operation in Warsaw or Singapore without understanding the local higher ed scene??? I’m not being argumentative- seriously- how do you do that???
I think one way is to have the candidates speak to hiring managers in the US/ Europe/Asia, if available or someone else if not. IF you don’t have people in country, you can easily have them speak to someone in another country. It’s more about the role, IMO.
Obviously, you are thinking that the local higher ed role plays an important part of hiring. Why? Or what is it that makes you need to know the school rather than the skills?
Understanding that many of you have a global perspective, if I could, I’d like to confine this to US universities.
When you get past the top 5-7 schools well known for CS (Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, some Ivies) which very few are admitted to…
Is there a significant benefit between a private at 75-80K / year, and a well regarded public at 30-40K if in-state.
In advance- this one might not have a clear answer…
Because you’ll get thousands of resumes. Then you’ll have paired cutoffs to sift through – <School name, GPA>
Let me give you an example. There is a bayarea startup called Zipline. It was humming along fine. One day, some youtuber spoke positively about it. The next day they received 15k resumes for an internship for 2-3 positions. They had I think about 40-50 employees at that time. Therefore people use various mechanisms to filter.
All the Ivies seem to punch above their raw CS ranking, interestingly, according to my son. Also, the private schools seem to fare better in terms of non coding jobs – e.g., product management etc. I was shocked to find that Tufts did very well. I counted carefully when we were considering ED2ing to them. Their CS rank is pretty poor.
Any answer to such a question may be more useful between specific schools, rather than lumping all private and all public schools together. Of course, that assumes that the higher price is actually affordable, rather than requiring lots of debt.
Regardless of college prestige effects (which implicitly judge college students and graduates by the college admission and affordability characteristics that they had while in high school), CS departments can vary considerably in subareas covered and emphasized (although larger departments are more likely to have at least some undergraduate-level coverage in a broader range of subareas) and in curricular organization. These can affect academic fit for the student. Another factor in academic fit is the college’s general education requirements.
If both schools are well known for CS - then in my experience, not really. What matters is strength of curriculum, rigor, connections to the industry, etc.
Honestly, that has not been my experience or observation for hard core CS jobs (vs quant roles, etc).
Certainly some Ivy candidates do very well - like those from UPenn, Cornell. But we are just as likely to see strong candidates from other leading private and public CS schools. Princeton and Harvard grads tend to go to investment and finance jobs more often than CS. And in all my years I can’t recall hiring anyone from Dartmouth or Brown
My peers at other leading technology companies have shared similar observations.
There are plenty of publics in the top 10 for undergraduate CS so it does not need to be an either or decision. UIUC, GT, Berkley, UCLA, UT, UW are all in the top 10.
I don’t know about Harvard, but I have a kid at Princeton, and they place a sizeable chunk of their class into FAANG for internships – maybe about 20-25% easily. Other large tech is well represented – e.g. Stripe etc. A lot of the kids don’t want to go into FAANG. There is a decent presence in quant – maybe about 3% of the entire undergrad batch, spread across Math and CS. There are also a bunch of product mgmt placements.
I have heard very good things about Brown. I know less about Dartmouth, but a friend’s kid who is a freshman there was offered a fall internship in his Sophomore year at Amazon. He would have got in for freshman summer, but he was late and they were full up. I don’t think that kind of penetration is trivial.
A lot of the CS kids at Princeton don’t want to go into traditional finance, because it either pays less well, or has insane hours in the case of IB . They are more sympathetic to quant. Strictly WLB.
I certainly didn’t say no one from the Ivies goes to tech companies and I did specifically call out quant jobs. My point was, there’s no specific benefit (from a hiring viewpoint) of being at an Ivy vs one of the top xx public or private CS schools.
Since this is not a debating forum, I’ll leave it at that.
I agree. I see the ivy as giving some optionality to look at areas outside of pure CS and also access to product type roles for which people would look at you seriously.
There are institutions in other parts of the world called “college” which do not calibrate to a Bachelor’s degree convening institution. In our world it would be a post high school certificate.
Which is fine. If you need someone who can code in XYZ language, then that’s what you need. But you aren’t likely to find that person well versed in theory, mathematical complexity, quantitative analysis. An analogy might be that a nurse can correctly administer a strep test and diagnose and effectively treat a strep throat when the test comes back positive, but you won’t be going to that same nurse to diagnose lung cancer and develop a treatment plan.
That’s why you need to understand the local landscape if you’re hiring overseas. Some roles require “can you start on Tuesday and do you have the skills”. Other roles require evidence of more.
I agree with that. No two schools, whether public or private, are interchangeable. The premium you pay for some of elite privates over their public counterparts is for, first of all, the experience, including the academic experience (e.g. potentially more interactions with faculty, more likely to be surrounded by peers with similar abilities, etc.), potentially easier access to certain courses, stronger overall resources (including in career counseling and placement), and generally greater flexibilities (including in selecting alternative or additional majors/minors).
Here’s another reason. Tech companies tend to do more extensive evaluations of candidates’ skills than most other industries. However, they can only focus on a few select aspects of technical skills in their evaluation processes. A school’s program, and how the student does in that program, gives these companies some confidence in the student’s ability beyond those few select aspects evaluated by them.
Harvard is an interesting exception among the schools that offer a CS major (there maybe others). I think just doing 8-9 courses will get you a major at Harvard. Harvard wants you to have the opportunity of touching many different fields just so that you will have an interdisciplinary mind set. To that extent the CS majors at Harvard may have less commitment to the field.
By contrast, Princeton requires 8 departmentals (300 or above level) plus some mandatory 200 level courses (I can count at least 2) + depending on whether you have are a BSE or a BA 1-2 junior independent study papers and a Senior thesis. At that point there is some commitment to the field :-). I am sure kids self-select the school anyway.
We do an online assessment before your resume makes it to HR for review. There is a more detailed one that is specific to your role after the HR screen. The interview panel can also assign another assessment if they wish, they usually give the applicant a mini project to complete.
My employer is committed to hiring a diverse workforce and limiting our applicants to a handful of schools would not work.
Concentration Requirements :: Harvard CS Concentration says 9 CS courses (including both lower and upper level; looks like 4 are lower level) plus 2-5 math courses (depending on math entry level) are required for the CS major. Honors requires 11 CS courses, while joint concentrations of CS plus something else require 8 CS courses.
Yes. The math courses apply broadly to many majors. I wouldn’t count them as CS courses. They can do 8 and be done if they are doing jointly with something else. That number is quite different at many places.