Companies: DON'T DO THIS! I, for one, actively discourage smart friends from interviewing at places that treat candidates like shit.
I felt so humiliated, worthless and traumatized that I stopped interviewing for atleast 3 years after that. I now have (irrational) fear of interviews.
This experience has dissuaded many of my friends from applying there.
This should be the lesson for employers: an interview candidate who feels good about their interviewing experience, even if they aren't hired, can refer their qualified friends to your company. The alternative is that they might discourage good candidates from interviewing with your company by warning people on Hacker News about its hiring practices. Also, the candidate might be a good fit for a different position in the future.
That told me exactly what I needed to know. I'd be instantly rejected because of not going to a "good school".
Sample size of one, but I dropped out of a top public school, immediately started working full-time x 1.5, and ended up with a resume that my now-graduating colleagues are blown away by. A few top companies (Google and Yelp! included) have flat out refused to screen me based on no other conversation than "Oh, I never finished school because _____". Hell, I interned for a large bank and received a great job offer which was promptly rescinded after the right manager found out what everybody else already knew.
It's one thing if I fail the interview process. I get that. I know I have a lot to learn. But the way some of these companies act is just messed up. FWIW, none of my independent clients care.
Yeah, banks (and many big companies) are like that.
I once came across a job application that had TOP SCHOOLS ONLY emblazoned across the top.
Thanks for saving me my time in applying.
At some schools, the CS curriculum is focused on "pure" computer science. These curricula are packed full of theoretical CS and rigorous mathematical courses, and are great for people who hope to go into CS research or academia.
At other schools, the "CS" curriculum would be better called "software engineering." These curricula focus on programming and applied CS, giving more "practical" skills for people planning to proceed straight to industry.
At NC State, the undergraduate CS curriculum was a pretty good balance between both. You'll get a mix of both theoretical and applied CS, the downside being that you won't get very deep coverage of either. However, I feel that I was well-prepared to enter industry after graduation, and I've been pretty successful in my line of work.
Here's a small subset of what I studied as an undergrad at NC State:
Theoretical | Applied
-------------------------------------------------------------
Discrete mathematics | Java
Automata theory | C
Computability & complexity | x86 assembly language
Linear algebra | Software engineering
Mix
----------------------------
Data structures & algorithms
Operating systems
Computer graphics
Artificial intelligence
Database management systems
Multimedia systems
Human-computer interaction
Another benefit of NC State is that it's in the NC Research Triangle area, and the Research Triangle Park is only about 10 minutes down I-40 from campus. RTP is home to a TON of tech companies, so there are plenty of opportunities for relevant employment, both for students (internships, co-ops) and for recent graduates (full-time work).
Raleigh is also a great place to live and work. Plenty to do, great job availability, low cost of living, and traffic is never too bad. The only downside is that the public transportation story isn't nearly as good as, say, D.C.'s (the bus system isn't terrible, though -- I generally found that I could get where I wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time, and there are connecting buses that will take you to nearby Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill (UNC)).
I very much enjoyed my time at NC State, and if I could go back and choose a university again, knowing what I know now, I'd choose NC State again.
I hope this helps! Feel free to ask me questions :)
Might be smarter to have a "Where did you hear about this internship?" question instead and have "on-campus event" as a choice.
Next time they do that, I hope the candidate says whatever profanities they feel obliged to say to the interviewer's face. And then walks out.
By all means, keep posting + telling your friends about this experience.
So, discrimination is rampant because it works so well. Its not fair, possibly not legal, but hard to stamp out.
If that's the filter they want to use -- the time to apply it is before inviting the candidate to take 3 days out of his/her life to fly across the country for an interview. If it's such a huge "ding" for them that a candidate doesn't come from a certain set of preferred schools -- fine, don't invite them for an interview. It's really quite simple.
Of it's a "ding", but they want to give the candidate a "shot" -- that's fine too, but there's no need to blatantly neg the candidate right to their face. It serves no purpose; it's just uncivil and unprofessional. (No purpose, that is, other than to give the interviewer an ego rush, and thereby provide a temporary defense of sorts against their own very deeply rooted insecurities. That, and to basically deep-six the candidate's performance, and nullify whatever enthusiasm they might have had for Airbnb during the rest of the, by that point, manifestly pointless "interview").
And the fact that such allegedly highly educated people would so quickly resort to numbskull behavior like this suggests that maybe's it's not such a good filter, after all.
Now I look at what's happening with Theranos and laugh, and laugh :)
I was an internal referral there for an ml position. They rolled a fucking front-end developer who had never looked at my resume into my first interview just shy of 25 minutes late. And yes I'm sure about the time, because I was walking out at 25 minutes. Dude was nice and we had fun chatting (not about work, just a cool outdoorsy dude), but we had nothing in common in the work we do. I finally talked to one of their ml people and absolutely nailed that part of the interview. And talked to a weird founder (who always asks weird questions. That were not a good fit for a quantitative person.)
They then decided they weren't sure if I wanted to work there (apparently because, you know, I'm in the habit of wasting a day of my life interviewing for giggles) and made me have another conversation with an early engineer there. Who was really cool, but still, it was a strange process.
They also low-balled me on cash, and were strange about it when I turned them down and didn't negotiate at all. Someone else offered me $20k more and I figured it was a sign they wanted me so I went with them.
The whole thing was a strange experience.
That's not really fair though. Tons of people apply for jobs because they need a job. I've surely done it in the past. I've applied and accepted jobs I didn't give a damn crap about. I had to pay rent, feed 2 kids, and pay my wife's tuition. And even did so with multiple jobs at the same time. Anything else was secondary. I went into interviews, praised the greatness of the ideas of some shitty startups which were doomed to fail. I always showed up prepared and was "professional" (in so far as you can show up and not give a rat's ass, but not let it show), and always tried to show I was invested by having already ideas about their products, website, etc... But still, didn't actually care for that stuff.
So, I was motivated and a good "employee", but was I a good fit? Probably not.
And, on the other hand, I also actually did interview at times just for giggles. Or for practice. Or just in case. Or to get leverage.
And when I was the recruiting, while I surely wouldn't assume that the person in front of me would be "interviewing for giggles" (at first), I can totally understand the "weren't sure if I wanted to work there". Like I answered on another part of this thread: the onus / burden of proof is on you, you are the one who has to show you really want to be there (even though you actually may not).
It's screwed up, but it's how it is, because we also work for money. I know I did often. Still did my best in any job I got though.
(And you should not expect that either, actually. I'm similarly pissed by friends or colleagues who tell me "damn it's like these guys don't care about the job or don't give it all". Well, heck yeah, why would they?)
Then you are an asshole. Seriously you wasted how many people's time for your own amusement? If you want practice or informational interviews there are ways to achieve those without being completely inconsiderate and disrespectful of peoples time.
It fits that you are suspicious of other people based on your own questionable practices. Most normal people don't do this however.
I was referred by a college classmate and close friend who used to work there at the time, who knows me extremely well, and is easily in the top 1% of engineers I know (Linux contributor, loved by every employer he's ever had, etc.). He told me I totally had the level to work there, and was better than most people he worked with. So I went along with it, and went to their holiday parties, where one of their execs schmoozed with me for a while, told me I sounded like a great fit, and a recruiter would be in touch with me.
I talk to the recruiter on the phone, get assigned a home coding challenge. I spend a Saturday on it, and get a perfect score on it. I don't know if it was by design or not, but it showed me the rankings of every person who ever did that challenge. I was tied for 1st place with 40 or so other past candidates, in a pool of a few thousand participants.
I do their onsite interviews (fortunately I was local to SF) - don't remember much, except that they felt very stilted. But it was the usual "here's a canned problem I know the best answer to, you have 40 minutes to figure it out while I give out cryptic clues". After 3 or 4 of them, I sit in the room alone for about 30 minutes - the recruiter then comes to me and tells me that they won't move forward, bye bye.
My friend met me outside for a smoke, and told me he had no clue what happened. Oh well. AirBnB definitely left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I got a much better gig at a much better company a few months later, so things worked out.
I have worked with, and currently worked with people who are amazing problem solvers and developers who went to community college or trade schools. Recently I worked with one of the smartest people I've ever known who had no college experience at all. He's so good at his job his makes over 6 figures with a high school diploma with no student loan debt.. how could you not call this person smart?
I definitely wouldn't say that people who come top schools aren't top talent, but it's no guarantee and I think it's silly when people require it.
My degree's not from a good school?
That's nothing; your shirt didn't exactly come off the best dressed mannequin in the Sears window.
From my own experience as an interviewer, "has a degree" was absolutely not even a factor when determining who was good and who wasn't.
Something is utterly, terribly wrong with their process if the coding exercise made them think that you were worth flying in for an interview and then they cut short the interview process because they thought it was going so badly.
There are other signs that the tech leadership at airbnb is confused. Witness this almost parody of a video of their devs describing how they worked their way through pretty much every javascript hotness de jour through the years. I honestly thought this was some sort of a parody initially...
That's just nuts, what a horrible experience.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Airbnb-Interview-Questio...
I've had rejection emails from huge companies and tiny startups personally written by the hiring manager. It's not that hard.