Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges
dcurbanmom.comThere's some incongruity here: college admissions are by no means fair, but they also don't evaluate for nearly the same things as Google's hiring process does.
Put another way: colleges aren't qualified or equipped to make the kinds of determinations that Google does when hiring engineers, and being hired as a Google engineer prior to going to college isn't any particularly strong signal that you're prepared to go to a specific school.
I sympathize with his situation, but I think treating college acceptances as a foregone conclusion based on demonstrated engineering prowess is an error.
> I think treating college acceptances as a foregone conclusion based on demonstrated engineering prowess is an error.
While the demonstrated engineering prowess in high school does not guarantee an acceptance into a good college, I view it as the problem with the acceptance process.
Any college acceptance is somewhat random, but the fact that the vast majority of the listed 16 computer science programs rejected him does not show the US college acceptance process in good light. My 2c.
It is the 1590 SAT, 4.42 GPA, individual achievements, and Asian last name that make the College rejections notable, not that Google hired him.
Notable? It's just another Tuesday.
There are more qualified applicants for both top-colleges and Apple/Google/Amazon jobs, so both processes have a high degree of randomness. I don’t draw any conclusions from one event occurring but not the other.
Evidence suggests it is false in the details if not in entirety - his high school lists all the colleges their graduates apply to, and it does not list all of those in this story.
idk, that is partly true. Then there's all the college signaling that academics are not enough. To be admitted in a top school you need to show extra curricular experience and generally be extraordinary, but now that's not enough. Well, I'd like to see the applications.
Then what are the comp sci departments screening for and why?
We don't have any indication that he was rejected by a department; he may have been filtered outright before any CS department could have a say.
I went to a small rural high school in the 1980s. Taught myself to code, started a business writing software, entered and won the regional science fair and placed second in the CS division of the International Science and Engineering Fair in 1987. Won a prestigious NASA internship, got glowing letters of recommendation from my NASA mentors. Took every AP class available to me (all both of them). Graduated third in my class.
Also played on the varsity basketball team, was an Eagle Scout, and served in my church.
Oh, and scored 1460 on the SAT and 34 on the ACT.
And I got turned down flat by MIT and waitlisted by Yale. Actually, MIT turned me down twice, once for undergrad and again for grad school.
I also ended up at the University of Maryland, and had the time of my life there. And I've had a wildly successful career, which occasionally means I fund MIT professors.
It's a crap shoot. I'd love to know what happened when the MIT admissions board looked at my resume, because as a rational exercise I don't get that decision.
It's like a good fit for a job. If the school is not looking for many CompSci that year, they will pass. But if you are a history buff and the history department needs another declared major, you're all set. And your High School unfortunately really mattered then, and it matters even more now, especially with SAT scores disfavored. Also if you live in Mass vs Texas, because they likely have quotas for state residents, international, etc. And they pull first from magnate high schools and private schools, up to a third of their acceptances so I've heard. Currently it is smart to apply to more schools if your parents can afford it, as it increases the chance of a 'lucky strike'. And up at that level, much of it is luck.
Prestigious schools are ranked in part based on how selective they are which incentivizes rejecting people rather than having some standard and growing to accommodate everyone who meets it. This incentivizes them to make admissions seem somewhat random so people that are unlikely to make the cut also apply. Even less selective schools want to reject some applicants simply to maintain a consistent number of students year to year.
Which isn’t to say things are random internally, just that they don’t want most people to be able to know if they would get rejected.
Above a certain threshold, and if you can't raise admissions, a random selection process is perfectly fair.
It's certainly fairer, IMO, than having a perfectly objective ranking system that mirrors biases in society, and then using affirmative action to counteract those biases.
Fair isn’t necessarily the most important metric for schools. If your parent is a billionaire it’s perfectly rational for them to prefer you over somewhat more qualified applicants.
based on what, their willingness and ability to donate?
"the university could use a new international airport..."
Donations are appreciated, but so are connections.
Mixing the extremes of intellect, social connections, and wealth offers benefits to each group. It’s an old formula and arguably a larger factor of what makes an elite school than its faculty.
I've always wondered if they ever turn down people because the people applying appear that they will become intelligent and successful without said college? So why not accept someone who is doing great but not quite living up to their potential?
University of Texas, which one? if it's UT Austin then its CS program has been top 10 in the nation for quite a long time, so, good college CS program did admit him.
SAT 1590 is nothing for MIT or CMU or things like that though, esp for male students with Asian names, you need way more than just a great SAT score and a perfect GPA, a lot more indeed.
The high bar on Asian male for good universities just made them even stronger academically, with internet and free job market nowadays, nothing can stop a smart and determined mind, and they might actually have saved a lot of money because some colleges rejected them based on their ethnicity.
I went to community college and a tiny private college nobody has ever heard of and I got a good paying job in tech as an engineer at a prestigious company. And I understand the obsession with Stanford and MIT, the networking opportunities, the namesake, but I never felt like I had to attend a prestigious university to study what I wanted. Just my 2c. Ironically the community college prepared me better for a career in tech than the 4-year school.
I personally know a half-dozen high-performing devs at FAANG companies who have never attended college at all, too.
Yeah, I think that, at least with respect to programming, the important question is, does college matter anymore. I think that ideally, it should not, because there are so so so many other ways to learn and prove yourself.
I think college is great for a lot of things like physics or philosophy, but maybe, outside of theoretical CS, it just doesn't matter anymore. And that's OK.
Good for them. I am however, confused by the list of accomplishments, one of which is "wrote tests". I think this goes to show that audience matters---that list looks a lot better as items on a resume at an undergrad career fair than it looks to college admissions or even looks on a resume of someone a few years out of school.
> RESTful APIs, workflow orchestration, metrics and alerting, horizontal scaling, CDN, rate limiting, security hardening
This more than likely reads like gibberish to the average admissions officer.
Yes, that's almost certainly true. It's very odd that American schools generally run their undergraduate admissions with minimal input from their faculty.
University of Texas has an excellent CompSci department and this person should be happy to attend.
Also, there are plenty of engineers at Big Tech companies and at startups who have no degree other than a high school diploma and a huge number don’t have a computer science degree if they do have one.
There is also a large contingent of folks who have terminal degrees in law or a PhD in Physics but work in software engineering.
I think the college application process is a crapshoot for the most part but its likely that this person didn’t distinguish themselves in that particular area but apparently had no issue passing a completely different criteria and process for an engineering gig at Google.
Kid’s making bank, congrats! But as an ex-L4 Googler I need to say, I’m sure he’s similarly frustrated as I was. I don’t live to maximize income - I want to maximize learning and fun. Compared to successfully launching a startup fixing bugs and launching minor features as an L4 is depressing as hell.
Not everyone will have it that bad. Hopefully he’s having a better time than I did.
Not a bad place if they make the most of it. They'll learn pretty good SDLC best practices and get exposed to Google's internal tooling. All of these are useful for running a technical team at some point.
Yes. Doing commits the Google way was a positive learning experience. Not applicable to really small early companies but a good tool for most other situations.
Sometimes maximizing learning and fun is having enough money to pursue your interests outside of work.
Sure. But a kid that’s building a successful business as a high school sophomore probably has software engineering as a #1 interest with no close #2. I’ve got a healthy list of hobbies and it wasn’t enough for me.
Feeling the time wasted on mundane BS and thumb twiddling while at Google literally gave me nightmares. Granted, I need to and am working on healthy stress management. But that would probably just get me to recognize I need to quit sooner.
Sure but also maybe not? It’s weird to lament someone you don’t even know.
Can confirm - L4 is super depressing for ambitious engineer.
Quit! I did it and now I’m interviewing for roles where I could build the team from 1 to 5 engineers. Lots of good proven founders out there that want an ex-Googler.
I haven't worked there for 5+ years now.
Maximizing learning vs maximizing earning is a great way of saying this.
The real news (to me) here is that Google is smart enough not to care about college degrees.
Only recently, though I don’t know exactly since when and it may have been for a while.
But, for many of its early years it was very particular about not only college degree, but which college and what you studied.
at least ten years
College admissions are broken, plain and simple. Completely opaque. Success criteria unclear, appears highly subjective, subject to gaming and monetary influence, officially biased against non-alumni & non-affiliated children. Simply F'ed up. I don't have any words for it. Schools or someone else have to clean up this mess.
My only hope is that people will see through how potentially useless college education is. For many people, it's simply an extended daycare if you need additional time to find your life's direction. Kids like this one don't need it. Kudos to him! Teaching models are largely broken. All you need is youtube and an internet connection these days. Structured post-K12 education is over-rated.
There have been speculations about whether family connections played a significant role in the hiring decisions. For example, the fact that Stanley Zhong's father Nan Zhong is engineering manager at Google may lead to concerns that a reference or recommendation from that parent, who holds a high-ranking position, influenced the hiring process.
Moreover, some have pointed out that the Stanley Zhong's primary background in the case was founding a startup that utilized services from a major tech company, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This situation has led to discussions about the potential overlap between the teenager's career development and the parent's professional connections, as Nan Zhong happens to be previously software engineer manager at AWS.
So having applied to Google multiple times on different referrals and gotten exactly 0 interviews, I can say that it probably doesn't affect your application to have "connections" nearly as much as you'd think. In any case, he did competitive programming on the side and he was certainly very good at it, which makes the interview portion trivial to pass.
> Moreover, some have pointed out that the Stanley Zhong's primary background in the case was founding a startup that utilized services from a major tech company, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This situation has led to discussions about the potential overlap between the teenager's career development and the parent's professional connections, as Nan Zhong happens to be previously software engineer manager at AWS.
This is BS. Every web app runs on some cloud infrastructure (or I guess on-prem is an option if you have a lot of money), but as a high school student your budget will be determined based on how much free credit you'll get. Google Cloud and AWS both have generous amounts of free credits for startups, so realistically these were the two best options. I think it's slightly easier to get AWS credits than Google, but regardless, they're pretty easy to get (I have a friend who has gotten tens of thousands of dollars worth of free credits for simply having registered an LLC and getting a Mercury account).
Is that your father or mom who you got referral from or just some random friends? It's totally different if the referral recommendation is very strong. As a software engineering manager at Google I can tell you that you don't underestimate the power of managers these days. One can easily connect resources and asks for which team is actively hiring and put in some good words. Otherwise, if the candidate is that strong, why did he never spoken about being offered position at aws or even meta? Likely he just get rejected by minimum qualification requirement by resume.
Is this all that surprising? College admissions are not optimizing for people who can currently pass a tech company interview. Maybe they should focus more in that area, but that's a separate discussion, and currently schools neither select for nor claim to select for those skills.
Plus both processes have immense amounts of variance. It's not hard to find excellent candidates who were rejected from a particular university or job.
While that's true, there seems to be enough for universities. He has the grades, the SAT, and the extra curriculars.
I feel like we are missing something. Someone with perfect grades, SAT, and leading a competition coding team should get accepted to more schools (many are strong but not name-brand).
It's no surprise -- being good at work is not the same as being good at school.
Probably not intended by the poster, but this gives me hope. Universities shouldn't overvalue these. Ultimately, they are focused on academics. The profile of this person screams "Will drop out before graduating".
I mean, if he applied to average universities and got rejected, that would be notable. But applying only at top universities and getting rejected? That's not at all notable.
They're not all top universities though, are they?
Only one isn't
Can anyone verify the accuracy of this statement? A random post on a message board doesn’t merit a response without a little more evidence…
At least this specific case was cited in a congressional hearing:
This case was presented to the House Committee on Education & the Workforce in the hearing on "How SCOTUS’s Decision on Race-Based Admissions is Shaping University Policies":
What a bunch of gossip.
If you took away the gossip, dcurbanmom wouldn't have a website.
I don't know anything about this specific applicant. Often, an applicant to a top school meets with a volunteer alumni/ae interviewer from the applicant's local area. They might get a competent interviewer with a dev background. There normally won't be a quiz on software development but there will be a conversation about a project. If the applicant asserts they did 95% of a project's work with 5% help from a parent or other contributor, but the applicant's responses give the interviewer a much different perception of the percentage, this can be flagged as an embellished claim. And that can sometimes be much, much worse than not mentioning the project at all.
MAANG isn't hiring officially, and only for critical roles and senior engineers on the q.t. It's an ostensible belt-tightening that's really about repress wages and placating Wall St. by extracting even more money during economy-wide years of massive profits. MAANGs don't have below L3 or L4. L3 or L4 is entry-level while IC6-7 are senior, and IC7-9 are custom tailored, under-specified roles of engineers who can make a million or more in TC.
Mandatory bragging: When I glance left, I can see a reflection of the top of UT tower and the capitol in my window. Also, I-35 S traffic is backed up as far as the eye can see and I-35 N is inching along like lukewarm molasses.
> Also, I-35 S traffic is backed up as far as the eye can see and I-35 N is inching along like lukewarm molasses.
sounds about right. at least you can get drunk on dirty 6th with the rest of the uni folks
Well, he certainly did something wrong in his applications. His high school doesn't even know he sent some of them, going by the failure to mention eg Maryland or Wisconsin in their list of colleges applied to this year. (And I get the impression this place tracks them pretty closely...)
https://gunn.pausd.org/campus-life/college-career-center/col...
I went to this high school. They used to require you report every college you applied to, but no longer do (due to… privacy concerns I think? Not everyone wants intense speculation in where they may or may not have applied.) so he could have just not reported it.
Would he really have not reported acceptances though? (Maryland)
I don't oppose this being flagged. But I'm curious, why was it flagged?
This type of experience isn’t uncommon.
Maybe it’s someone who knows it to be true, is uncomfortable and wants to make sure no one else can see it!?
It's a faux pas to say how racist American institutions are. Please don't bring it up again.
Sounds like he dodged a bullet landing a solid 6 figure job rather than paying tens if not hundreds of thousands for the next 4 years (or going into that much debt)
I mean is there any question why he was rejected?
Why bother with working for a large corp or going to college? Seems like he should focus on his organically fast growing startup.
There is value for an 18 year old to work for a bit before trying to work a start up. It will help him meet people, pay rent, save some money, maybe learn some new tools, and something about management and business.
You missed the part where he has a profitable company already. He does more management and business at his own company than as a low level engineer at a megacorp.
A better answer is that his startup is done and generating cash flow with part time work, and doesn't really have a future growing to really challenging DocuSign.
i agree but some people are so brainwashed from such an early age that they need to go to college and the best one out there or they won't be successful in life.
I should point them to my old neighbor who didn't go to school and worked as a HVAC tech. Then started his own company and he barely works now and is 42.
That's true success in my book
The teenager the post is talking about and your neighbor are not the norm. For normal/average people (like me, for example), going to university and getting a degree is the best way to maximize our chances to get a decent income and average way of life (paying bills, eating good food, etc.)
I think it’s kinda obvious. Haven’t you seen the enormous amount of people out there without studies that have a very difficult life?
> Why bother with working for a large corp
Like at a FAANG? That's easily the fastest and lowest risk path to financial security.
Its because he's not rich.
I don't understand why this is not more widely understood. These schools are not for meritocracy. Schools with sports teams fill much of the incoming class with athletes before they even consider an application, and then they start picking from places and people who'll keep their prestige reciprocally high. The son of a foreign dictator would never attend the school that produced the only human with two unshared nobel prizes, because that's not the game they're playing.
And when they pick, they're starting with schools the admissions officers have relationships with (rich people schoools) that require rich people middle schools to attend, etc...
The chain starts in childhood, you don't just take a bunch of tests available to the public.
I've had friends whose job it was to interview kindergarteners for access to their exclusive schools. Others had to deal with two sets of parents suing each other over one's access to that school.
And before you say this is conspiratorial, I've verified this with admissions people and deans from these places.
And yes, racism, but a more pedestrian sense than a true sense. Any wealthy arab or prestigious african has access to these places, just not normal ones.
And these colleges looooove it this happens. Their numbers get better and they didn't have to do anything that compromises their design philosophy.
And having interviewed people for much less prestigious 'diversity' programs, I can't help but relate. The African diplomat's son with an excellent international education interviews well and gives your organization a future 'success' story.
It's true that unis and corporations care about different things.
However, I am surprised that he would only be accepted at two of those universities, given the grades, SAT, and competitive coding. Most of those schools are solid but non-name branded.
Some interesting hypotheses in the thread based on other people’s anecdotal experience: didn’t care to write application essays, didn’t take expected minimum classes (e.g 2 years of social sciences or whatever). For example Cal Poly says minimum 4 years of English classes in high school and they recommend 5 years by doubling up or doing early college.
I'm trying to find the takeaway, should kids not go to college? or that nobody reads the comments, since one of them raises the question, "is there proof?" and claims that not according to their linkedin
How much does Google L4 make as a starting salary and bonuses?
Where can we see this, glassdoor or something?
Kids, change your names before applying for places. Sincerely, Wanda Abimbola
>Stanley Zhong graduated from high school in June 2023
I think it's safe to assume that Mr. Zhong is of an Asian background. My guess is that he is, unfortunately, lacking in "interpersonal skills".
That's a dangerous, biased assumption.
I suspect it's not supposed to be taken at face value. It's a reference to Harvard admissions process, where asians seem to get suspiciously low "personality scores" compared to white applicants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
I totally agree, which is why it's disheartening that universities like Harvard use it as a metric to exclude Asians: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/15/harvard-disc...
Is there a reason this post is flagged?
> Shortly after he turned 18, Google hired him as an L4 software engineer, a position typically offered to candidates with multiple years of professional experience as well as a college degree.
L4 is the entry level for Google's SWE position, and Google absolutely hires SWEs straight out of college (no professional experience). A Google SWE without a college degree is more rare but I know a few. I'd never heard of an 18-year-old landing a full-time Google SWE position, though. Congratulations to him!
edit: sorry, got mixed up, entry level is L3. Thanks for the correction.
Googler here.
L4 requires experience. New grad hires are L3.
Oh, you're right, I spaced. I've been away from Google for a few years now, and I remembered the titles and Lx being off from each other but had it mixed up. Thanks for speaking up; I was wondering what the deal was with the downvotes.
* L3 = Software Engineer II, entry level. (There's no Software Engineer I.) * L4 = Software Engineer III. * L5 = Senior Software Engineer. * L6 = Staff Software Engineer. * ...Aren't interns L2?
L3 is entry-level for fresh college grads.