<p>“I just don’t think the ‘elite’ thing is as important out here in the wild wild west as it is in other parts of the US.”</p>
<p>It’s most important in the East. I don’t know why this isn’t more obvious to people in the East! </p>
<p>@sally305 & @Pizzagirl :
<a href=“http://mobile.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Oracle-Aims-at-BrandName-Schools-for-Recruits/”>http://mobile.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Oracle-Aims-at-BrandName-Schools-for-Recruits/</a></p>
<p>OK, looking at this again, “product development” in this case may refer to coding (rather than marketing, which is what I usually associate with “product development”).</p>
<p>BTW, UW-Madison makes the list because they have some faculty who are renown in the database world.</p>
<p>The article mentions MySQL as an example of a company doing the opposite as what the article thinks Oracle is doing. But isn’t the MySQL company a subsidiary of Oracle?</p>
<p>I think there is a narrative that says you are not going to get what you want in the US unless you did everything right when you were 15 and 16 and unless you were born a great test taker and unless you studied all the time and never had a bad year. But, I don’t think that narrative is actually “true.”</p>
<p>I like to see the facts come out from time to time, in interviews like this.</p>
<p>Being bright doesn’t necessarily always equate with being a great (by CC standards, perfect) student. Sometimes it leads to less direct paths. And I think this is all right and I think this intensity around these early years is a bit too much, personally.</p>
<p>Particularly since the outcome is not assured for anyone. Not a perfect outcome and not a negative outcome either. Of course, being born to the “right” parents seems to be the most important thing of all, and can make up for a myriad of bumps in the road.</p>
<p>Let’s also remember that Google has had a voracious appetite for people for the past decade or so. When you need to ramp up as quickly as it has needed to ramp up, you can’t limit yourself to a handful of relatively small colleges for recruiting purposes.</p>
<p>By the way, a Google hire from the University of Chicago whom I met a few years ago was an anthropology major, with an excellent statistics background.</p>
<p>Kids not going to college – hmmmm . . . . I suspect that in some ways this may be the most impressive bunch of all. The child of a long term friend has worked at Facebook since he was 18, well before it went public. He spent a year at Harvard, didn’t like it, was accepted as a transfer at Stanford, but never enrolled there because he took a summer job at Facebook and never left. That could easily have happened before his first year of college, too. He’s plenty smart; his parents are both PhDs, one of whom is faculty at Stanford. He started as a software developer, of course, but his role has expanded over the years. In any event, these are not companies where the finance department pushes the developers around. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point is, the type of person who works in a professional job at Google without going to college is quite likely someone who is very, very smart, fairly privileged, and actually fairly well-educated, too. Not really an argument that college is unnecessary for any broad group of people.</p>
<p>Yes, actually, I like that the writer in the Times made it clear he was not arguing for people not to go to college.</p>
<p>Every large company will have one or two “savant” types who dropped out of fill in the blank college and is now a senior vice president. I don’t think the typical HS or college kid can take career development advice from the outliers. My own company has someone running a huge division who started here as an administrative assistant. But it’s disingenuous to tell kids to get jobs as secretaries and data entry clerks since “everyone knows companies don’t care about elite educations” or whatnot.</p>
<p>UCB- it’s less about the size of the actual school and more about the size of the potential talent pool. BYU “punches above its weight” in corporate recruiting not because it’s so huge (there are many state U’s significantly bigger) and not because it’s convenient to get to (although it’s not a bad trip) but because if a company needs a geographically mobile entry level/management trainee pool, that’s what BYU has. The grads already speak one or more foreign languages; the grads have already spent quality time overseas (and not on some debutante “junior year being a tourist in Paris”, but actually working internationally); seniors are typically 24 years old and very often married vs. 21 or 22 and needing a big social life/dating pool for their first job/city.</p>
<p>That’s distinct from the academics, which in some departments are really strong (others not).</p>
<p>So the cultural “milieu” of a particular college is an important component as well. A large defense contractor has very different needs from a big ad agency. And the list of schools which a company like Boeing considers “prestigious” is very different from the list of Bank of America or DE Shaw.</p>
<p>@blossom: BYU is actually one of the biggest privates around and has more undergrads than Cal & UGa, many more undergrads than UVa, and has about as many undergrads as UMich. Few state U’s are significantly bigger.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus: that article was before Sun bought MySQL and Oracle bought Sun.</p>
<p>I kind of wonder how we get from “doesn’t care about top schools” to high school graduates so quickly? B-) </p>
<p>Considering that Sun bought MySQL AB in 2008 and was bought by Oracle in 2010, an article that old may not reflect current hiring practices of any of the companies described.</p>
<p>Purple- my point is the density of what you are looking for, not the actual size in terms of numbers of students. I’m not recruiting at a huge university if I have a narrow hiring need no matter how many kids there are on campus. It’s not a relevant metric. If a big school doesn’t have an aero/astro concentration, the fact that its undergrad business program has a few thousand seniors doesn’t matter to me if I’m hiring engineers to design propulsion systems.</p>
<p>The point was not to argue the benefits of BYU which is a fantastic college. But for some hiring needs UVA is better. :)</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus: the point was showing that some companies may (at some points in time, though if one company was exclusive in the past, it’s not hard to imagine that others are now) be exclusive in their college recruiting for product development. BTW, the date of the article is clearly shown on there.</p>
<p>How many of their graduates are recruited from college? The majority of the people I know at Google were recruited away from other firms from all over the country.</p>
<p>It could be easy to not care about credentials when you are hiring based on proven experience. </p>
<p>I pretty much agree with everything you say in post #23, poetgrl. I am not so certain Google is a good example of what you mean, though. It may be a good example of some of what you mean, but there is a strong elitist streak through what the Google guy is saying, too. It’s not “We only hire from Harvard,” of course. But it’s “We only hire the super-intelligent with great leadership qualities” and “No pre-meds and other weenies, please.” They don’t want people who have never experienced failure, but the kind of people they seem to want will have experienced mainly the type of failure that comes from outsized ambitions – “My rocketship didn’t make it to Mars!” not “I got depressed and confused and crawled into a hole for awhile.”</p>
<p>Reading Friedman’s description of Google’s hiring process, it sounds a lot like Teach For America.</p>
<p>That’s true. There can be an elitist attitude to "not hiring top school grads, too ". </p>
<p>There can be elitist attitudes with any practice. And that’s not always a bad thing. There are risks and drawbacks of course, but a company that targets the smartest/most-motivated/hardest-working is likely capable of more than a company that doesn’t target so narrowly. (Whether you want to work there is a different question).</p>
<p>I know two people at Google - one graduated from Williams with a degree in Art History and is in their marketing depat last I knew. The other is Director of Google Ideas. Stanford grad with too many other achievements to list. He did not start out at Google, though. </p>
<p>S1 was the only one in his department hired straight out of undergrad. Everyone else came from other departments, other companies or academia. OTOH, the other folks we know who work there were also hired straight from UG, and they often had multiple offers from which to choose.</p>
<p>Not needing to go to college =/= privileged. It does however, without a doubt, mean that the person is a genius who was born with extreme ability. It reminds me of a story I read a while back about a guy who had to escape political turmoil in Egypt, whose parents both died in a fire that took down his home, and how he learned everything through KhanAcademy upon coming to the US and then got into Columbia University. He absolutely was not privileged, but he was extremely smart. </p>
<p>What does this tell us? Google can sense intelligence extremely well, and unlike possibly any other company, looks beyond your college degree to sense it. </p>
<p>Of course this is assuming that these articles aren’t just a PR attempt to get people more hopeful and disguise its selectivity in ways beneficial to the company.</p>
<p>For important positions, condidates must be smart.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><a href=“http://research.google.com/workatgoogle.html[/url]”>http://research.google.com/workatgoogle.html</a></p>
<p>On the other hand, not everyone wants to work for Google.</p>