Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

I'm old enough now to know where you went to school doesn't correlate to who you are as a person and your level of intelligence (however you may wish to define the different types of intelligence). That and I've met way too many people from "Top Schools" who are just this side of morons, and too many people who have zero or little education who are quite intelligent/innovative/great "engineers"/etc. Still, it's all about that brand.

The difference is Thiel is paying people to drop out of college to start a business, not to just go get a job.

But yes, there is irony, maybe not as much as at first glance.

I was a CS dropout who didn't work anywhere near SV when I was hired. The filter (and recruiting pipeline, given the proximity and deep connections to Stanford) tends to correlate with "top CS schools", but I promise you that they're not discarding resumes based on school.

I was a philosophy dropout software engineer who worked on the other side of the country and was aggressively recruited by Palantir a few years back (I passed, mostly not wanting to relocate)... I think they like to keep that top-tier CS count high but still go after engineering talent when they spot it, like any half-sane software shop. The degree thing probably (theoretically?) helps the sales pitch but it's not like an East Coast "white-shoe" firm where anything other than a Harvard MBA is automatic disqualification.

You can justify any biases with that attitude.

How were the false negatives?

Worth pointing out that you can pick apart any hiring criteria with the statement that "I've met lots of people who met the criteria but were idiots, and many people who didn't meet the criteria and where very intelligent."

That's what makes it so convenient (not trying to be funny).

> Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

From what I understand, Thiel is not super-involved in the day-to-day running of Palantir.

It's ironic that the guy who says college isn't best for everyone finds it a useful probabilistic filter, and a useful way to sell brand to clients?

How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? I always thought of University of Toronto as a top school based on the fact that it employs some of the best computer scientists in the world (Geoff Hinton is practically a celebrity nowadays). Apparently they were a third-world diploma mill all along and I never knew.

Yeah really, I was going to make the same comment. UofT is outstanding.

> How can I determine which school belongs to which tier?

Just out of curiosity, what is it that you do that you need to know this?

It helps with reading comments on HN that discuss tiers of schools. Shared context and all, even if the tiers themselves are meaningless (see Big 3 CS companies etc).

What ar the big 3? This seems like a meaningless distinction. I always see Big 4 on Reddit. I don't think anyone has ever said Bi4 4. And even Big 4 makes no sense. It should be Big 5. Wait or Big 10? Isn't that a football conference?

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon have prestige, but more importantly, recruit and hire the most heavily out of college.

These days, I think the big 3 are Google, Apple, and Facebook.

Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc... are all great places to work, but are definitely on the backup-list of the best college grads.

I don't think Apple recruits as many SWE out of college as my original 4.

If we're talking about where college seniors want to work, it'd look more like a list of unicorn startups (Airbnb, Uber, and yes, Palantir) - reasoning is you actually get to build something instead of end up a cog in Google. But necessarily these places hire fewer college grads.

Top 5 schools according to LinkedIn are Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, MIT, and CMU. See https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=20708&trk=rr_connect...

Sure. Here are 818 data points: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-In...

Paysa ranks Palantir #20 in terms of tech talent [1], and also supports a large fraction of their workforce coming from tier 1 schools, as well as salaries [2] that can help attract top talent, even if the work turns out to be unsatisfying.

[1] https://www.paysa.com/company-rank#!companies=Google:::Airbn...

[2] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/palantir-technologies

That salary data is pretty misleading. The equity grants are almost entirely illiquid, and if you take those out the numbers start to look normal (for startups) or low (for big tech companies). Not what you'd expect to need to attract Stanford grads.

1745 current employees on LinkedIn [1] and 76 on AngelList [2]. Those are some data points that could be analyzed from their APIs.

1: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=20708&trk=rr_connect...

2: https://angel.co/palantir-technologies

I have an additional data point of someone who didn't finish any university.