Via a riveting thread on Twitter, Mekka Okereke discusses getting hired at a company like Google. The hiring rate, apparently, for Stanford grads two years ago was much higher than for some other colleges and universities.
I asked the Google SWE:
👨🏿: Did you know that there is literally a class in Stanford’s CS curriculum, that is basically “How to pass Google’s Interview?”
👨🏼: Wait… what?! Really?
👨🏿: Yep! They spend the semester practicing.
👨🏿: Stanford students also have ready access to Googlers for doing mock interviews. Ready access to SV tech workers also humanizes these mythical Google and Amazon engineers, into “kids I took classes with” or “my research teammate.”
👨🏼: That all makes sense…
Here’s the course details: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/
Of course Stanford’s course summary does not mention any company by name:
This course will prepare students to interview for software engineering and related internships and full-time positions in industry. Drawing on multiple sources of actual interview questions, students will learn key problem-solving strategies specific to the technical/coding interview. Students will be encouraged to synthesize information they have learned across different courses in the major. Emphasis will be on the oral and combination written-oral modes of communication common in coding interviews, but which are an unfamiliar settings for problem solving for many students.
So what did Mekka and colleagues do?
👨🏿: Two years ago, we started traveling to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), giving mock interviews, and we downloaded the publicly available syllabus from that Stanford interview prep class, and gave it to CS students at Howard. 3 guesses what happened next.
👨🏼: More Howard CS grads started passing the Google interviews!
He finally states: “Over the years, hundreds of Googlers have volunteered to create materials that level the playing field for engineer evaluation. The best way to remove ‘access to interview information’ as an advantage… Is to give away interview prep materials to everyone.”
See the Stanford course materials here and read the original Twitter thread here.
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Header image source: Samuel Zeller, Unsplash.com
