[potatolicious]

Heartily agreed - I see that one of replies below already demonstrates your point all too well, the unfair (and in my experience grossly elitist and simplistic) characterization that anyone who doesn't have a high GPA simply didn't try hard enough. This is especially relevant in our field.

For one thing, I've only run into a handful of software companies who have a hard grade cutoff anywhere. None of the big names (MS, GOOG, etc) do it, and IMHO if you understand what makes a great hacker, you wouldn't do it either. NVidia was the last company of note I dealt with that had a hard grade cutoff. I didn't make it - and many other talented programmers I know didn't either... their loss I suppose. I do know the people who were selected, and none of them can really be called good hackers - at most competent coders.

I've seen this pattern time and time again - in college the ones with the highest grades were the least employable. I had the pleasure of being in a program that required internships, and invariably the people with middle-of-the-road marks (3.5 is well above middle) had a much easier time finding employment than the ones at the top. The amount of effort it takes to stay at the top precludes one from doing the side projects that invariably makes the main difference between a merely competent programmer and a talented hacker. The top marks had no problem landing interviews, but had trouble converting interviews to offers.

Sure, you can claim that a truly elite individual can make the grades and do all the side hacking projects and make it home to cook dinner. Reality of the matter is, these guys are exceptionally rare, and odds are you're not paying half as much as you would need to hire one of them ;) By hiring in that range you're getting an unproductive mix of academic overachievers mixed with a handful of pure geniuses. By targeting a lower grade bracket you're getting a much more even mix of people good at the job you want them to do, but aren't so good at academics.

[jchonphoenix]

I'm just being honestly direct. You cannot completely throw out GPA because it is a measure of something. And you cannot completely rely on GPA because it is, as in all things, somewhat biased.

The people with the low GPAs will continue to say GPAs do not matter. The people with the high ones will continue to say it does. All I'm saying is that, at a target of 3.5, it doesn't preclude you from accomplishing other endeavors during your university years.

[potatolicious]

> You cannot completely throw out GPA because it is a measure of something.

Of course you can. Nobody is saying the GPA doesn't measure something, the question is whether or not it measures something relevant to the hiring decisions of your shop. From what I've seen, there is actually a negative correlation between grade and employability.

> All I'm saying is that, at a target of 3.5, it doesn't preclude you from accomplishing other endeavors during your university years.

Yes it does - from personal observation to boot. My peers in college with the 3.5 GPA were almost all considerably less capable than the people who stayed up late hacking and sacrificed marks as a result. There were a couple of outliers (who were an absolute joy to work with), but they are also exceptionally rare.

The question is whether or not believe what it takes to get the grades has relevance to what you do after graduation. I'm firmly of the opinion that it does not: every major skill I've ever learned that has helped me become a better programmer has not come from a classroom or the lips of a professor. Classes were really just a nice supplement to the hacking I was already doing, not the other way around. Like a great many other crafts, practice makes perfect, and while a small minority of the population can make the grade and hack a lot, the vast majority cannot. Deliberately placing yourself in a pool with a very few number of good candidates, and a flood of academic overachievers, is not an optimal hiring strategy.

In hindsight though, this filter is not precisely a bad thing. From past experience, the companies that have hard grade cutoffs are also the ones I do not wish to work for - so perhaps it is a good idea that the industry seems to have segmented itself this way.

[jchonphoenix]

Haha, hey potatolicious, I just realized you go to Waterloo and I go to CMU. Those are two schools who are bitter rivals in the regional ACM ICPC programming competition.

I just found it ironic and actually quite amusing and figured I'd let you know ;)

[azanar]

Of course you can. Nobody is saying the GPA doesn't measure something, the question is whether or not it measures something relevant to the hiring decisions of your shop. From what I've seen, there is actually a negative correlation between grade and employability.

Sigh. I could try to convince you that your personal observations are not representative, and you could probably tell me the same thing, and we would end up yelling past one another. We could both scream for data, and probably disregard the data that doesn't back our viewpoint and continue yelling past one another.

The problem is that we both have a vested interest in believing what we do. You've already admitted that you have a GPA that probably would not satisfy most hard-line GPA targets. I'll admit up-front that my GPA likely would satisfy most company's targets; this means I already lose a gold star.

This is a shame. I have not drawn any conclusions just from your self-confessed low GPA, but you have already prepared to consider me irredeemable. I'd probably ask some probing questions, realize that you've been bloody busy outside of classwork, and not think too much of it. This strategy could work both ways, for what it is worth.

I could just decide that if I were rejected at a company where you were vetting me, I am perhaps better off not being there. If I were hired, I'd have to deal with the chip on your shoulder about how I have already shown I can't hack because of some single arbitrary metric. But that would be out of the spirit of this site, and would assume things that probably aren't true about the users. So, instead, I'm going to try to provide a counter-argument.

Here's what I can say in my defense: I got that GPA without really giving a damn about my GPA. I found the topics I was working on fascinating enough without the motivation of grades, and got good enough at them that I was able to perform well on tests and assignments anyway. I guess I could've gone farther and just not done the assignments and skipped the tests, but requiring that much disinterest seems petty.

I wasn't trying to prove myself to anyone. And I still found time to play with things and hack on things of my own outside of the classroom. The only big strike against me, perhaps, is that I didn't get involved at all in open source until later on; I never published most of the things I was tinkering with in college. It doesn't mean I wasn't tinkering though, just that I wasn't public about it.

On top of that, I had an entire network of machines in my dorm room that the administration would've thrown a fit about had they known; I can only imagine what the power bill looked like. Having this taught me a bunch of things a networking theory class never would.

On the other hand, my networking theory class allowed me to make connections from experience to theory that made a whole lot of other things become obvious almost as soon as I was exposed to them. I drag this quote out from Deming all the time, because I think it is the best argument for not just focusing on the immediately practical: "Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning." FWIW, I haven't stopped learning just because I left college; to be honest, I think I would go stir-crazy if I did.

Hopefully, what I've written above makes some sense. Unfortunately, I've been shot by your generalization, and would not have been able to explain any of this had you said this in a group where you also controlled admissions. I think hard grade cutoffs in both directions suck, because they make a universal predictor from a weak indicator of arbitrary performance through unknown motivations.

Please, for me, and those like me who arrived where we are without the motivation of sucking up to our superiors and fitting the mold, don't be so hasty at nailing us to the wall. You'll just end up cultivating bitterness, and groups of people who don't want to work with one another based on something completely arbitrary.

[gamble]

"I've only run into a handful of software companies who have a hard grade cutoff anywhere. None of the big names (MS, GOOG, etc) do it"

Isn't Google notorious for requiring a 3.0 or better GPA?

[potatolicious]

They interviewed me :P (no, didn't get the job), My GPA was about 2.8 at the time. Also, if Google has a mark cutoff, it is not made public (suggesting that there are circumstances where they will ignore a low grade).

NVidia on the other hand made their intentions very clear, and basically said to not bother if your GPA was below 3.5, right in the job description.