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With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

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Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#141

Post by pkaye »

traviswingo wrote: post #87
FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

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…

Would you prefer a self starter with a 4.0 GPA or a 2.0 GPA?

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#142

Post by cirgue »

mrguyorama wrote: post #106
cirgue wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPA, in my experience, seems to map exactly onto your ability to wrangle a good GPA. That set of skills is largely orthogonal to solving hard problems or making useful contributions to a team.

To me, that just sounds like your teachers and professors were piss poor at their job and had no idea how to grade properly.

I was referring to my experiences with hiring engineers. Throwing shade about people's education isn't cool.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#143

Post by andrewmcwatters »

sadamznintern wrote: post #134
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've been "elite" tech people since before they were in the job force. 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…

>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. That life looks like living in Seattle or the Bay or New York, making somewhere between $180-$230k a year first year out of undergrad, being able to travel for concerts and live in luxe Airbnbs with your similarly elite and pedigreed friends. >Even the peopl…

Thanks for sharing. Still curious how sustainable the lifestyle is if you're married, or if it's possible at all. Any thoughts? The folks in Phoenix out here can't make that type of money unless they're a Principle Software Engineer/Architect/VP or higher if they can manage to negotiate it otherwise it's reserved to management. Anecdotally, I've seen the CEO of Recruiting.com underpay his seniors heavily.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#144

Post by stcredzero »

s-shellfish wrote: post #130
stcredzero wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Load new problem, new program into memory, and forget what you were last doing. I used to say that being a great programmer was being a professional forgetter -- in that you had to know how to forget vital details without getting yourself hurt. So, like a professional tumbler, or a stunt-person specializing in falls. It isn't about the falling. Anyone can fall. It's the expert who can fall without getting hurt. If yo…

I agree with this. I wouldn't call it people with short attention spans though. People have to arrive at their own understanding independently in order to be able to know that understanding is their own. But that's also a problem, because once you get there, how do you check it's the right understanding? Check with other people, check with code. And then, it loops - argue with people to prove distinction - code disti…

People have to arrive at their own understanding independently in order to be able to know that understanding is their own.

Far too many managers in the 90's and early 2000's simply thought they needed to hire super-memorizers who just knew everything, like they're characters out of a movie. I'm not so sure this has changed in 2018.

Work smarter, not harder.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#145

Post by godelmachine »

FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

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…

>> When you are 40 years old your college grades will likely have no bearing on your career prospects. Your social network will.

True that.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#146

Post by enraged_camel »

traviswingo wrote: post #87
FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

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…

We hired someone like this, thinking their “street smarts” would give them an edge and make them a good employee.

What happened instead is that they struggled with discipline. They were late to client meetings, they missed important deadlines (rest of us had to pick up the slack), you name it. They were indeed street smart and stood out in terms of creativity, but their lack of what is typically called “work ethics” (which no doubt contributed to their average GPA) prevented them from meeting their obligations.

So yeah, GPA isn’t everything but it can be a really good signal for qualities necessary to succeed in professional work.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#147

Post by drawnwren »

wenc wrote: post #90
FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

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…

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…

Yes. To go along with this, the other misstep I see frequently is the inability to differentiate between statistical distributions and the individual. Your friend dropped out of college to become a carpenter and is now worth $100m? That's incredible. I'd take fairly bad odds that the P(Salary>$!00k|Dropped out of college to become a carpenter) is lower than P(Salary>$100k|Graduated with 4.0 gpa). It would be harder to statistically analyze, but I'd take even worse odds that the fellow who dropped out of college would not be too much worse off if he had stayed and graduated with a 4.0. IMO, the cost of a high gpa is fairly low.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#148

Post by make3 »

paulie_a wrote: post #111
make3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then you're one of the only ones

I honestly don't even care if they went to college. "Top tier" is meaningless outside of snobbery. I honestly don't care where you graduated from 2 years ago or ten years ago. It simply doesn't impress me.

I think that's ready to say, but getting into MIT, CMU or Stanford requires pretty heavy academic achievement.

I myself went to a Canadian University (so fairly unknown to people in the US), so I'm not trying to defend my honor it something by saying that

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#149

Post by mcny »

wenc wrote: post #118
drb91 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is why I mentioned nonlinear thinking. 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…

This is basically what a strategic advisor (sic) for ETS told me was the official position of the corporation.

He said ETS does not recommend that schools and employers use test scores as a (edit: SOLE) way to decide whether or not to admit/hire someone. What I heard was ETS is aware that schools and employers do this and wants to cover its behind.

Re: With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

#150

Post by ThrustVectoring »

wenc wrote: post #90
FlyingSideKick wrote: post #71

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…

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…

Yeah, compensating factors are a must. If you have a screening function that correlates with both ability to do the job and GPA independently, though, then conditional on passing the screen, the better candidates have a lower GPA. You've essentially got a noisy test for the sum of ability + GPA, so if the sum is high and they have a low GPA, the source of passing the combined test has to come from higher ability.

This process comes up in other similar contexts. SAT scores are not generally correlated between Math and Verbal, but if you screen based off "incoming Freshman to a particular college", an inverse correlation comes up. This is because admittance is based off the sum of the scores - too high and they go to a better college, too low and they get rejected.

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