No Prestige? NO HIRE! Does Your School Matter For Getting A Dev Job?

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hey folks we are going to the comments for a question I'm just realizing I look like absolute crap I'm I'm pretty sick but it's like I'm only sick at night and then I wake up and then like the sickness goes away for the day which is good but also really bad because then I can't ever sleep so that's why I look like this but anyway this is from gameing Yun one um gameing un I'm pretty sure has asked a question before so it's great to great to be back asking more this one says hello code commute how much do companies value the status of an applicant school when it comes to hiring intern or entry-level applicants do employers tend to have a bias towards High status schools such as the ivy league and other name brand schools versus the small less well-known or even unknown

State schools considering that companies are getting hundreds or even thousands of rums for intern and entry level positions I would assume that some companies May Fail throughout app applicants by The Prestige of the school think that the applicant would be better candidate since they got into a prestigious School um so we will go through this I'll give my perspective on this um I will share with you someone else to check out for information on this who actually has data to back it I don't mine's anecdotal and an opinion uh but just a friendly reminder for folks if you want questions answered leave them Below in the comments and or send a message to Dev leader on social media that's my main YouTube channel and uh if you send a message on any platform where I'm posting and stuff I'll keep you anonymous so you can

write whatever you want you can add more context and I will keep you completely private unlike calling out game andun and that's just because it's a public comment so um cool and by the way I'm going to talk about one of the comments that was left in response to this which I think uh I kind of skimmed through I think it's a a good answer but I I'll kind of give my perspective um I will start by saying that latterly doio it's John vanir he actually has data to back this up like so he's an econom PhD which is super cool I always love like calling out John and then saying he's got a PhD in economics cuz I think that's I don't know I think it's cool to have a PhD I don't um but he has data and I'm pretty sure the answer

is yes there is statistically a benefit to it um but the other side that I'll give you is that I have never actually cared ever in my entire 13 years of all sorry almost 13 years of being an engineering manager I've never once looked uh let me take that back I have looked but only because when we had applicants coming in it was just like hey which school are they coming from and the only reason that I would care about that is because we had uh we were forming relationships with some of the the local schools and trying to figure out how that pipeline was working that's the only reason I would look that's it um so the the reason I'm saying this is because for me personally the the school side of things was never really a big deal um I think that it's

great if people have gone for postsecondary Education um because I think in general if you're trying to better yourself from learning then like that's a good thing it's a positive thing but the the flip side of that is that I know that like depending on the school and stuff there's there's a lot of other factors that can come into play with which school you get into and and all of that um and even when it comes down to Marks and stuff cuz I I know this person isn't asking about the grades but I've you know said this before in other videos but like your grades in school I don't care um because what you're doing in school is not the same as what you're doing on the job that's just the reality of it um so when it came to interns and I should also

add in like in my career and I mentioned I've been managing engineering teams for almost 13 years I was an intern for for uh over the course of 5 years CU I went to the University of water which is a co-op program there for for engineers so I had two full years of work experience in my five-year program because every other semester was an internship so I had six internships um do all the math there and um and it was an amazing experience when I graduated and and I started working at a startup that startup had interns the entire time that I was there and when I say the entire time I don't just mean like we had summer interns I mean like we would have out of the the semesters of the year we would have uh interns all year round and because some

of the local schools and I if you're not familiar with the area and I realized this is the internet so odds are not everyone just knows what uh kitchen or waterl looks like in Ontario but um there is a like pretty booming uh startup kind of community there uh if anyone remembers Blackberry you know the phone before the iPhone was really popular had the little keyboard and stuff on it Blackberry is there um it used to be called Rim research and motion and um there's also colleges and universities there so in and I I realize this is kind of weird too because I now that I live in the United States I realize that I feel like college and university is synonymous here in the US but college and university is not in in Canada um so in Canada you go to university for a

degree in college you go for a diploma um what's the difference well generally and this is again generalization University is much more theoretical and uh college is a lot more uh practical and Hands-On uh Hands-On but um if you depending on what you're trying to do like for example again other videos that I made on this uh to be a licensed professional engineer in Canada or at least in Ontario minimally you need to go to an accredited University program not college so if you wanted to be a professional engineer automatically you have to rule out college does that mean that it's worse no that's just like that's one of the requirements to be a professional engineer and it's not just any University it's like an accredited engineering program so like again I'm just kind of giving you these examples because there are there are differences

depending on who you're talking to what's going on and stuff so this kind of stuff I re I'm assuming that this person is uh talking about this from a US perspective mentioning um you know state level ivy league that kind of thing like that's not really so much of a thing in Canada there's definitely some like more like prestigious schools I guess uh and I would say like if you're an engineer like waterl is the best one and then the University of Toronto people would you know lose their minds but um they're wrong and that's okay so the um the idea for me was that I I was always around interns I was one and then was always around them so this isn't I'm not just saying like oh this one time when I was hiring an intern like I happened to look at their

school and like here's my perspective I mean like I was doing this for years for eight years at this uh this startup and at Microsoft it's a little different I'll explain that um at least from my side of things but when I was working at a startup for eight years uh you know reviewing resumés for interns interviewing them never cared about the school aside from just to understand that pipeline um and a little bit more context on that because we're a startup we're pretty constrained for for resources like if we're going to go spend our time to go Network and go to events and things like that where are the candidates coming from right like if we're if we're like hey we want a better Pipeline and because we have these schools in the area so there's uh Wilfred Lauer University there's a university of

waterl there's Koga college and unfortunately I don't remember the names of some of the other colleges but there's smaller uh colleges even on the campus of the University of waterl so there's a lot of schools in the area and that's not even like when I was going through this like boot camps and stuff like it's not that they didn't exist but I don't think anyone really talked about that so that wasn't even a factor when I was uh you know looking for interns and stuff like that um so but if we're in this area where there's a lot of postsecondary education for us we want to figure out where should we be investing our time if we have a really good pipeline coming from the University of watero and we're not even investing much effort for that let's say that just because of how the

the the co-op program is set up there if we're in their roster uh so that when students go to apply for jobs we're showing up in their their portal for that if that's all like just working well for us and we have a good pipeline coming through for that we might not invest even more time into that we might try to maintain that relationship or Ure stays in good standing but then we might say well if we're not getting anyone coming from uh and this is I'm just going to say this because if you're if you're familiar with the area people from the University of water would be like elitists and if you were at computer science at uh Wilfred Lauer would be like oh like your your school like isn't good just because you know sort of like an elitist mentality I'm not saying

it's good I'm not saying that's necessarily how I thought but um you know there's still like we still have this opportunity to hire from laer and still have this opportunity to hire from Kos stoga College we had really good uh Koga College interns um and there's I got a there's a lot of things to talk about here um but point is for these two other schools if we weren't getting a good pipeline of people coming in we'd go okay well if we want that pipeline we have to go figure out what kind of events to go to do we have to go get a contact at the school like invest some time that's the only reason I would ever look at the school then when we ended up getting a satellite office in Ottawa it was the same kind of thing like do we have

a good pipeline from the the schools and stuff but otherwise I don't care personally it doesn't to me it just doesn't matter it's the same I've talked about this with marks your grades I don't really care um I think in the previous videos where I've talked about grades the only thing that I called out was like it's help I know that as an intern my number one goal is to make sure that you're learning and having fun um because I feel like if I can make an environment like that for someone and they're kicking ass doing that then that's good then if they're learning then hopefully they'll come back if they're having fun right and then I've invested the time to skill them up by helping them learn um my goal with an intern is not just to crank out work from them and that's

because I feel like it's an ineffective strategy to do that they're an intern they don't have much time with us and if my expectation is they're going to crank out a ton of work like it's just it's not real expect it's not a good expectation I don't think I would much rather try to take that time to build up the relationship to have them be very interested in the company go hell yeah this is an awesome place to work hell yeah I'm learning and then use that time for me to understand Eng gauge how effectively they're learning and ramping up um depending on what the person's like we can kind of um because they're early in their career like they're an intern like we can kind of mold like how they're approaching software development um and then you know if they're an awesome fit and

they want to come back and we had a lot of success with this great like you know we got to start early with this person and they're kind of just embedded in how we operate I think it worked really well and I think that I think that people enjoyed it because they wanted to come back right and I think that's a really good metric for us um but overall um yeah the grades it was kind of just like to figure out if people like how much handholding I don't like using that phrase but like how much we're really going to have to to help them through stuff um because sometimes based on our capacity it's like yeah we can take an intern but like if there isn't like a strong candidate like it's it's going to be you know it's more about like keeping the

team in form because we small teams like might be pretty tough this time around or like hey this person seems like they should be pretty awesome and they already know car for example so at least we don't have to go teach them that these kinds of things but otherwise like I don't care about your grades and I don't care about your school um that's that the the thing on kosa College I wanted to call out was that what was really interesting with them was they had different internship periods so this what was another reason why we might look at this school it's not it's all these reasons that you might not be thinking like had nothing to do with the prestige or the fact that it was college and it wasn't University or vice versa um Koga College had uh different length internship programs so

waterl was generally generally four months sometimes up to eight and K stoga I think was 48 maybe 12 and 16 but they had like they had a variety of length programs and if you haven't had internships before had interns on your team when you bring someone on there is an overhead to getting them ramped up right and if you're bringing someone on for 4 months the overhead pardon me my my throw it's going uh the overhead for getting that person ramped up proportionally is larger than if you were to ramp up someone for 8 months or 12 or 16 months you kind of figure out why right the other side effect though is that if you have someone who is not a good fit they're not actually a good candidate and you bring them on for longer what you really don't want to do is

fire an intern that's a really shitty spot to be in because that can really make it difficult for that person to get hired in the future as an intern right it's like it it can screw up their academics because if they're if they're off for credits and stuff like that and like I don't know like is that something that we have to be responsible for like maybe not necessarily but at the same time like I think it's a also a Miss on our part if we hire someone they're not a not a great fit um so ideally there's a balance there right if we're feeling pretty confident about someone um and they can work for a longer internship period great let's minimize the overhead um yeah and there were there were times too I'm trying to think where like we had some interns that were

interested in staying connected between coming back so they might have another four months where they're off and they're like hey like you know if there's like side projects or things that you can keep me up to speed on in between like that would be awesome like they really the work was cool like it's digital forensics right so um so sometimes we'd have some opportunities like that but um overall never really cared about the school stuff now at Microsoft I do not um I don't see any of it sorry my one dog just ran in here and she's being crazy um when she runs in breathing really heavy I'm like you you were doing something you probably shouldn't be doing cuz you're too hyped up um yeah I don't end up seeing a lot of the details um in terms of having applicants get interviewed um

and in particular for interns I think that I've only ever been assigned interns I don't even think that I've selected interns that's just because the process is different right so everything that I've been talking about so far has been from this startup where I was actually looking at intern resumés interviewing them at Microsoft now um I I won't see the resume and maybe unless I ask after but I basically have an I get an intern that's assigned to my team so everyone else who is responsible for going through resumés um for doing the interviews all this stuff that's all before me I don't have any detail about it um to full transparency like the most recent intern I had I didn't even know my team was getting an intern I had no idea and then it was like got an email was like Hey like

kind of felt like a surprise is like got an intern um and I'm not complaining is as I didn't realize that we were getting one so like that's how separate the processes right so I'm just kind of giving you that for for context um I don't know how our our recruiters and how the what the hiring team and stuff is looking at for that stuff um to full transparency so to this person's question um is that a factor perhaps um given the volume perhaps um I would say that the way sometimes talking about this stuff is kind of weird because it's like if I were to say that that something could give someone an advantage then the people that don't get that Advantage um almost feel like then it's a net negative the other way around but like I don't I don't think that that's

true like therefore if you were if you didn't go to Harvard like you're screwed no and this is where I wanted to kind of mention mention this other person's comment cuz I thought it was pretty good um let's see I just wanted to pull it up this is the nice part about not driving as I can do this um so they said the importance of school uh Prestige really depends on the company and its hiring practices I almost feel like this is AI written by the way just because there's a rocket ship but this is from Good Time Dev when you put a rocket ship in your comments like it's like screams Chad gbt but uh says some to and some top tier firms m H it's a little suspicious especially in finance and big Tech May prioritize candidates from well-known schools simply because those

institutions have strong recruiting pipelines and establish reputations however many companies especially in Tech prioritize skills projects and practical experience over school name sounds like basically what I was saying right I even said that the in terms of top tier firms it's like I was just telling you the schools that were in our area that's all I mean waterl is top tier though so uh since companies receive so many applica uh applications some of uh some of these school proced is an initial filter but this is far from Universal yeah and I agree with that I don't think that that's I think some PE places may do it but uh many hire managers focus on candidates portfolio internships personal projects yep if you're from a lesser known school you can stand up by building a strong resume contributing to um open source projects I I'm not

going to go through the rest of that but I made lots of other videos on how to try and stand out if you want some extra help with that and you're watching this video so far and you're this far in on my main Channel Dev leader I do a resume review uh playlist so if you go check that out just on dev leader YouTube channel uh resumé review series it's a playlist if you watch like the first minute of any one of those videos if you don't want to watch the whole thing um you can see how to submit a resume however I would recommend watching them because if if I'm going to review your resume you want to see what kind of feedback you're getting that's the kind of feedback so I recommend watching one if you're considering it um and I try to

talk about what things to me stand out and how I how I try to think through as someone reading a resume like why why do I care about anything that's being written here um so try to call out like things that I think are working well and things for opportunities but um overall I think the answer is it depends uh I think you know I don't care I think many places aren't going to care about the prestige um I do think that it can be a factor at some places um but yeah I I don't think that it's the end of the world or nowhere near close to like the end of the world if you didn't go to like Harvard or like MIT or something like that so I wouldn't worry too much but G andun I think this was a great question I

hope that helps for other folks again reminder if you want questions answered leave them below or send a message to Dev leader on social media and that way I can keep you Anonymous so thanks again and I will see you next time take care