How much does school prestige matter when evaluating a company?
I'll be joining a startup that has a bimodal distribution of new grads and seniors. The senior SWE's are pretty decent - 46% have some form of FAANG/Quant/Unicorn experience. The executive leadership team have been in senior leadership in Big Tech and pre-IPO startups. Meanwhile the interns/new grads are pretty good - almost all of them come from a T5 CS school with FAANG/Big Tech experience.
Past advice on Taro suggests that a company is pretty good if there are SWEs who are ex-FAANG. Since interns haven't worked a full time job, would schools be a good proxy? How about past companies these students intern at?
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 2
a month agoI just work here @ RobinhoodFor evaluating interns, I'd evaluate the following (ordered by descending value):
- Repeat internships at top companies
- An internship at a top company
- Strong side projects (thousands of downloads for mobile apps, thousands of daily page views for a web app)
- School
- 1
a month agoAI/ML Eng @ Series C startupThere's some great input here. So why does school matter? (at least initially)
People are always looking for signs of exceptional ability. And at the beginning of your journey, school is often the only indicator of ability if you have zero internships or cool projects.
Top company is an even better filter than school because it's a more recent indicator of ability. Even at top schools, very few people actually end up succeeding as much as you think (FAANG, IB, etc)
- 0a month agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
School prestige matters a lot!
Here's the verbatim job requirement for a picky startup that is trying to hire its first few engineers:
CS degree from a top school (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Waterloo etc.)
So that gives you an idea of the type of schools that are generally considered top tier.
Of course, you can also have amazing engineers from other places, e.g. large state schools. In these instances, looking at past companies they interned at is valuable.
- 0
a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroSchools do matter, but work experience reigns above all. The main thing to look at is prior internships. Let's say you have the following 2 students:
- Student 1: Berkeley degree (Top 10 CS school), no internships at known companies
- Student 2: Degree from no-name university but interned at OpenAI
Student 2 is going to be way stronger, and the fact the company managed to get this person is very impressive.
Jonathan's framework is very good.
