<p>Some small companies don’t care. Their HR and Talent people primarily get evaluated on “cost per hire” and so the emphasis is on developing a recruiting platform and process that gets the biggest bang for the buck. Some large companies don’t care either- except for executive roles, the drill is “cost per hire”.</p>
<p>it’s silly to generalize on something that has so many factors.</p>
<p>Where does Google really hire–good schools.</p>
<p><a href=“Schools for Getting a Job at Google”>Schools for Getting a Job at Google;
<p>Obviously the best students are going to usually come from the best schools, but the point is that not everybody has to come from those schools to be considered worthy of hiring. </p>
<p>@barrons, I look at that list, and of the 18 American schools, I see 10 publics, including SJSU and UCD. Only 3 Ivies. Harvard but no Princeton or Yale.</p>
<p>Certainly, the list is heavy in schools that are known for having good CS departments, private (Stanford, MIT, CMU, Cornell) as well as public (Cal, UMich, UDub, UIUC, UCLA, UCSD, UT-Austin)</p>
<p>It’s basically a list that I would expect for a company based on the West Coast that tries to find the best talent it can anywhere.</p>
<p>Having spoken to one person at Google, he does not know where his colleagues attended school. He also noted that it is hard to differentiate between those with BS, MS, or PhDs. </p>
<p>I did not bring up the idea of affinity groups in this thread. It was PG. Since not everybody is familiar with this concept, I thought it would help to show where the idea comes from. That is all.</p>
<p>My central thesis is that what Google is looking for is not that revolutionary. Most of what Bock is looking for has been expressed by others before. The only concept that is new to me is “emergent leadership”. Personally I doubt he finds many with such attribute. Finding people with all the attributes is just about impossible.</p>
<p>Hope this helps. Glad to see the thread back on track again.</p>
<p>^Thank you for the links to followup to the original article.</p>
<p>"I did not bring up the idea of affinity groups in this thread. It was PG. "</p>
<p>Nope, sorry, you brought it up out of nowhere, post 41.</p>
<p>I said good schools–not Ivy schools. Most good comp sci programs are NOT at Ivy schools. Ballmer not withstanding.</p>
<p>^^The word affinity has a specific meaning in this context. It did not even show up until your post, #42, where you are already in an attacking mode. Why don’t we just let other posters decide for themselves while we stay on topic?</p>
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<p>No problem. I think the addition of the second interview (and the WSJ article) give us a much better understanding of where Bock is going. He is clearly a pragmatist. Go to college, but have some idea why you are going. Don’t waste your time and money otherwise. Everybody is born creative, but acquisition of quantitative skills requires effort, do it because the job market respects you more for it. </p>
<p>I personally agree with him, but I suspect most here do not. Am I right?</p>
<p>Liberal arts are important, especially (if?) done in tandem with something else (more practical?). I think he is carefully dancing around the question here. Cognitive ability is not IQ? This is the strangest comment in the interviews. I think he is doing his best to be PC, but then Manzi said exactly the same thing in his excellent piece as well. What do you folks think? I would rather they be more direct, but I understand people are easily offended.</p>
<p>Finally, he felt the young lady in the WSJ made a serious mistake switching majors. I have trouble with this suggestion. Taking a GPA hit is one thing, risking failure is something else. Anyone with me here?</p>
<p>"Liberal arts are important, especially (if?) done in tandem with something else (more practical?). "</p>
<p>It’s so odd to think that liberal arts can’t be “practical.” It is reflective of a narrow mindset that sees only math and science. It’s a mindset I would be embarrassed to have.</p>
<p>Practical may not be the right word. However, it is clear that as a result of information and communication technology, people with certain kinds of skills in creating ideas, coding and software development, and data analysis are being rewarded. At the same time, the ICT has eliminated and will continue to eliminate a variety of jobs that used to occupy liberal arts majors (lawyers, middle managers, bookkeepers, etc.). In the past, some of these jobs were outsourced but I think we are reaching a place where software does the job without outsourcing. The Economist had a series of articles that suggests that this latest “industrial revolution” seems to be unlike previous ones in that it does not create more jobs than it eliminates. Art majors who know how to advanced graphics for games will probably be rewarded but people who know how to illustrate things by hand will likely not. This has resulted over the last decade or so in wage stagnation of the middle class (and probably a decline in real terms) and wage acceleration for the to 10% and top 1%. As competition for jobs at the middle/bottom has increased, returns to a) capital; and b) defensible ideas that can be implemented by startups or bigger companies (and the wages who can help with implementation) has increased. I think that the wages for the bottom 80% (just making up a number here), which have been stagnant to down for a couple of decades will decline dramatically and the value of technical skills will go up as it has and the value of ideas/ownership/capital will go up dramatically. It is not a good recipe for societal happiness, but seems to be the trend. I have a general sense that many parents and even some among the august on CC don’t really understand how bad the situation for kids who major in English or sociology or recreation studies may become as more and more college graduates fall through the middle class to the barista/retail class. Fewer jobs and more job candidates. So, practical may not be the right word, but possessing the demonstrable skills to add nearly immediate value to companies in particular technical areas might be more applicable.</p>
<p>Shawbridge- your macro analysis may be correct but parents here don’t need to be advising an entire cohort of college students- just their own. And by and large, it is a mistake to look at these macro trends and figure out what any particular kid should do with his or her life.</p>
<p>Yes- a kid who is oriented towards complex and abstract quantitative thinking will likely have some options post grad unless he or she can’t communicate, work in a team, get along with others, etc. But what to tell your own kid who loves history and literature and is struggling with senior year calculus? “too bad kiddo, you’re majoring in math”.</p>
<p>That’s a recipe for a wasted education in my opinion- and believe me, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people in my career who were lousy “whatevers” due to parental steering/coaching/advising, and it took them half a career to find out that they were terrific “somethings” and not lousy “whatevers”.</p>
<p>I hire lots of former English major and Sociology majors. </p>
<p>I also reject a lot of kids who majored in accounting and finance and international business and recreation studies and “real estate studies” and other so called practical majors. A kid with a C average in an accounting program is useless to me for a job in an actual corporate accounting department. Better he should have been an A minus student in comparative literature, with a statistics course and both macro and micro econ. A kid with a C average in a not-so-rigorous undergrad business program in accounting to me is a kid who doesn’t like accounting. And didn’t have enough self knowledge to go explore something else he did like.</p>
<p>Engineering- sure. The golden ticket if you time it right. But go tell that to the aero/astro folks who got laid off in the early 1990’s. Or the electrical engineers who were SOL after the 2001 tech bubble burst. Or the petroleum engineers who have long known about the boom/bust. If you are clever enough to tell a high school kid today which discipline will be hot four years hence- fantastic. I am not so clever. I see the massive swings; I can’t predict what will happen with H1B visas next April, let alone in four years. So even if companies are expanding their engineering hires by a massive number- if the tech industry is successful in lobbying for expansion of H1B’s I can guarantee you a tight hiring year for new grads with engineering degrees. They’ll be competing with the kids at IIT, Fudan, some of the biggest universities in the world, and not just worrying that their 3.3 GPA from Illinois puts them right up against a 3.4 from Michigan.</p>
<p>Yes, demonstrable skills. But they don’t need to be technical. Strong writers. Strong communicators. Ability to synthesize lots of information into easily digestible bites. Ability to use charts and graphics to demonstrate a complicated concept. Ability to drive consensus.</p>
<p>And my biggest beef… read the damn newspaper. Not the headlines from your Yahoo or flipboard feed. I can’t tell you how hilarious it is to interview a kid allegedly interested in X (let’s call it finance) who has trudged through a vocationally oriented business major and sits in front of the interviewer and cannot discuss a scandal/event/crisis unfolding in the world of finance that has been on the front page of every newspaper for over a week.</p>
<p>Awesome post, blossom. It should be required reading for every parent of a prospective college student.</p>
<p>Just want to mention that there are great jobs in the retail business. Maybe it’s above sales associate, but it can actually be a really great career, contrary to popular CC lore. </p>
<p>That said, I’ve really liked the last few posts!!! Thanks. </p>
<p>“Just want to mention that there are great jobs in the retail business. Maybe it’s above sales associate, but it can actually be a really great career, contrary to popular CC lore.”</p>
<p>Amen. People on CC are so narrow-minded about what constitutes a “good career.”</p>
<p>Totally. One of my dream jobs would be working with animals all day. The young woman who runs the day care where I take my dogs has a BS in biology from our local flagship. She worked there for years before buying the business when it came up for sale. Every year it wins the “Best of” award in our community and they just moved to a new, larger location. I would love that to be my career!</p>
<p>Like many before said, it’s not that Google is purposely rejecting top school grads. It’s that they look for certain qualities when hiring, and the author (mistakenly) links top school grads with not having such traits, like intellectual humility. </p>
<p>Yes. People need to read the article with a grain of salt. Laszlo Back himself is a Yale grad.</p>
<p><a href=“https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/in/laszlobock[/url]”>https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/in/laszlobock</a></p>
<p>^Excellent find! Pomona and Yale, 4years at McKinsey. I guess I don’t drink the Kool-Aid for good reasons.</p>
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<p>Math is a liberal art with a distinguished history that stretches back thousands of years. It can also be highly practical. I am not certain what Bock is really trying to say, but here is a related passage from Manzi:</p>
<p>“Then, your degree should be in something hard: math, physics, electrical engineering, analytical philosophy, computer science, and so on. It’s okay to major in history or literature, but you better have some really tough quantitative or analytical classes on your transcript, and have done very well in them.”</p>
<p>I suspect he is saying that some disciplines train analytical thinking better than others. It is certainly consistent with his comment to the WSJ article. I agree with that. CCL came to a similar conclusion; all majors are not the same:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/16/connor_essay_on_why_majors_matter_in_how_much_college_students_learn”>https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/16/connor_essay_on_why_majors_matter_in_how_much_college_students_learn</a></p>