I'm surprised nobody's commented with the first thing that occurred to me: UNC, Duke, and NC A&T. One of these is not like the others. It's NC A&T. Why? It's not race. It's the fact that UNC and Duke are much, much better schools. The top North Carolina Black developer talent is...already at Duke, of course.
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
That's the point. Saying there's a pipeline problem when you ignore where the pipeline you're looking for is actually located is being silly.
In general there's an extremely strong belief in the bay area that it's not worth considering graduates of schools outside the top as being worth considering.
That's how you end up with entire companies treating the entire middle of the US as "flyover country."
No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
> No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
> The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.
Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I absolutely agree that as a society we should stop placing so much emphasis on "prestigious" schools and using that as such a strong filter.
That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.
To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea and it’s why I’m such a fanboy of interviewing.io and that whole platform. I don’t think it’s that hard to come up with new interview questions and screen through an anonymous platform.
I just think there’s not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they’d actually get higher quality candidates.
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.