4 ms·
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.
by paulie_a 8y ago
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.
- make3 8y agothen you're one of the only ones
- paulie_a 8y agoI 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.
- make3 8y agoI 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
- recursive 8y agoI am also one of the only ones.
- commandlinefan 8y agoYeah, same here - as much as it pains me to admit it, I'm pretty impressed when I see that somebody graduated from MIT or CMU. And, honestly, when I've worked with people who did graduate from "top" schools, they were smarter than I was/am (but on the plus side, I got to learn a lot from them). On the plus side, there aren't that many of them, and there are lots of jobs for the rest of us.
- sodafountan 8y agoI couldn't care less about your GPA or what school you went to, some of the best people I know never attended school at all.
- imsofuture 8y agoYep. Some of the best people I know either didn't graduate, or graduated in fields more or less entirely unrelated to what they do.
- commandlinefan 8y agoWell, unless you're leaving something out, you just said that the less education a person has, the more capable they are - so, reductio ad absurdum, the most capable people in the world are middle-school drop-outs. But I suspect you're trying to suggest that education and competence are completely uncorrelated (which is a claim that would be hard to back up, incidentally) and that "something else" is an indicator of competence/intelligence/capability, but you're not specifying what you think that is.
- maxk42 8y agoAnother one of the only ones here.
- stcredzero 8y agoYes. The projects someone has done is more useful, but only as a source of topics to ask questions about. I keep on running into recent grads from prestigious University of California system schools with 3.75+ GPAs who don't know basic things about pointers, who can't concretely specify a design for even a small subsystem, and who seem to have only ever glued libraries together with a high level language, nothing more. I introduce a 2 element cycle in a dataset, and ask how we can detect such things, and have repeatedly gotten an if-clause that would only detect the 2 elements. Then I ask about a 3 element cycle, and I've even gotten another if-clause to detect the 3 elements as an answer multiple times. What in the world!?
- sodafountan 8y agoI'm a college dropout who's been in a position where I've had to interview people and make hiring decisions. I always hire based on who I'd most like to work with. Sometimes that candidate has a degree from a very prestigious university, other times they don't, but I always hire the person who I think I'll learn the most from or whom I think will add the most value to the company. Grades and the school you went to never tell me those things, it's your interview and personal projects that tell me that.