1/ The title on this article should have been: "Everything wrong with Google's first decade of elitist hiring practices" https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html

2/ Not said in the article: it was an open secret in the tech world that Google (and later startups) were shamelessly elitist. Unless you went to an Ivy+ school, then good luck getting hired. Google was extreme and asked for transcripts years after graduation.

3/ Let's see how elitism panned out. Begin the quotes:

4/ "We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess…"

5/ "We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

6/ "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation."

7/ "Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything."

8/ "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different."

9/ "Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment."

10/ End quotes

Let's be nice and assume that Google cleaned house over the subsequent years.

That doesn't fix the Valley. There are still tons of early ex-Googlers that never got the message and went on to infect other startups with elitism. It's a huge and sad stain on Valley.