I'm really sorry, but I stopped reading when it was implied that the "good" engineers are the ones at Facebook/Google that went to MIT. If that's your idea of a necessary condition for "good" engineers, I think you deserve what you get.
The old "I stopped reading at ..." routine is pretty annoying even in the best of circumstances, but particularly so when the basis of the complaint is misinterpreting the article. There is no implication made in the article about only Facebook/Google engineers being "good". There is however exactly the opposite implication being made about both the definition of "good", and how this kind of credentialism is a structural issue. Too bad you stopped reading before getting there.
In an article claiming that finding candidates is harder than filtering candidates, her first point ends by saying "hey, you could just crawl all the job sites for people who work for Google/Facebook and went to MIT". How no one gets the implication there is beyond me, but reading further just reinforces it.
Secondly, if it's a structural issue, creating a new startup based around technical-recruiting is absurdly pointless. If it's structural, your startup is going to accomplish _absolutely nothing_, because it's just going to keep sending in safe candidates, in favor of qualified candidates.
Author here. I get why you parsed it the way you did. I guess what I was going for is that conventional wisdom dictates that those candidates are the good ones, and I was using that as kind of a hyperbolized thought experiment. I do NOT agree that pedigree is a good predictor of aptitude. I even did a bunch of research around this. Check out http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hi...
Message board nerd pro-tip: You can always --- like, in every single case --- make your comment better by changing "I stopped reading" to "I almost stopped reading". It conveys exactly the same sentiment without broadcasting the notion that you haven't actually read the thing you're criticizing.
If the poster actually stopped reading I don't think adding "almost" is good advice. I'd rather read the truth than a lie. However if I read a post that says "I stopped reading" I expect a good reasoning why to see if it makes sense. Unfortunately usually it's "i stopped reading because it sucks".
I went back and read the whole thing, still could have stopped after the first point, everything else is just a supporting argument.
However I've read posts where you disagree with the same exact sentiment: credentials don't tell even the majority of the story of whether someone is qualified.
You stopped reading too soon. If you'd read through, in Example 1 you'll find an explanation of why companies have an incentive to focus on credentialed engineers, and a footnote indicating that her willingness to source other kinds of candidates has caused problems for her with internal recruiting.
By no means does she think that the only good engineers are credentialed.
You need to keep reading, they explain the mis-aligned incentives of an internal recruiter later:
1. Bring in 10 StanFaceGoogMIT candidates, one gets an offer they don't accept - keep up the good work.
2. Bring in 10 ugly on paper candidates, two get an offer, and one accepts - expect a stern talking to about your performance.
Someone from a no-name school, no relevant/interesting companies, technologies that aren't considered cool at the moment, and from somewhere you consider backwards. Think South Carolina at the moment.
Imagine you're a Stanford alum (even dropout) working at Google. If someone from University of [current bad state] comes across your desk with their main work experience being enterprise consulting in Java, odds are you're going to pass and look at the next person.
Quickly filtering by these "important" things seems to make some sense except for the fact that none of these factors tend to be indicators of success or failure. You may be saving yourself some time but you're missing some good candidates too.
But they wont turn them away, and that's my problem with the article.
I went to an absolute shit school (like, bottom 150 of world ranked schools) an I had interviews that lead to offers with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, among others, when I graduated. People from my graduating class are working at many of these companies, i.e. with the same background as me.
So clearly it can't be a horrible problem if they seem happy to employ people from my no-name, considered harmful, school.
Who knows, maybe every single one of us got extremely lucky, or some engineering managers just happen to know it doesn't take a M.S. from MIT to know how to write good software.
When you say I stopped reading when then you make a judgment you also have to accept your idea is based on incomplete information.
Edit: Btw I upvoted because I believe we should all try to refrain from making judgments based on incomplete information, WHEN we have the data in front of us but decide not to go through it all. I do this a lot.
I read enough to know what the author was asserting (that finding candidates is harder than filtering candidates), and I stopped when I realized her supporting claims were ignorant.
But people do this all the time. When people argue in person, they spend most of their time not listening to the other side, but trying to formulate a reason the other side is wrong.
It's not the right thing to do, and I know that, and it's why I put "I'm really sorry" at the start.
Ok, why do people keep down-voting movak. They just stated his opinion, rectify them if wrong, but down-voting is not very helpful. Also we should up-vote comments we truly disagree with to give others an opportunity to learn what may be wrong.
