[kenster07]

This is an irrational model for evaluating a candidate's talent. The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple. Many people's motivations in university diverge from their motives in the professional world. Some people will work much harder when the result is a paycheck every two weeks, or when they have to feed a family, or because they see their work career as distinct from their academic career. But for the sake of argument, let's play along with this naive model.

The university they attended matters almost as much as their GPA, as we all know that professors will tend to curve the difficulty of their course to conform to the quality of the students they are teaching.

And you have an illogical attitude towards 3.9-4.0 students. Almost every student who attends an Ivy-caliber school had a 3.9-4.0 in high school. Surely, you aren't implying that the quality of a CalTech CS graduate is lower than the quality of a UCLA CS graduate, because the CalTech students' one-time GPA was likely a 4.0. And you certainly can't be saying that Ivy-caliber students are sheep who blindly jump through hoops.

[jmharvey]

> The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple.

For evaluating talent, sure, but the job interview process isn't about finding the most talented candidates, it's about finding the candidates who would do the job the best. The point of the parent and grandparent comments was that GPA was an important indicator for the non-talent portions of the jobs they were hiring for.

From personal experience, I've worked with several people who were absolutely brilliant when presented with a new and interesting problem, but as the novelty wore off (usually on the scale of weeks) and their excitement waned, their ability to actually complete their work dropped off, too. That's not something you can tell by just making them code for you.

[greenlander]

All the candidates I gave serious consideration to write lots of code (as did my staff who also interviewed them). But I can't interview everyone whose resume I receive: I can only pick the best resumes. When a candidate failed the interview process, I tried to figure out the error I made (if any) in order select better resumes in the future.

And I agree that schools are different. I occasionally considered candidates from schools that people snicker about, like San Jose State. But they had better have aced everything and really stand out from the pack to overcome that handicap. Sometimes, great people have life circumstances that corral them into lame schools. On the other hand, I'd give pretty serious consideration to a candidate from Harvey Mudd or CalTech with a 3.1. (But even at those great schools, the < 3.0 rule seemed to apply: candidates with a really low GPA couldn't pass the technical parts of interviewing. You'd be surprised how many CS graduates from top schools can't implement the C library strrev() function or return a pointer to the nth element of a linked list.)