<p>Google (or other company) executives of the type who may be negotiating with lawyers may not be representative of people in general at the company or in the region.</p>
<p>My older kid went through three rounds of interviews with Google for an east coast office… He didn’t even seek out employment with them as he was never an i gotta work at Google kind of guy. No offer. Maybe they didn’t think he was arrogant enough. :)</p>
<p>I work with a bunch of people at Google and they are not at all arrogant. Also, they are not techies! When you are as big a company as Google is, you have all kinds of in-house divisions that have nothing to do with your core business.</p>
<p>@blossom, there was a post by @epiphany that people criticized suggesting an interesting style of arrogance. I think the only thing that is interesting is the sense that history started at the founding of Google. Other than that, nothing new. I think it is a digression from the main topic.</p>
<p>While we are on this digression, my experience with Goldman folks is that the arrogance is a little more circumspect – the team culture tends to do that. At Man’s Greatest Hospital, not so circumspect. They are pretty arrogant at McKinsey as well, though my sense is that there may be a little less to justify the arrogance. I have been fortunate to know/work with/come into contact with some extraordinarily smart and capable people over time (e.g., quite a few Nobel prize winners, founders/CEOs of major quant hedge funds, professors at the top-ranked universities, etc.). I frankly have no problem with arrogance as long as the work backs it up. I think that kind of skill/competence is even better when wrapped up with someone who is either humble or as they say at MIT I think, humbly arrogant. One of my academic mentors is a great man of academia who is as sweet and humble as can be. Very confident in his own abilities but never banging his own drum. </p>
<p>To the extent that the whole sub-thread started by @ephiphany is relevant, it is because that kind of arrogance might cause them to pay less attention to prestige university backgrounds, though I suspect that is a combination of a) PR that is honored more in the breach than not; b) as you pointed out, Google needs to grow very quickly and can’t merely plumb the most elite of institutions; and c) on the programming side, you need people who can code and it matters less where their degrees are from. Back in the dark ages, I taught myself programming and was employed in high school at Bell Labs writing software. No degree at all. </p>
<p>Shaw- of course there are some world class intellects/achievers who are humble in the extreme. There are legendary stories of Isaac Stern for example- and how extraordinarily kind he was to students and aspiring world class violinists. So you don’t need to be arrogant to be at the pinnacle of human achievement (although I’m sure he had his moments!)</p>
<p>What I was trying to point out is that some posters seem to take delight in pointing out that the institutions which believe themselves to be at the top of the heap are often characterized as arrogant. As if somehow this undercuts whatever selection/assessment processes they have in hiring employees. Goldman is arrogant- oh my, then we can safely discount the fact that they seem to prefer Harvard over Framingham State as a target school for recruiting. McKinsey is arrogant- oh dear- then the fact that they seem to have more Wharton and Chicago MBA’s than they do University of New Haven and Fairfield U is a datapoint we can all ignore- just another group of prestige %^&*'s.</p>
<p>There is a troubling undercurrent on CC which supports the notion that it’s ok to ignore output data on where kids who go to colleges end up because “it doesn’t matter where you go”. Fact is that for CERTAIN kids it doesn’t matter where they go. I mentioned the kids upstream who are so extraordinary that it really doesn’t matter. If your kid is one of those- congrats. Or your kid wants to teach fourth grade in your home state- great. Or your kid is joining the family business and just needs a degree and a couple of courses to teach managerial accounting- fantastic.</p>
<p>But for lots of other careers it DOES matter. Not just for the prestige. But because when Bank of America is figuring out its core school recruiting strategy for next year it will NOT be visiting all 3500 or however many colleges there are in America. Boeing does not say “mechanical engineering is mechanical engineering no matter where you study it”. The CDC will not view a degree in statistics from a college which does not require a programming-intensive set of classes in applied math the same way it will a degree in statistics from U Michigan or RPI.</p>
<p>So sure- Google doesn’t care where you go to college (a factoid I don’t believe btw). Plus they are arrogant.</p>
<p>Is this a helpful thread to anyone out there worried about launching their kid into the world of earning a paycheck, paying taxes, and advancing professionally???</p>
<p>As is typically the case, @blossom, you and I are on the same wavelength, both about Google’s supposed disinterest in where job applicants went to school and about the fact that where one goes to school can influence life outcomes for many.</p>
<p>Interestingly, even for the limited number of the extraordinary, where they go to school may affect their life outcomes. My father was extraordinarily smart – at some event (maybe at the National Academy of Science) a theoretical physicist (from MIT?) told me, “Your father is considered a virtuoso mathematician among theoretical physicists,” which is a scary thought. No problem at all with brains or drive. But he grew up in the Depression and was deeply grateful that he was given a full scholarship to a school that at the time didn’t take a lot of Jews. I think he was a math and physics major. He knew that teachers had job security in the Depression and had decided to become a HS math teacher. One of his professors asked him what he was going to do after college and he said HE math teacher. The prof said, “Son, you are not going to become a HS teacher.” He talked with him about graduate school and my father went to one of the best programs in the country. He went on to a very distinguished career that he absolutely loved – it was a little hard to understand what he did but after his death when compiling stuff, I came to understand that he made some fundamental contributions that surprisingly touch how we live. So even for the extraordinary, where you go can influence life outcomes. </p>
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</p>
<p>It was initially. The continued focus on Silicon Valley and the banking industry has made it less so, at least for me. </p>
<p>I think the problem with threads like this is that the readership of this site seems so dominated by people living on the coasts (many of whom accept, without question, the superiority of HYPSM) that it’s difficult sometimes to have a reasonable discussion. Those of us who live and work in other parts of the country never seem able to convince some of the more entrenched posters that, yes, it is possible for smart kids with good critical thinking skills to do very well with a degree from a variety of schools and that there are great opportunities in many fields, including technology, in dozens of livable cities around the country.</p>
<p>As an aside, I work for a growing tech company whose HQ is out west but not in SV. It is full of incredibly talented people who come from a variety of backgrounds. Hiring is based on skills, not credentials. We have offices in several states and recruiting is local or regional, except at the executive level. And in the C-suite you won’t find many people with an “elite” pedigree. A few have MBAs from top programs but they didn’t go to fancy undergrad schools. </p>
<p>In my community there is also a major ($1.7B) technology company that has been adding as many as 1000 employees a year. It pays very well and affords young college graduates an incredible range of opportunities including working internationally. Admittedly, many of them work investment-banking-type hours and it can be a grind. The company is known for hiring liberal-arts majors from LACs or the local flagship. They administer their own critical-thinking test and want to see both high school and college transcripts. But they have absolutely no bias toward the “elite” schools. The presence of this company has spawned literally dozens of consulting and related businesses in the area as well. These companies are being created and run by people with connections in the community, not to some far-away university that may hold some prestige somewhere else.</p>
<p>It’s a big world out there.</p>
<p>LinkedIn now lets you search resumes by University and employer so you can see what the “top alma maters” are for various employers.</p>
<p>KEEP in mind, this is JUST who has given their information voluntarily to LinkedIn (and maybe even folks who have turned off the privacy functionality), and assumes people are telling the truth (and laying out all the info), BUT, the top 10 alma maters for Google are (in order):</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>UC-Berkeley</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>University of Michigan</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>University of Washington</li>
<li>University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
</ol>
<p>Now, these results DON’T account for number of alumni/ae these schools have in total; they are purely raw numbers (not proportional). For example, the big publics on this list graduate thousands more students each year than say, MIT or Harvard, so the results may be skewed a bit towards schools that produce a lot of engineering alumni/ae. It also probably (my assumption here) undercounts folks who are in higher level administrative positions; I know a guy who is pretty high up at Google. He’s not on LinkedIn (and he didn’t go to one of these 10 schools either, interestingly).</p>
<p>For Goldman Sachs, if you were curious (and keep in mind these include folks worldwide who list Goldman as their employer; based upon the results I am assuming that Goldman’s London practice pretty much ONLY hires at LSE/Oxbridge):</p>
<ol>
<li>NYU Stern</li>
<li>NYU</li>
<li>London School of Economics</li>
<li>UPenn - Wharton</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>University of Oxford</li>
<li>University of Cambridge</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
</ol>
<p>Just for fun/comparison…</p>
<p>Top Alma Maters for INTEL:
- Arizona State University
- Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
- Portland State University
- Oregon State University
- Cal State - Sacramento
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israeli Univ)
- Tel Aviv University
- University of Phoenix
- University of California -Berkeley
- University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign</p>
<p>I find comparing Google’s top alma maters to INTEL’s fascinating. I might look up some other tech companies now…just because it’s an interesting anthropological look I think.</p>
<p>Sally, I live on a coast but I have been hiring for almost 30 years for businesses which range from classic manufacturing/gear head cultures to the more “knowledge worker” variety. I do not believe the parochialism is limited to those who live on the coasts. I’ve met people throughout the country (and the world) who suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome, and moreover, believe that “if I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be any good”. These are senior corporate folks in St. Louis and Dayton and Minneapolis who had (past tense) trouble understanding that an honors grad in engineering from Fudan University might- just might- be better qualified than a kid from UIUC or Wisconsin. And I’m not knocking either Illinois or Wisconsin- both of which are very fine schools. But they just didn’t understand the weeding process and the depth and the magnitude of some universities not in their backyards- until eventually they did. </p>
<p>Hire a couple of kids with a BS from a university not in their backyard who has essentially covered the entire Master’s curriculum from the colleges they are familiar with- and they get it. Hire a couple of kids with a BS from a university you have never heard of and watch them run rings around their colleagues because they’ve been doing creative blue sky work since junior year- not just “chug and plug” problem sets and memorization- and you get it. Or in the liberal arts- hire a kid from a college which requires a senior thesis or some sort of capstone project which isn’t just “write a big paper with footnotes” but actually requires creativity and synthesis and the ability to draw from multiple disciplines to make a new insight… and compare that kid to someone who has been dutifully handing in papers and taking exams (even with comparable GPA’s) and they get it.</p>
<p>Yes- administering a proprietary critical thinking test for sure is a great way to normalize the candidate pool and make sure your hiring managers aren’t letting “Notre Dame has a good football team so it’s got to be a better college than Goucher” seep into your process.</p>
<p>But it irks me that so many folks assume that “prestige” is some magic fairy dust that has no relationship to what actually goes on at a college. A long time ago I hired an intern to do essentially clerical work. We paid him the same rate we paid full time employees but he asked us to call him an intern since it would look better on his resume than “part time clerk”. Our company at the time had no problem with that.</p>
<p>A year later he called and said I needed to talk to the Academic Dean of his department so he could get credit for a “business rotation”-- and since he was several credits shy of graduating, he really needed this “rotation”. I told him I wouldn’t lie about what he did- xeroxing, stapling, etc. and he said that was fine.</p>
<p>And yes- it turned out to be fine. The Dean just wanted to know whether he showed up on time on his scheduled days (yes) and left on time (yes). I described his work duties- essentially what a smart 9 year old could have done- and the Dean thanked me for my perspective.</p>
<p>And the intern got full academic credit for TWO semesters of “business” out of this. Plus he was paid (but we didn’t and don’t let people work for us for free).</p>
<p>So yeah- I like to peek under the hood of the vehicle I’m buying. I have seen too many college seniors patching together a BA out of AP credits, “stapling and filing” coop’s or internships, and independent studies of dubious intellectual value to be able to say honestly that prestige is irrelevant. It’s not as relevant as most people on CC believe, but it is not without merit as a way to quickly separate a huge cohort of 22 year olds into manageable piles. You don’t get two semesters of academic credit for a mickey mouse internship at Cal Tech. You don’t get two semesters of academic credit for clerical work at Swarthmore. You don’t get two semesters of academic credit for just showing up on time (for a part time job!) and leaving on time at U Chicago.</p>
<p>The fact that those schools (East, West and middle) are prestigious- well, they also have high academic standards. Both for getting in and for getting out.</p>
<p>Employers notice these things.</p>
<p>Okay, just a few more, I promise.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind, this includes ALL self-reporting employees. Someone could be a temporary salad bar cleaner or they could be chief engineer on some project.</p>
<p>Top 10 for Microsoft:
- University of Washington
- Washington State Univ.
- Univ. of WA - Foster School of Business
- Western Washington Univ.
- University of Waterloo (Canada)
- University of Mumbai (India)
- University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign
- Stanford
- Bellevue College (small public college, formerly CC, located in same town as Microsoft HQ)
- UT - Austin</p>
<p>Top 12 for IBM (I went all the way to #12 because I thought it was interesting):
- Bangalore University
- Visvesvaraya Technological University
- Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University
- University of Pune (India)
- Kendriya Vidyalaya
- Osmania University
- University of Mumbai
- Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil)
- UT - Austin
- Anna University (India)
- University of Madras (India)
- North Carolina State University</p>
<p>If you sort IBM for just US-based personnel (which I didn’t realize was even possible until right now, oops), you get:
- UT - Austin
- NC State Univ.
- Penn State - State College
- University of Phoenix
- RPI
- Georgia Tech
- University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign
- Purdue
- Marist College
- University of Maryland - College Park</p>
<p>What I learned: University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign must graduate a lot of great computer engineers!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Exactly. So why are we disagreeing? It’s not just the elite schools that subject students to rigorous academics on their path to graduation. Many LACs require senior theses or capstone projects or substantial research. So do majors in various programs at big state schools.</p>
<p>I think the bogus internship example you are using is an outlier and not indicative of either all companies that hire interns or all colleges that accept internship credits. At my company, we are not allowed to turn interns into admins. We have to give them substantive work related to their career path. And we pay them. Most of the internship descriptions I have seen from various colleges have pretty strict requirements on what constitutes a credit-worthy position. Maybe times have changed.</p>
<p>@3kids304 Thanks for the lists! I’d like to play with that search option sometime! :)</p>
<p>I don’t think linkedin is a reliable source. The information is not verifiable. To me it’s just a social network. Everyone can say he/she works at company A on linkedin regardless of the position (important, unimportant,…). I can say I worked for some company B when I actually had 2 months of temporary job there and was not selected to become a full-time employee. Linkedin is just a way to get attention.</p>
<p>The offshoot from the original article seems to have taken on a life of its own. There are a small # of employees in a small # of departments at Google who managed to get through the hiring chain and join the 1% or so of applicants who were hired, yet without a college degree. Good for them. They have an employable skill. But as someone said, there are lots of departments and job demands that have nada to do with programming. And with something like 50K employees (around 20K or so are at headquarters IIRC) it seems hard to generalize about the arrogance of the employees. Maybe a person had had an experience with a few, but do they represent the complete corporate culture? The handful of employess I know aren’t arrogant, so I choose to generalize from my n of 5 or so :)</p>
<p>Sally- we are not disagreeing.</p>
<p>My “intern” was not an outlier- he graduated with a degree in business from a well regarded (locally) university and now that I am not young and naive, I have come to learn that his experience was most definitely not out of the ordinary. Kids from this (and other) universities get internship credit for working at brokerage firms doing what is most assuredly clerical work. Kids get internship credit for jobs which involve “attending” departmental meetings when it is clear when you interview them that they have no idea what went on in those meetings or why the topics being discussed were related to the work at hand.</p>
<p>My company has tightened up its internship policy both to be in compliance with the feds AND to make sure we are not unwittingly creating a shadow corps of employees. But there are several kids in my neighborhood right now working on securing their Summer of 2015 internships (for college credit) and it’s kind of astonishing what passes for intern-quality experiences in some companies- AND what the college will consider college level experience. Having a summer job which involves pushing “print” on a Powerpoint that someone else has created (even if it passes the corporate sniff test for an internship) seems to me to be below the bar for an accredited university’s business program.</p>
<p>My kids both had paid summer internships during college but did not also receive college credit for the internship. Are these kids you’re talking about looking for summer internships getting paid and getting academic credit as well? That’s a good deal if that’s the case. My kids were expected to make money during the summers and I would not have wanted them to do an internship for credit only.</p>
<p>@3kids304:
Shouldn’t be a surprise. UIUC has one of the top CS and one of the top CompE programs in the US/world.</p>
<p>All a kid needs to do to get in to Fudan is to do (very) well on a test. They’re even less holistic in their admissions than UIUC or UW-Madison engineering. This can be seen in some of the grads of places like PKU/Tsinghua/Fudan/Jiaotong who have great intellects but are severely lacking in other areas required for success in the business world. Also, Fudan engineering isn’t exactly top-notch; not in China and definitely not in the world (when it comes to engineering faculty and training engineers, I would say both UIUC and UW-Madison are light-years ahead of Fudan). I’m afraid that your post manages to display both your ignorance of engineering and arrogance, @blossom. Plus, does Fudan even have honors?</p>
<p>Purple- we hired the Fudan grad who majored in engineering for a non engineering role. She was heads and tails above the other new grads being interviewed for that role- intellectually, creatively, etc. There were hiring managers who couldn’t bring themselves to admit that she aced our critical thinking test, had everyone who met her fall in love, etc, since they’d never heard of Fudan. My point was not to knock UIUC or UW engineers as I think I’ve already pointed out in several posts-- I am a fan of both schools and have hired for both technical and non-technical roles there, but to point out that fantastically talented people can come from universities you’ve never heard of.</p>
<p>Explain to meet what is arrogant about that? I am happy to be ignorant. But there are tens of thousands of engineering students around the world who interview for and get non-engineering jobs every year (even the engineers from UIUC and Wisc. Many of them get hired in management rotation programs where their colleagues majored in econ or urban planning or history). And I was pointing out that if you live and work in St. Louis or Chicago or Dayton, SOME of them might have gone to colleges you have never heard of. And that’s ok too.</p>