What you do after you graduate matters way more than where you went to school. Here’s the data.

The first blog post I published that got any real attention was called “Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data.” It was my attempt to understand what attributes of someone’s resume actually mattered for getting a software engineering job. As it turned out, where someone went to school didn’t matter at all. By far and away, the strongest signal came from the number of typos and grammatical errors on their resume.

Since then, I’ve discovered (and written about) how useless resumes are. But ever since writing that first post, I’ve been itching to do something similar with our platform’s data.

For context, interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs.

If you do well in practice interviews, and you advance to guaranteed (and anonymous!) technical interviews with companies like Uber, Twitch, and Lyft.

Over the course of our existence, we’ve amassed performance data from thousands of real and practice interviews. Data from these interviews sets up us nicely to look at what signals from an interviewee’s background might matter when it comes to performance.

First, some background on our dataset

When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform, they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question. Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role. Interviewers typically come from a mix of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber, as well as engineering-focused startups like Asana, Mattermark, and KeepSafe.

After every interview, interviewers rate interviewees on a few different dimensions, including technical ability. Technical ability gets rated on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “poor” and 4 is “amazing!” On our platform, a score of 3 or above has generally meant that the person was good enough to move forward. You can see what our feedback form looks like below: