My personal understanding is that Thumbtack only wants candidates with Ivy League educations, and that they're dismissive of everyone else. I have heard they have difficulty filling their positions due to this. Is that accurate?

Thumbtack engineer here, writing anonymously.

Re: "Ivy League educations" -- I believe we have zero engineers from Ivy League proper undergrad, and a couple with grad degrees there. If you include MIT/Stanford/CMU/Caltech/Berkeley we go up to 15/50, but the majority of eng is not from elite colleges. We might have a bias for hiring from Google, I'm not sure how much of that bias is just that Google engineers tend to interview well.

Re: "dismissive of some people, and have difficulty filling positions due to this": I agree that we have a selective hiring process which likely results in a substantial false negative rate. The selectivity tends to be focused towards "ability to write code in an interview setting quite well." I agree this is not all that correlated with the ability to produce good engineering work over a long period of time.

Hey, I appreciate the reply. What I heard through the grapevine is that Thumbtack primarily wants Stanford grads. A very experienced friend had his resume dismissed out of hand because they didn't like his educational pedigree -- didn't even consider an interview. Meanwhile, the Thumbtack employee that had forwarded my friend for consideration told of constant pleas for referrals of "qualified programmers", and promises of exorbitant bonuses for people who could furnish them.

After watching this happen, it was no wonder that Thumbtack was unable to fill their positions. There's a point where such baseless and flippant dismissal of good talent stops representing selectivity and begins instead to represent incompetence.

The prior head of recruiting, who was employed by Facebook and Google before she was employed by Thumbtack, has been replaced since that incident, so perhaps things are better now.

I can confirm. They have a very smug and elitist attitude. They also engage in some pretty shady business practices (just google them).

I'm sorry you perceived some members of our team as smug and/or elitist. While I don't feel like they're smug or elitist towards other engineers here, I don't know how they behave outside of work.

I googled for "thumbtack shady business practices." The top results were professionals complaining about 1)inability to buy a single lead at a time, and 2)bogus leads. The first is specifically a measure to filter for more dedicated businesses; regarding the second, there are multiple engineers and manual reviewers filtering out bogus leads and from what I can tell they do a solid job.

Since you're likely coming from a technical pov, you may also consider the fact that our company gets a considerable fraction of traffic from SEO to be shady. I agree that gaming SEO by itself is a silly thing to do. Fortunately for me, optimizing for SEO is somewhat correlated to optimizing for quality content. Additionally, at our company's current growth stage SEO is becoming somewhat less important than building a solid product; this likewise makes me optimistic.