I'm not sure I understand your argument here. If we cut through the clutter, you're essentially advocating that you hire people on an individual basis and shouldn't weight at all what school they come from. No?
No, they are advocating hiring from the big 5 and then saying that it's just a coincidence that all the employees they've hired on 'on [their] own merit' are from there.
FYI OP posted alongside you in their own words. What I got from it is "No shit Harvard is better than UPhoenix South Campus" but if we came up with a good way to measure skills and learning capacity independent of rote programming quizzes/etc., hiring from a lower tier school would be less risky.
I know someone who dropped out and is now making plenty of money at a software development gig. I also know CS grads who can't think about anything outside their little realm to save their lives. Point is: some schools legit don't filter well for learning capacity.
Harvard is no MIT. One generally goes to harvard because they are rich vs smart. You may be surprised by the quality of UPhoenix grads. One has to be motivated to be a UPhoenix grad while other things are more important at Harvard.
Where does GP advocate for this? As I read it, he is saying that there are some potential bad hires from lower tier schools that should be avoided. I don't think this involves 5 schools or GP's hiring history.
They said that there 100 bad hires for every good hire while by omission claiming that every Stanford hire is a good hire... But also that you should definitely be hiring talent 'on it's own merit'.
The argument is that if you're hiring a student from Stanford you can assume some baseline level of competence (only approximately true, I'd bet). If you're hiring from elsewhere, maybe you have to interview 10 people to find someone with similar knowledge/skill/misc. It's a bigger time investment in the hiring search, and gauging technical skill in a job interview is still an unsolved problem.
If you find an efficient + effective way to compare all the applicants, that would make it easier to put everyone on the same footing regardless of school. But that's hard to do and it's easy to be risk averse and just hire the Harvard grad.
A Harvard grad presumably costs you more, but they keep doing it that way because 1) it's simple, and 2) if you try to hire more broadly but misjudge and make a bad hire, that's potentially much more expensive.
Forget CRUD applications. Most of the work at most companies, including the usual Big Ones, simply isn't that complicated for anyone with just about any technical degree. On your scale most of it, almost all of it, tops out at like 50-60.
These companies set the bar at 70+ for a number of reasons. Their own egos ("I only work with 'the best' so therefore I'm also 'the best' and don't want to water that down"), status signalling for the companies, to keep bright young talent from starting a competitor, etc.
Good luck convincing Google (or Netflix / Amazon / Microsoft / any other major company) that anything they do is 'just a CRUD application'. Even when it's true, they'll never admit it.
It's pretty easy to make a bag of garbage; it's non-trivial to make 100M bags of garbage.
Even if they're making CRUD apps, making tons of high-availability CRUD apps that work against dozens of services your team doesn't own that can serve huge fractions of the globe requires non-trivial coordination and skill. (Not that all those companies do is CRUD apps, but even if.)
I'm not sure it's as jard as those companies make it out to be -- but it's not "just CRUD apps", it's the logistics of CRUD apps spanning the globe.
Are CRUD projects really the most guilty of only hiring from "elite" schools?
Sure, there are software jobs where you're setting up wordpress blogs, but there are plenty that require you to think about algorithms and how your database actually works in order to do them well.
