61–70 of 122 posts
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Will the students who purchased these essays go on to build bridges, rockets to the moon, cure cancer? Hah... Interestingly, there is probably little or no supply of German, Dutch, Scandinavian bootleg essay mills.
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…
> When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. When I studied engineering I saw almost the same culture. Firms were looking for the same students with similar GPAs and sadly I was not one of them. I distinctly remember going to the campus job fair and having my resume repeatedly being put into the "maybe" pile. My academic work wasn't amazing but my extracurriculars were a few engineering p…
If I could see you solve problems with code in a got repo with history, and you can solve a problem live for me on a laptop or whiteboard, I don’t need to approximate your ability through coursework because I have more directly measured it. This gets fuzzier for non-entry level qualities, but they don’t really teach those in schools anyways. I always tell people in school to lean heavily into their projects.
They liked to work late, often talking on the phone...within a few days we realized that they were discussing the work with someone on the phone, who had probably been on the phone screen and probably had a day job. The employee couldn’t program at all, and was employed by us about a week total.
I don’t know how they made it through the interview process but the VP of engineering immediately revamped the hiring process!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, as engineers.
That company sucks then. It might be hard to measure between competent engineers but bad engineers stick out like a sore thumb. If that keeps happening it means the entire engineering department sucks at those companies.
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…
> When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. When I studied engineering I saw almost the same culture. Firms were looking for the same students with similar GPAs and sadly I was not one of them. I distinctly remember going to the campus job fair and having my resume repeatedly being put into the "maybe" pile. My academic work wasn't amazing but my extracurriculars were a few engineering p…
The reputable firms usually had a more or less firm cut-off around 3.0, while smaller firms were more lenient.
Most reputable finance and consulting firms wouldn't even look at your CV unless you had a 3.5
I think CS firms are more forgiving, and care less about credentialism. Obviously you'll have some, but if you're a kick-ass developer with a portfolio to show, most companies are willing to take a look. I think a lot of firms understand that they're missing out on excellent non-traditional hires, because HR and old hiring practices have been gatekeeping them away.
Microsoft was the first big tech firm I ever spoke with, and interviewed for, and they said that as long as you had taken at least one class in data structures, you were welcome to the interview - didn't mater if you had studied history or CS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people that cheated, were utterly incompetent, and got prestigious jobs at tech firms.
As engineers? Like, actual individual contributions and not managers? Doing what?
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…
And these same folks continue gaming the system once employed by these banks. Go figure.
Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analyti…
You've never had to read and understand some data, analyze it, and then communicate your results via written word in your career? I'm totally willing to grant you that the majority of careers do not require this skill but most white collar work does. Agreed that essays are overused but I'm just surprised to hear you downplay them so much.
Learning how to write well is important, but I didn't feel that any of the lit classes I took helped greatly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. When I studied engineering I saw almost the same culture. Firms were looking for the same students with similar GPAs and sadly I was not one of them. I distinctly remember going to the campus job fair and having my resume repeatedly being put into the "maybe" pile. My academic work wasn't amazing but my extracurriculars were a few engineering p…
My academic background from Engineering was in Electrical Engineering, so very much a "traditional" background, i.e where most firms hiring were rather old and stodgy, compared to modern high-tech SV companies. The reputable firms usually had a more or less firm cut-off around 3.0, while smaller firms were more lenient. Most reputable finance and consulting firms wouldn't even look at your CV unless you had a 3.5 I t…
Of all my friends who graduated as engineers half are in IT or software engineering at this point. There traditional engineering careers were awe fully short for the amount of effort put in.
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…
And these same folks continue gaming the system once employed by these banks. Go figure.
Sounds like the cause of pretty much every banking scandal ever, from Nick Leeson, to Libor, to the subprime crisis to Wells Fargo to...