111–120 of 278 posts
I occasionally interview people and review resumes. There are two things I don't even bother looking at: where you went to school and what your GPA was.
then you're one of the only ones
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One of the Cal Polys has an engineering program which curves the average grade to a C+ which automatically disqualifies the average from many engineering jobs.
A curve distorts grades: they tell you how the person performed relative to their peers not relative to their mastery of the material.
I don't think it is uncommon for tests to be written such that with a student a strong command of the material will not score 100%.
For college students, I absolutely recommend transferring up if your GPA is above 3.8 and you're attending a lower-tier school. Your alma mater will resonate throughout your career. Your GPA will disappear after your first or second job. Better to get a C at MIT than an A at RPI.
As someone who went to a "lower-tier" school. I hate how true this feels sometimes. My colleagues who went to big name schools all seem to be in some sort of "club" together. At least, they have shared experiences that I have no such ability to relate to. They've been "elite" tech people since before they were in the job force. That being said, the only time I feel this is in social settings and it's usually minor. P…
By what standard? What does that life look like? It seems so foreign to me. It seems like a lot of HN is comprised of this sort of folk or people who know them.
I don't work in the Bay Area, I work in Phoenix. I imagine it's a different world out there: instead of saving 90% of my income and living in a van, I own a home and save 75%. Instead of talking to people who work at Apple and went to MIT, I talk to people who were self-taught, or attended some other institution I'm not familiar with.
Even the people that I do know who went off to work at Amazon, Apple, or Google aren't even that great of engineers. In fact, they're probably worse engineers than the ones I know at Fortune 500s which aren't even tech companies.
I've seen people who had 25+ years of experience lose a job position to someone who didn't know what `setInterval` was.
To me, an "elite" tech person would be someone who wrote software that people actually cared about and had a strong amount of domain knowledge in a particular area, or prototyped hardware and sold a product that people bought. Even then, these people are flawed just like everyone else. Not too long ago, the author of Redis posted an article about shortcomings of Lua here on HN, and a deep inspection of his post simply yielded the finding that he wrote a Lua binding with a glaring exploit in it, and his entire article revolved around trying to justify his own flaws.
To me having parents that have money doesn't make you elite; it's just something to think is rather nice and want to work toward as well.
It seems to me that there exists a demographic of people in tech that seem impressive to others, but haven't actually contributed anything significant or tangible to the industry. They probably exist in senior positions of companies that I've never heard of that serve a niche that I'm not a part of. I don't know, but they aren't "elite" to me.
Kids, do and make things people care about. School doesn't matter at all. Learning matters. Spending a small fortune to maybe associate with people who will get you a job is trying to play the lottery, but with a far more expensive ticket.
When you're denied a job at a startup after receiving multiple degrees ask yourself if it was worth it. It takes 30 minutes to invalidate 4-8 years of your hard work. People want people who can do the job.
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I teach. I can say that I have never had direct pressure to pass students or raise grades, but there are two issues that I run into related to grades. First is the ever-growing methods of academic dishonesty. I do not have enough hours in my life to create and design new homework that prevents cheating. It's possible for some assignments, but not all. I don't give up on cheating detection, but this leaves tests and p…
Can you explain more about this “litigation”? Your students actually sue over their grades?? That’s nuts!
My grandfather was CEO of an NYSE listed company and he preferred to hire people out of college whom had lower GPAs around 3.0 then perfect students because he thought these folks made for better team members and well rounded employees. Simply put he wanted to hire people who perused side passions and had a social life. Personally after having been in entrepreneurial circles for years it seems the most financially su…
I think your grandfather was a wise man. I have frequently noticed the best employees I’ve hired are not the top students. They’re self starters, independent, and “street smart.” I actually never ask about education, simply because true intelligence doesn’t come from a classroom. The valedictorian will frequently bother me for the next task or to sign off on something, the 3.0 gpa figures it out on her own. Obviously…
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There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing. The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking. Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the corre…
But a low gpa isn’t inherently meaningful at all. What do you mean “make up for” a low gpa when you shouldn’t be hiring around gpa in the first place? Like it’s not some debt to be paid; it just means they attended class sometime in the past. Just discount it entirely. What’s the worst that could happen?
Having to confront the cognitive dissonance that their youth was spent chasing numbers that have little to no bearing on their present or future.
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Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real. If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest…
This is so ignorant to the advancements in pedagogy over the past several decades as to be insulting. Part of, if maybe not the biggest or only factor, the increase in grades is we are just hugely better at teaching than we were 30 or 40 years ago. Teaching for mastery, the idea of reversing the role of homework vs tests (in terms of relative difficulty and exposure to new information) to better facilitate self learn…
I can only speak for electrical engineering, but the basics have not changed in 100 years. Crack open a text book from 100 years ago and you’ll find the same control theory, circuit analysis, electromagnetics, etc. The difference may be vacuum tubes vs. transistors, but the analysis is them same. Many things are a lot easier to do now with computers, and I’ll wager a student of 100 years ago had better analytical skills.
It’s not just grade inflation either, but degree inflation. The PhD is the new MS, etc down the line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing. The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking. Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the corre…
But a low gpa isn’t inherently meaningful at all. What do you mean “make up for” a low gpa when you shouldn’t be hiring around gpa in the first place? Like it’s not some debt to be paid; it just means they attended class sometime in the past. Just discount it entirely. What’s the worst that could happen?
If you imagine a multivariate nonlinear function (I don't believe there exists a definitive function, this is just a framework to help us reason more rigorously) representing the performance of a hire, there will be ranges where the function is insensitive to the x (e.g. say GPAs between 1.0-2.0). If you discount x entirely, you're throwing out the baby with the bath water because the signal might be meaningful in other ranges.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a significant tendency on HN to unduly discount good grades. I think this is a mistaken tendency due to univariate, linear thinking. Grades are not everything, but they are not nothing. The fact is, determining a good hire requires multivariate, nonlinear thinking. Good grades can be a proxy for metaskills like discipline, cognitive ability, etc. They don't always measure these things perfectly, but the corre…
I worked my way through college and still got a 3.75 in a double major of Math and CS. My girlfriend at the time got a 4.0 at her college but had a full tuition scholarship and did it by dropping any hard math course that wasn't absolutely required. We both later got PhDs in our respective fields. I used to help her with her homework a lot. Who was more well-rounded? I challenged myself with some of the courses I too…
One needs to factor in all the other predictors, as you alluded to in your story.
I do a lot of interviews and I am pretty sure that quite a few students are cheating to get high grades. There is no way that I get a student who has a A average in computer science and then I ask them to do some simple coding and they outright fail. The some people cheap right in the interview, I step out of the office and then quick come back and I see they have their cell phone out to copy from. I am sure cheating…
Some people are good test takers on paper. Ask me to whiteboard some code, and I genuinely get stuck on trivial problems because whiteboarding coding questions is not what I am great at.
I've worked at Amazon and now I am at Google - after alot if stress, anxiety, and prep, I was able to get through and get hired. Microsoft outright rejected me.
One other thing - CS degrees don't teach people to code. They reach computer science. It just so happens that labs and assignments may require coding, but spending half a day or a day to do a project and getting an A has very little relationship with being forced to quickly hash out code in a 45 min interview.
IMO, at both companies I have been at, the majority of new hires are fresh grads. The barrier to entry whose been out of school is extremely high... but I digress.