I'm not sure the article is intended to be targeted towards people who want an excuse to blame for their lack of success. I guess it is aimed at employers to try and make them consider context and circumstances when viewing somebody's job application.
The problem with saying "Life is unfair. Deal with it." is that this argument could be used to justify many things that we regard as outright wrong. Born into slavery? Can't get a job because of your skin colour? Wrongly accused of a crime? "Life is unfair. Deal with it."
At some stage somebody has to say "life is unfair, how can I make it a little fairer?" or the problem will simply become self fulfilling.
Why should an employer consider context and circumstances? They want to hire a best programmer they can for the money available to them. A sob story about how someone hasn't had the luck to get the experience to achieve rockstar status before they graduated as an undergraduate doesn't change the fact that if I'm a founder of the startup, or a hiring manager I am trying to optimize the chances of success of my startup or my team. I'm not a social services agency.
Because if your startup is just another way for people to share pictures of cats, you can get things done perfectly well with a strong candidate from a state school instead of wasting months of time and thousands of dollars per month of burn rate on Stanford and MIT graduates.
I would guess the pragmatic answer would be that you could discard good candidates because of such reasons. However it may well be that there are enough good programmers who do meet your criteria that it is a benefit (in terms of time) to just ignore those that don't.
There is a broader issue though. If certain trends in hiring (that may be partly perpetrated by HN and the blogosphere) are preventing good people from getting jobs (to what extent this is true is up for debate) then what can be done by either individuals or society at large to somewhat reverse that?
Tech has always been proud to call itself a relative meritocracy compared to other more mature industries. As it matures how would we prevent the industry falling down similar pitfalls?
> "Why should an employer consider context and circumstances?"
Because we aspire to live in a world where we're not always entirely self-serving. Because a world where we operate strictly based on a hard cost/benefit ratio is really unpleasant.
> "I'm not a social services agency."
Neither am I, yet I still find ways to do a little bit of good in the world. The idea isn't "stop hiring from top schools", it's "take a look at people outside the top schools and give them a chance to prove themselves".
The articles you quoted about people being courted, as opposed to needing to find a job, apply to very few college Juniors. It doesn't matter whether you're at an Ivy League school or somewhat lower tier school.
You're going to have a much harder time getting hired at a startup, mainly because a founder can't afford to take any risks. And an unknown quantity (which is what most college Juniors are) is a risk, by definition. An Ivy League degree might make a difference, but at a startup, you're going to want to optimize for the very best people you can find, and that's in general going to be people with a lot of experience (not just in technical matters, which is why being interested in learning about business and legal issues on the side is no bad thing).
Also, while I wasn't at Google during the period when it was growing at an astonishingly fast rate, the stories that I hard was that they were taking busloads of candidates from schools such as Stanford (literally; they would bring them in buses for interviews in an essentially production-line fashion). I talked to someone who told me how hard it was interview a half-dozen people in one day, and then having to keep track of it all to write up the interview reports.
For companies going through a huge growth spurt, they are going to inevitably take some shortcuts to maximize yield, and lower the burden on an insufficiently staffed HR and interview-qualified engineers to do the bulk hiring. And stories about the hiring practices of companies who are going through that growth spurt might not be accurate when the companies' growth rate has slowed, and they can afford to be a bit more deliberate about their hiring process.
I've heard a large number of wildly inaccurate (at least from my perspective, only having worked at Google for 2.5 years) stories about how hiring works at Google, and I sometimes wonder if they are stories that reflected an era from a previous stage in Google's evolution as a company, and yet, because they are great stories, they keep on getting retold, even if in the end they are actually harmful for people who believe they are still true.
The problem with saying "Life is unfair. Deal with it." is that this argument could be used to justify many things that we regard as outright wrong. Born into slavery? Can't get a job because of your skin colour? Wrongly accused of a crime? "Life is unfair. Deal with it."
At some stage somebody has to say "life is unfair, how can I make it a little fairer?" or the problem will simply become self fulfilling.