Where Stanford software engineers want to work
I was recently asked what the most ‘elite’ software companies to go work for as Stanford software engineer. I answered quickly:
- Palantir
In that order, with Facebook and Google fading a bit in the last year or two. Asking the same question of a few friends, they all gave essentially the same answers.
Why are these companies considered 'elite’?
Eliteness of a position within a software company is determined primary by two factors: perception of desirability and perception of difficulty of achieving said position.
So to achieve 'eliteness’ in this context you must make working for your company seem both awesome and hard to attain.
What did Palantir, Facebook and Google do? They’re all fairly involved on campus, hosting tech talks, dinners and more. Until recently Palantir even bought alcohol for a quarterly party for CS TAs until the legal department caught on that Palantir was paying to get a bunch of underage kids drunk… But it’s more than just having a campus presence. The perks. The brand. The difficulty of the interviews. The perceived impact. The stories of those who interviewed, those who got turned away and those who end up working there.
Palantir: Top pay. Free dry cleaning. The best meals (I had quail and lobster when I ate there a few weeks ago.) A reputation for smart people. Palantir’s PR department will tell you that all hires who make it past a certain stage are interviewed by a cofounder, and only 50% of those who meet a cofounder are hired. (Though I know of at least one example of of full-time hire who never met a cofounder…so take that for what it’s worth.) Compared to Facebook and Google, Palantir still feels like a startup. (It’s not, of course, but Stanford engineers like to pretend like they’re not risk-averse.) Palantir also aggressively recruits at Stanford: one former intern estimates that 40% to 50% of their interns are from Stanford. Most Stanford CS students know at least someone who worked there, and Palantir uses friend circles as both a recruiting tool and a quality filter. What Palantir has going against it is that, unlike Google and Facebook, your parents and grandparents haven’t heard of it. They also make their money helping the government spy on people… engineers I’ve talked to aren’t quite sure what values Palantir has but see it as a place to cut their professional engineering chops at a brand that will let you work anywhere else in the Valley.
Facebook: Facebook has done a great job of selling their “move fast and break things” culture. (Although I’ve heard this was recently changed to “move fast and build things,” which is pretty god damn generic.) Through hackathons, “hack” culture and even their (relatively) progressive artwork, Facebook has made their engineering experience feel rebellious and cutting-edge much longer than it had any right to. And of course, Facebook is probably the most visibly branded software experience that Stanford students have on a daily basis. The Facebook product is also small enough that an individual engineer can have a pretty big impact (at least within the Facebook domain.) Facebook is also very aggressive in with paying cash, offering returning interns a 50k to 100k bonus. Facebook, like Google, has lost some of its eliteness as it as grown. The big post-IPO drop, Facebook’s product stagnation, as well as a general cooling of the social network space also has students wondering whether they’d like to spend their next four years cloning Snapchat, rearranging photos for maximum click-through and tweaking ad algorithms.
Google: I mean, it’s Google. Google basically invented the 'spoil your engineers’ recruiting strategy post the dotcom bust. 20% time. Bouncy balls for chairs. Professional chefs and massages. And Google has also been known for its hiring standards– from Sergey “explain me something complicated” to books like “Are you smart enough to work at Google?” What Google has going against is its size (both increasing bureaucracy and lowering hiring standards) and the banality of most of the problems that most engineers will be working on. Projects like Google Glass and self-driving cars have helped fight against this problem to some extent, but most engineers will still be working on problems like improving ad placement by .01%. A friend relates that a major reason Stanford students don’t work at Google is simply that they’re slow at hiring:
Google also puts all interns who pass the first few rounds of interviews in a pool. They get the interns to put up keywords, and then, each team can go pick interns. I know at least 5 people in the Google pool right now. Since not a lot of teams care for interns, it can take like a month or two to get off the pool. I think this is the biggest reason I personally know of for why people don’t work at Google: every other company has an exploding deadline, but Google doesn’t go anything to move things fast so people just accept other places.
Why not…
Apple: I’ve always been confused by this one. Apple’s presence within Stanford’s CS department is basically non-existent, though from what I hear they do more outreach in mechanical engineering and product design programs. Apple isn’t seen as particularly desirable place to work for new grads either…low-pay, long hours… If you ask someone who interned at Apple what they worked on over the summer they’ll say “I can’t tell you.” This secrecy makes engineers unsure about what they’ll work on and what kind of impact they can have.
Quora, Stripe: extremely well-respected for their engineering teams among those who follow startups closely…but the quality of their engineering teams are not well-known amongst CS undergrads more widely.
Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitter: both very well-known across campus, but not seen as elite. Both Dropbox and Airbnb have very heavy on campus presences (tech talks, free Ike’s, swag, etc.) but (accurately or not) their engineering team and the experience of being an engineer on their team, is not seen as top notch.
Thanks to Abi, Jess and David for reading drafts of this post. Thanks to Semil for inspiring it.