@stanfordgsb00 -
For the record:
Perdue makes chickens, not Computer Engineers
In the world of engineering, prestige is viewed as an emotional construct that impedes logical thought. As such, it is best left to people that don't have to actually build stuff that works. (i.e. the "front end" and management consultants).
After several years of analysis, Google figured out that there is little to no correlation between between traditional academic metrics and job performance. As a result, they recruit very broadly and promote based on performance, not prestige. (Which is what they tend to teach at the better business schools).
Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?
A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.
Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?
A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.
Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html