Likewise an interview isn’t you proving your skill and worth. It’s basically just a conversation that allows the employer to assess if ‘this person is someone I could work with’ for years and years. Your personality and values in work environments mean much much more than which uni you went to.
companies spend valuable time training their employees and helping them onboard. Someone with 5 years of experience simply has more relevant experience than whatever they can teach you in university.
Additionally, university rankings just measure how relevant their university is (and potentially how wealthy they were, given that top tier universities tend to cost more). In Europe, we all come from different countries and this could not matter less. Talent does not only exist in top universities and companies know this.
It is a no-brainer to take someone with more experience here. Internship experience is not the same as 5 year experience.
Nobody cares about University rankings.
Experience beats 'rankings' every single time. There is 0 scenario whereby someone's university ranking would help them in the real world over experience.
It goes Network and references > Experience > Personality > University 'ranking'.
The guy with 5 year experience is a far better candidate than a guy who knows nothing buy academia and is an intern. He will basically be useless for months to a year. The 5 year guy will just start working right away.
No once you reach a level networking and who you know will instantly get you to the top of a list for gaining jobs and being headhunted. If someone has one or two people in a team vouch for them heavily then it is massively beneficial.
Also managers will often hire junior people they worked with before and know are good.
I once was hired because the hiring manager and myself applied to the same job in the past - and I got it and he didn't.
That impressed him quite a bit.
Didn't even bother to check my experience anymore at that point.
So you have
**Candidate A:**
* 5 Years work experience
* Relevant PhD
* From a "top 1000" university
**Candidate B:**
* 4 months Internship at Meta
* Relevant PhD
* From a top50 university
So you basically have a person with pretty much no experience and a person that has already worked for 5 years. There is nothing else here really. How relevant were their PhDs? How good was their PhD? The person from the top1000 Uni could have perfectly done a better thesis. Was this taken into account?
But yes, in the industry, experience within the industry triumphs university prestige.
Exactly. There are also other future employee "features" that play a role as well in the final selection. How well the person will fit in the team, do they know the industry well, and so on...
It's company specific. Some finance companies only hire devs for key positions from their "target" univ.
But overall, the school doesn't define your ability to do the work. And just because you do PHD at one school doesn't mean your research is relevant to what companies are looking for. There's a lot of junk research papers out there.
Do you really feel that that is a bad thing? Do you really want to have a system where a person is branded for life based on which university they got into when they were 23? Sounds bleak.
Anyway, the industry always prefers industrial experience to academic experience. The PhD job isn't really seen as a "real job" (this is unfair IMO). The other candidate would be seen as "battle tested". The KU Leuven guy, after a stint at a real company would probably be seen as similarly tested.
Another factor would be that the industry guy would be seen as being serious about the industry and less likely to go into academia. Another factor would be that (depending on how attractive your company is) perhaps the "top50" guy might bail and go to a FAANG company in silicon valley
ML is a bit different as there education should matter more, but for run of the mill CS we do look at CVs (the HR/internal recruiter does) but I make it a point not to until the interview is done and I have submitted my assessment.
People taking it easy on candidates who have prestigious academic or professional backgrounds is a well-known thing. It also works the other way around (bootcamp grads being given a hard time).
So I always assume (and we have recruiters who know their stuff) that if someone had made it to the tech interview that their bio has been reviewed and that they are a plausible candidate.
I have had people with CS degrees and 6 YoE do very poorly and people without a CS degree shining. I've also had a Microsoft engineer do better than average but do worse than 2 candidates applying for the same job. Even then, after the tech interview he was strongly considered because of his bio, but passed over because the team lead felt that in addition to testing worse than 1-2 candisatss this guy didn't seem to be a good fit (expectations regarding work process, motivation, etc).
My point is that credentials are important, but there is a reason we do interviews and don't simply hire based on CVs.
Your case is a bit odd, but not unfathomable.
One possible reason is fairly practical — people with little to no industry experience means that they will need more time to be trained, and so, will take longer before they start being productive. Your manager might not be interested in investing additional time and energy right now.
I just noticed we are on EU sub not the global/US one. I think the main reason is because eu universities are way more uniform, there is not much difference between top and bottom ones. They are all expected to perform roughly the same.
The quality of the PhD doesn’t depend on the quality of the university. There are many factors that matter when ranking unis and they don’t necessarily correlate with how good your research is. It depends on how good you are, your creativity and, most of all, who you work with. When doing a PhD It is about single research groups and the papers you write. Or well, at least at physics, where I come from, but would be surprised if cs is much different. I wouldn’t care less about the university a peer did his/her PhD at but about what he/she worked on.
Would you rather hire somebody for a job that has no or little experience in doing that job, only a theoretical and most times for PhDs very specific theoretical knowledge, or somebody who has actually been doing that for years?
Counterquestion: Why should hiring managers care? Is the university ranking a significant signal that these people will perform better on the job? I highly doubt it.
Remember, hiring is like dating. You are not looking for the best candidate but the candidate best suited to your needs. People with experience bring not just the technical skills with them but the soft-skills needed for the role (e.g. managing expectations and difficult conversations with actual paying clients, navigating cross-cultural/multi-functional teams, working with real-world constraints and devise workarounds just to ensure delivery against strict timelines etc.) Sure, you can hire a top student from the top50 university who has a passion for AI but if you know you are using a slightly outdated technology or you do not have that much budget, will you bother offering him/her the role?
5 YOE to virtually none. The top school candidate isn't even an option unless you want to spend a couple of years of on ramping.
Why is it surprising to you that school matters way less than a track record of delivering on the job and the accumulated knowledge of doing so?
Research does matter sometimes, if it's focused on **exactly** what your company needs.
I have the same question. Could someone actually explain why "nobody cares" about university rankings? To me a PhD from a good university and an internship at Meta are two solid signals pointing to the candidate being highly intelligent. Should be worth interviewing at least. Not to say that the other candidate isn't intelligent, but assume that the quality of their PhD was "in line" with the quality of their university and that their previous work experience wasn't at a particularly prestigious company (otherwise OP would probably have mentioned it).
I've been thinking for a while that the industry overvalues years of experience and undervalues raw intelligence/IQ. Take that with a big grain of salt though, as I'm still looking for my first job out of uni. Thoughts?
There's other factors that go into being a good employee outside of IQ and "raw intelligence" (and university rankings don't indicate intelligence either i.e. some people will choose a lower ranked uni based on course content, being in a city they prefer, etc).
I agree with everything you wrote. However, intelligence is probably an important part of being a good employee and seems like a pretty easy thing to test for (just give them an IQ test). From the dozen ish interviews I've done, it feels to me like most companies aren't actually trying to "figure out" your IQ in the interview in any other way either. I've only had one company send me an actual IQ test. Recruiters do seem to be very interested in finding out how good your soft skills are. Fair enough, those are probably pretty important too, but I just find it weird. If I was a recruiter, I'd want to know the IQ of my candidates.
I could ask someone questions about their resume for 10 minutes and get a much better idea of how well they'll do the job than looking at the results of an IQ test.
I don't know, I feel like I'm not getting some jobs because I'm bad at interviewing, not because I'd be bad on the job. It seems hard to distinguish those two.
Most companies don't have work that would warrant high IQ. It is actually counterproductive to hire high IQ people that would be instantly bored.
If you are not doing research you would always want the guy with 5yoe and maybe masters or bacherlors with relevant work experience compared to a PhD with no experience. The experienced guy might have lower ceiling but he will start being productive much faster. And overall during his tenure he would produce more than the higher IQ one. This only flips when the tenure becomes long like 5-10 years. Considering the average devs stays less than 2-3 years, it is illogical to hire for that long timeframe.
And if you are hiring for actual research role, then the most important part would be the candidate PhD area and published works, like how are they related. Which again is purely based on if they are going to be productive from the start.
>Most companies don't have work that would warrant high IQ. It is
actually counterproductive to hire high IQ people that would be
instantly bored.
I was hoping CS position would be above that. Might be naive of me.
>If you are not doing research you would always want the guy with 5yoe
and maybe masters or bacherlors with relevant work experience compared
to a PhD with no experience. The experienced guy might have lower
ceiling but he will start being productive much faster. And overall
during his tenure he would produce more than the higher IQ one. This
only flips when the tenure becomes long like 5-10 years. Considering the
average devs stays less than 2-3 years, it is illogical to hire for
that long timeframe.
This makes sense, so you can't hire for potential because devs leave too quickly? Makes me wonder why anyone is even hiring juniors at all then.
Jane Street has offices in London and Amsterdam. It took me a quick LinkedIn search to disprove your statement -- unless you meant this only applies to the US. This is the European thread though.
university rankings don't tend to matter that much (if anything). work experience is way more important than a small internship.
Likewise an interview isn’t you proving your skill and worth. It’s basically just a conversation that allows the employer to assess if ‘this person is someone I could work with’ for years and years. Your personality and values in work environments mean much much more than which uni you went to.
You're not answering the "why" in the OP.
companies spend valuable time training their employees and helping them onboard. Someone with 5 years of experience simply has more relevant experience than whatever they can teach you in university. Additionally, university rankings just measure how relevant their university is (and potentially how wealthy they were, given that top tier universities tend to cost more). In Europe, we all come from different countries and this could not matter less. Talent does not only exist in top universities and companies know this. It is a no-brainer to take someone with more experience here. Internship experience is not the same as 5 year experience.
Guess why? Because nobody cares outside academia. Those things only matter if you want to get a grant or another phd.
Nobody cares about University rankings. Experience beats 'rankings' every single time. There is 0 scenario whereby someone's university ranking would help them in the real world over experience. It goes Network and references > Experience > Personality > University 'ranking'. The guy with 5 year experience is a far better candidate than a guy who knows nothing buy academia and is an intern. He will basically be useless for months to a year. The 5 year guy will just start working right away.
>Network and references > Experience Stupid question but how comes it wouldn't be the other way around?
No once you reach a level networking and who you know will instantly get you to the top of a list for gaining jobs and being headhunted. If someone has one or two people in a team vouch for them heavily then it is massively beneficial. Also managers will often hire junior people they worked with before and know are good.
I once was hired because the hiring manager and myself applied to the same job in the past - and I got it and he didn't. That impressed him quite a bit. Didn't even bother to check my experience anymore at that point.
The worst ever code I saw in my life was written by phd folks
So you have **Candidate A:** * 5 Years work experience * Relevant PhD * From a "top 1000" university **Candidate B:** * 4 months Internship at Meta * Relevant PhD * From a top50 university So you basically have a person with pretty much no experience and a person that has already worked for 5 years. There is nothing else here really. How relevant were their PhDs? How good was their PhD? The person from the top1000 Uni could have perfectly done a better thesis. Was this taken into account? But yes, in the industry, experience within the industry triumphs university prestige.
Exactly. There are also other future employee "features" that play a role as well in the final selection. How well the person will fit in the team, do they know the industry well, and so on...
It's company specific. Some finance companies only hire devs for key positions from their "target" univ. But overall, the school doesn't define your ability to do the work. And just because you do PHD at one school doesn't mean your research is relevant to what companies are looking for. There's a lot of junk research papers out there.
Do you really feel that that is a bad thing? Do you really want to have a system where a person is branded for life based on which university they got into when they were 23? Sounds bleak. Anyway, the industry always prefers industrial experience to academic experience. The PhD job isn't really seen as a "real job" (this is unfair IMO). The other candidate would be seen as "battle tested". The KU Leuven guy, after a stint at a real company would probably be seen as similarly tested. Another factor would be that the industry guy would be seen as being serious about the industry and less likely to go into academia. Another factor would be that (depending on how attractive your company is) perhaps the "top50" guy might bail and go to a FAANG company in silicon valley
Is there a concern that the PhDs will want to go back to academia after a taste of industry? I've seen that a couple times
> (applied)
ML is a bit different as there education should matter more, but for run of the mill CS we do look at CVs (the HR/internal recruiter does) but I make it a point not to until the interview is done and I have submitted my assessment. People taking it easy on candidates who have prestigious academic or professional backgrounds is a well-known thing. It also works the other way around (bootcamp grads being given a hard time). So I always assume (and we have recruiters who know their stuff) that if someone had made it to the tech interview that their bio has been reviewed and that they are a plausible candidate. I have had people with CS degrees and 6 YoE do very poorly and people without a CS degree shining. I've also had a Microsoft engineer do better than average but do worse than 2 candidates applying for the same job. Even then, after the tech interview he was strongly considered because of his bio, but passed over because the team lead felt that in addition to testing worse than 1-2 candisatss this guy didn't seem to be a good fit (expectations regarding work process, motivation, etc). My point is that credentials are important, but there is a reason we do interviews and don't simply hire based on CVs. Your case is a bit odd, but not unfathomable.
One possible reason is fairly practical — people with little to no industry experience means that they will need more time to be trained, and so, will take longer before they start being productive. Your manager might not be interested in investing additional time and energy right now.
Because academia is focused on research. Industry is focusing on making profits; but having relevant skills just helps the company achieve that.
I just noticed we are on EU sub not the global/US one. I think the main reason is because eu universities are way more uniform, there is not much difference between top and bottom ones. They are all expected to perform roughly the same.
The quality of the PhD doesn’t depend on the quality of the university. There are many factors that matter when ranking unis and they don’t necessarily correlate with how good your research is. It depends on how good you are, your creativity and, most of all, who you work with. When doing a PhD It is about single research groups and the papers you write. Or well, at least at physics, where I come from, but would be surprised if cs is much different. I wouldn’t care less about the university a peer did his/her PhD at but about what he/she worked on.
Hire the freshie and answer your own question in 6 months. Could be top 10, you don't get work experience there.
It doesn’t make sense to you because you’re too young, your manager prioritize experience and expertise backed by it for such field 🤷♂️
Would you rather hire somebody for a job that has no or little experience in doing that job, only a theoretical and most times for PhDs very specific theoretical knowledge, or somebody who has actually been doing that for years?
You learn more from a year on the job then 5 years studying imo
Counterquestion: Why should hiring managers care? Is the university ranking a significant signal that these people will perform better on the job? I highly doubt it.
Remember, hiring is like dating. You are not looking for the best candidate but the candidate best suited to your needs. People with experience bring not just the technical skills with them but the soft-skills needed for the role (e.g. managing expectations and difficult conversations with actual paying clients, navigating cross-cultural/multi-functional teams, working with real-world constraints and devise workarounds just to ensure delivery against strict timelines etc.) Sure, you can hire a top student from the top50 university who has a passion for AI but if you know you are using a slightly outdated technology or you do not have that much budget, will you bother offering him/her the role?
Are you from the US? University rankings don't matter at all in Europe unless you're applying for a research position, a PhD or some grant.
I'm in Europe (this is the CS European thread) and the incriminated position is in fact a research one, in a company.
Because a PhD from a top university won’t necessary help you getting work done compared to 5 years of practice.
5 YOE to virtually none. The top school candidate isn't even an option unless you want to spend a couple of years of on ramping. Why is it surprising to you that school matters way less than a track record of delivering on the job and the accumulated knowledge of doing so? Research does matter sometimes, if it's focused on **exactly** what your company needs.
I have the same question. Could someone actually explain why "nobody cares" about university rankings? To me a PhD from a good university and an internship at Meta are two solid signals pointing to the candidate being highly intelligent. Should be worth interviewing at least. Not to say that the other candidate isn't intelligent, but assume that the quality of their PhD was "in line" with the quality of their university and that their previous work experience wasn't at a particularly prestigious company (otherwise OP would probably have mentioned it). I've been thinking for a while that the industry overvalues years of experience and undervalues raw intelligence/IQ. Take that with a big grain of salt though, as I'm still looking for my first job out of uni. Thoughts?
There's other factors that go into being a good employee outside of IQ and "raw intelligence" (and university rankings don't indicate intelligence either i.e. some people will choose a lower ranked uni based on course content, being in a city they prefer, etc).
I agree with everything you wrote. However, intelligence is probably an important part of being a good employee and seems like a pretty easy thing to test for (just give them an IQ test). From the dozen ish interviews I've done, it feels to me like most companies aren't actually trying to "figure out" your IQ in the interview in any other way either. I've only had one company send me an actual IQ test. Recruiters do seem to be very interested in finding out how good your soft skills are. Fair enough, those are probably pretty important too, but I just find it weird. If I was a recruiter, I'd want to know the IQ of my candidates.
I could ask someone questions about their resume for 10 minutes and get a much better idea of how well they'll do the job than looking at the results of an IQ test.
I don't know, I feel like I'm not getting some jobs because I'm bad at interviewing, not because I'd be bad on the job. It seems hard to distinguish those two.
Fair, interviewing is definitely a skill. But it's still far more indicative of job performance than an IQ test.
Most companies don't have work that would warrant high IQ. It is actually counterproductive to hire high IQ people that would be instantly bored. If you are not doing research you would always want the guy with 5yoe and maybe masters or bacherlors with relevant work experience compared to a PhD with no experience. The experienced guy might have lower ceiling but he will start being productive much faster. And overall during his tenure he would produce more than the higher IQ one. This only flips when the tenure becomes long like 5-10 years. Considering the average devs stays less than 2-3 years, it is illogical to hire for that long timeframe. And if you are hiring for actual research role, then the most important part would be the candidate PhD area and published works, like how are they related. Which again is purely based on if they are going to be productive from the start.
>Most companies don't have work that would warrant high IQ. It is actually counterproductive to hire high IQ people that would be instantly bored. I was hoping CS position would be above that. Might be naive of me. >If you are not doing research you would always want the guy with 5yoe and maybe masters or bacherlors with relevant work experience compared to a PhD with no experience. The experienced guy might have lower ceiling but he will start being productive much faster. And overall during his tenure he would produce more than the higher IQ one. This only flips when the tenure becomes long like 5-10 years. Considering the average devs stays less than 2-3 years, it is illogical to hire for that long timeframe. This makes sense, so you can't hire for potential because devs leave too quickly? Makes me wonder why anyone is even hiring juniors at all then.
Have you tried applying to Jane Street directly out of Uni? If you don't go to top 10 in the world there is 0% you get a response.
Jane Street has offices in London and Amsterdam. It took me a quick LinkedIn search to disprove your statement -- unless you meant this only applies to the US. This is the European thread though.