In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white-shoe" firms – in apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:

"lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and ‘clean-cut’ appearances, are graduates of the ‘right schools’, have the ‘right’ social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture. ‘To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.’"

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. At least nowadays you don't necessarily have to be white, male, or non-Jewish, and the definition of Ivy League has broadened a bit, but this clubbishness is how it's been for a century and more. What, you thought people battled each other to get into Harvard because Harvard's graduate TAs were such talented and dedicated teachers relative to the competition?

I graduated Caltech in 2005. Caltech may be the best example of a school with extremely high academic standards but mediocre credibility with the "white shoe" crowd. Many of my fellow Caltech alums are descended from parents who are highly educated and moderately affluent, but also immigrants and/or Asian and/or Jewish and/or from less fashionable parts of the US (say, Idaho). On top of that, many of us display personality types most easily described as "geeky."

Caltech alums end up in many industries, but everywhere they tend to converge on rather specialized, analytical work. I know two who went into politics... to do statistics for campaigns. I heard of one that went to law school... and became a patent attorney. The ones in finance tend to do quantitative modeling or computer systems. Many, of course, ended up in private sector R&D (biotech, computer programming, engineering, what-have-you). And about half of us went to grad school, often to pursue a career in academia.

Now one reason for this pattern may be that white-shoe firms are not interested in hiring eccentric geeks as much as they are in attracting "well rounded" Ivy League folks. But an equally important reason is that the eccentric geeks are often not very interested in "white shoe" jobs, or at least don't look down on more specialized work.

That may be hard for the "white shoe" recruiters to understand. I recall talking to an acquaintance for whom being a McKinsey consultant would be the epitomy of career and life success, surpassable only by joining the Dutch foreign service... and who was almost offended at the idea that I was not in the least interested in such prestigious occupations.

I can easily imagine this attitude rubbing the white shoe folks the wrong way. "What, you are actually considering a career in kernel hacking (or genome hacking, or whatever) as a viable alternative to joining our glitzy band of Masters of the Universe? You must be, like, arrogant or something."