Google claims to have a lot of data backing up its hiring decisions, so maybe they have internal stats showing phone screens aren't a useful further signal for certain alma maters?

One year of science and mathematics: 1. Mathematics: At least one half year that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic. [CS]

2. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some exposure to laboratory work. [CS]

The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals, now it's robotics and communications).

So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is guaranteed to have more scientific and mathematical maturity than the generic CS degree holder from another school. It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with lots of both).

It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly.

NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, the raw odds if MIT judges you can do the work are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been published if not for later realized reagent contamination.

Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the department.

This has probably changed in the decades since since CS has matured (and, no- I don't want to name my alma mater!) but just on the face of it I can see why, based on your comment, knowing the mathematical rigor of certain schools and how they compare to other schools would allow them to skip an early filter. If a substantial fraction of their candidates bombed at the next interview level, they would probably put it back in.

Sorry for my lack of clarity.

I said nothing good about MIT's CS program per se (quite to the contrary...), it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities in the US (I'm not counting the tiny humanities colleges that rigorously do things like the Great Books, and maybe I'm missing some). Something its CS graduates indirectly benefit from, but it's not inherent to the CS program, which in its post dot.com crash I have little respect for.

No others even come close in subjects required of all students; as I mentioned in a message downstream, as of the '80s the math requirement for Harvard was proving you could do algebra. On the other hand, they have the world's "best" first year undergraduate math course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55), Harvard has been very strong in math for a very long time. But serious math (and science) is not required of all students.

So, yeah, you want to measure the dicks of us CalTech and MIT alumni as a population, go right ahead, you just won't be happy with the result if you think your school as a whole is better, with the noted exceptions that still retain rigor in the humanities.

None of which says that a graduate of another school isn't every bit as good, it just wasn't required of them.

Yeah that's not a fact at all; it's just your opinion. This is why I agreed with the other poster that this wasn't a great thread of argument; we're just dick-measuring based on our own experiences at this point. You can attempt to try to bring in what you believe to be "objective" measures (like course requirements), but 1) those measures are themselves questionable, and 2) the selection of criteria to judge is itself a subjective judgment.

Here's a neat story about how one student was implicitly recruited to one of them: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/06/shimer-coll...

Jibran Ludwig – recounts to me the strange tale of how he ended up here. One night two years ago, when Jibran was 15, he was sitting in an Amtrak station in upstate New York reading Plato’s Republic and getting annoyed by the translation. The Greek gods had been given capital Gs, which struck Jibran as an erroneous Christian reinterpretation, and so he decided to abandon the book and try and find something closer to what Plato had intended. It was election night. The woman sitting opposite Jibran had an iPhone. So he went over to ask her the results.

As he approached her, his Plato in his hand, she looked alarmed. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “I thought you might be one of my students and I didn’t recognize you and I felt embarrassed.” She explained that she was Susan Henking, president of Shimer, “and Plato is the kind of thing we read”.

“If the president of this college thinks I might already be there,” Jibran suddenly thought, “maybe it’s where I should be.”

In other words, why fast pass MIT grads but not applicants with MS degrees and published papers?

Maybe Google has some metrics to back up their decision, but I'm skeptical that they can explain why the numbers are what they are.

I can't think of much about MIT that can't be replicated by a dedicated individual. And I think the industry as a whole agrees with that. There seems to be consensus that where a degree is from matters much less as industry experience increases.

I said nothing of the sort.

I said they only require 1 university level math course in addition to discrete math, and a vague in this short overview science requirement, let's call it 1 course with a lab component (but it could be more).

All MIT undergraduates are required to do a lot more university level math and science, more than twice as much of the former given the usual pace of other universities, and four times as much as the latter. It's not optional, and FB/Google/whatever doesn't have to do any investigation of their transcript, just confirm they graduated from MIT (or CalTech, but it's 1/4th the size and science, not engineering oriented, I doubt they see many applicants from it and those should get true red carpet treatment).

And that's without getting into intangible benefits; as a physics major mentioned to me in my first week, "everyone" who attends MIT learns how to do electrical wiring. No, it's hardly required, but any vaguely curious person will pick up a lot of science and engineering just by rubbing shoulders with 4,000+ other STEM undergraduates for 4 years.

Compare to Zuckerberg's Harvard: back when I attended MIT, the math requirement for graduating from Harvard was proving you could do algebra, and I now find its CS program is not ABET accredited. That said, it's math heavy, requiring a linear algebra course which I assume goes beyond the linear algebra taught in MIT's required 2nd calculus course (see more here http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/book/computer-science).

Strange, but they are Harvard (and ABET has some ideas about how to teach CS that the MIT EECS department does not agree with at all, like being able to teach design per se), they were a pioneering computer institution prior to fully electronic computers, and students can fulfill some of their requirements by taking MIT EECS courses.

(Let it be said I'm boosting MIT too much, if I wanted to do pure CS, CMU would be my first choice, Stanford probably 2nd, not sure about EE derived UC Berkeley (which has in addition has all those state school disadvantages, and nowadays many fewer of the in-state ones for residents), and MIT could easily be my last choice after the department panicked after the dot.com crash cratered enrollment for the first time ever.)

As for "applicants with MS degrees and published papers", presumably they wouldn't be in the same interview track as gaggles of new graduates.

Doesn't describe my degree at all.

But that's not standard for lower ranked ABET accredited CS degrees. On the other hand, just now, looking at UC Berkeley which is an EECS department, they require perhaps more math than MIT, multivariable calculus and linear algebra+differential equations courses on top of single variable calculus and of course the mandatory discrete math. And 3 science courses (a third in addition to mechanics and E&M; see http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Programs/Notes/section2.shtml).

So I got a job offer from them without a degree, but they certainly did care.

Obviously they were happy with my competency since I was offered a job, they just took the path where they used my lack of degree as a negotiating tactic.

Turns out there are plenty of other places that don't care about degrees and offer more money, so I accepted a job somewhere else. It was an easy decision at the time.

At the beginning of my senior year in college, I sent them a resume containing my GPA (3.9/4.0) at a public school (Clemson).

I heard back from Google within a couple weeks, had a few phone interviews, and then they flew me out for an on-site interview.

I had friends with similar credentials, but lower GPAs (< 3.5/4.0) that never heard back from Google.

Having a degree or high GPA doesn't matter to them once you're interviewing, but its tough to even get an interview without one.

My sub-3.0 GPA for a humanities degree a decade ago has no bearing on my skill as a programmer, but it almost certainly means I won't be working for Google or Facebook.

It's also quite possible that the amount of test-taking/etc. people get in undergrad helps with some forms of interview programming. Hypothesis only - don't take too seriously.

I'm a computer science professor with a Ph.D., who's spending the year hacking code in C++ & Python at Google, and I can tell you with certainty that if I didn't study, there are some forms of dynamic programming or tree data structures (I can't remember the details of a red-black tree to save my life without googling it) that I'd flub in a time-pressured interview.

Many of those things are problems that some programmers might never encounter in day to day life. I do a lot of data structure stuff, and I've still never implemented a red-black tree or huffman coding after undergrad. I have std::map and gzip, for crying out loud. :) (That said, one of my Ph.D. students did once, in a very specific context where we needed it tightly integrated with something. He's also one of the best programmers I've met - far better than I - so take that with a grain of salt.)

1. I work in an office where almost everyone went to the same university, which is in the same town as the office. Recruitment of grads from that university is a high priority. 2. Like you said, the interview process does bias towards things emphasized in CS programs. Recent exposure to algorithms courses would definitely help. 3. The culture within Google itself feels very much like a university culture. Perf (promo through 'demonstrating impact' and basically being in a lot of design docs and PRDs, rigorous and extensive peer review, committees evaluating people's work almost like a thesis defense), etc. To me at least. 4. I've never been on hiring committee but I do get the impression that degree will be considered. Even if not for hire, but for determining the hiring level the person is slotted into. I can't say that for sure, tho.

Anyways, although I have been here 4 1/2 years I do feel like an outsider, and I feel a lot of this is being sans-degree.