I've worked for 10 years and recently applied for a position. The manager told me I was a good candidate, and that I checked the box for coming from a top school.
He didn't use the phrase "checked the box" but did explicitly say that my coming from a top school meant he could skip most of the technical portion of the interview and just focus on the people aspect.
But for the most part I agree with you. It usually is important for the first job.
As someone who went both to a top school and a very average school, I do have a problem with it. If you've not been to an average school, you may be surprised at how many bright and motivated students there are.[1] And if you've not been to a top school, you may be surprised at how average most of the students are.
I don't know if this generalizes, but it was my observation: Top school students tended to be a bit less honest (soft cheating, etc). At least where I was, it appeared to be clearly tied to the competitiveness needed to get in and get top grades.
[1] My grad school group-mate, who had only been at top schools, once went for an internship in a national lab. He was shaken at the fact that another intern from the University of Alabama-Huntsville was as capable/smart as he was. I saw this often in top school students, where they just assume that if they're doing well in school, that they are somehow better educated than the rest of the country.
If I were in a position to interview and hire someone, graduating from a top school would at least garner some attention, assuming the degree was relevant, but it's not a 'free pass' through any of the steps of the interview process, and may even earn them a more critical assessment in the implicit 'culture fit/personality' category.
This is just my opinion on the matter, not trying to make any sort of factual claims.
That may be true, but likely both of these have poor GPAs and thus are filtered out anyway. Usually you'll be evaluating candidates with at least a decent GPA.
I'm not claiming the average is the same between the two. But when there are a lot more average schools than top schools, chances are that numerically most good candidates do not come from top schools.
When I look at resumes of new grads, I ignore the school altogether. GPA has to meet some not-high threshold, and then it's just a peek at interesting projects they may have done.
And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.
Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companies actively recruit from top schools only insofar as every other company in every other industry does. But that doesn't mean they recruit exclusively from top schools either. Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League literally don't graduate enough students for that to be a feasible new grad hiring strategy.
You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. My personal experience is after you've worked a few years, no one in software engineering cares where (or even if) you went to school. And any software engineer with a pulse located in the SF Bay Area can get at least a phone interview with any of the top tech companies.