7 ms·

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 know

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 internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs! This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar). And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc. When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least. So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear. edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.

6thaccount2 7y ago
Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most required classes outside of the math/physics/engineering (Ex: literature and psychology) are pretty simple to ace. I never heard of anyone who had someone write them a paper.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I'm guessing it varies a lot by school. I went to a top engineering school as an undergrad and cheating was rampant - probably something like 1/3 of the graduating class participated in cheating to some extent. I then went to another top engineering school as a graduate student and I never saw anyone cheat.
  - SeanBoocock 7y ago
    Yeah I think so. I was shocked to discover that over a 1/3rd of the computer science classes I TA'd as a grad student were cheating, repeatedly, on homework assignments and tests. I had come from a culture as an undergrad (and graduate student at another university) where cheating even once was a potential expellable offense. At the very least you would fail the class. In the comp sci classes I TA'd the professor would fail the students for the assignments but no more, even after multiple offenses.
    - 6thaccount2 7y ago
      Interesting. At my university it was most certainly fail the course and possibly expulsion.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        At my school it was seen as a political issue. If you got stuck in a section that was dominated by a particular group of students, you were screwed because the class had a hard curve and the group openly and blatantly cheated. We had a faculty mentor from a different department sit in and witness what happened in an midterm, and escalated it to the administration, who made an accommodation for us.
      - tnecniv 7y ago
        I think this varies a lot by professor. Typically failing a student involves a lot of extra paperwork on the professor's part. Doubly so if it's for academic dishonesty.
    - 7y ago
mathattack 7y ago
And these same folks continue gaming the system once employed by these banks. Go figure.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Maybe that's what they want. A lot of people in general hold the view that high grades just equate to work ethic, so in the case of financial institutions perhaps they are really just concerned with the ability to produce consistent results.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Isn't a lot of banking basically about gaming the system?
  - mathattack 7y ago
    Yes, including one’s own employer. Anything for the external validation. (GPA or bonus)
- mattkevan 7y ago
  Hmm. A lot of people in one place obsessed with getting the best numbers and willing to game the system any way they can to get them. Sounds like the cause of pretty much every banking scandal ever, from Nick Leeson, to Libor, to the subprime crisis to Wells Fargo to...
pembrook 7y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
yardie 7y ago
> 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 project competitions. But the recruiters never looked past the GPA requirements. I would say IT and CS is far more democratic. I've met far more software engineers who don't have a traditional CS background but managed to hustle their way in somehow.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  When I was recruiting interns for CS at Apple, a good project trumped just about any GPA north of 1.0 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.
  - sharadov 7y ago
    That's exactly what I would do, trumps grades any day.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  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 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.
omarhaneef 7y ago
As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing. The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work. Let me explain. When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of them could do the job. And yet we had to pick maybe 10-30 from the school for that summer. (Keep in mind we recruited from many schools for many different positions). So you have 1000 resumes and they all seem smart and interesting and you have to pick 10. What do you do? The GPA is a great way to numerically and “objectively” make a cut. Then when you see a typo and maybe you can exclude that one and so on. The reason you have to rely on these non predictive elements is exactly because everyone signals well on the predictive elements.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  So why not try random instead? It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots, pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the results 5 or 10 years later.
  - clairity 7y ago
    yup, once you've whittled down to qualified candidates, you've exhausted your (relatively) objective methods anyway, so random is your best choice then. i made this same point recently using the nba for illustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848444
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    I’ve done that a few times when I’ve had to hire people very quickly. I numbered each resume without reading it and drew lots. We had 6 people interview ~30 people for 10 slots. Each person had 15 minutes to talk. Candidates were out of the running if 3 people said “no”. We stopped when we had 10 people. It worked out pretty good, but made HR angry. We ended up with 2 bozos, but the rest were pretty great. I worked at another place years ago where we would mentor call center agents to become DBAs and Unix people. Those folks were all awesome, and a few had GEDs only. One of them called me to thank me for the opportunity, he just became a CIO! Personally, if you have the time, you can mentor and get better results from a marginally qualified, engaged candidate than a person with the right credentials.
cbanek 7y ago
In my time in school for Engineering (UIUC), I think the "gaming the system" was mostly with the group projects. Many high level classes such as processor design made people form into groups of 2, 3, or 4 people to do a project. Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade. None of this is of course considered cheating, but a number of people skate past projects all the time. I do agree though, that once it gets to job interviews, those people typically fare less well. Of course in engineering, some people would still try to focus on the easiest classes to fulfill the requirements and maximize their GPA, but GPA only seemed to really matter if you were going to grad school. Other than that, anything 3.0+ is good enough to get an interview for an internship.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade. I was never assigned a group project in college that I didn't feel was a complete waste of time, but this situation is actually pretty easy to avoid if the professor cares. one of my professors would require group members to individually submit reviews of their teammates with each milestone on the project. basically "did they do their fair share, less, or more?" if on average your team felt you went above and beyond the call of duty, your individual grade would be the group grade multiplied by r > 1, and the opposite if everyone felt you were a slacker. the scores were normalized so if everyone rated each other as exceptional, r would just be 1. it didn't make the distribution of work perfect, but it made everyone pretty interested in at least appearing to contribute.
- tnecniv 7y ago
  I agree with you mostly, but to add my own take: I've seen the cutoff for more desirable engineering jobs being 3.5, which is also basically the cutoff for competitive grad schools. The real distinguishing factor at that point is what kind of lab work / extracurricular projects you've produced, and it's a lot harder to hide behind a group then.
dominotw 7y ago
not very different from grinding leetcode to land a gig at FAANG We are not really different from 'those types of employers'
peter303 7y ago
I dont think engineers can fake it in a real world tech job. I can spot a phony software engineer rather quickly.

6thaccount2 7y ago

Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most required classes outside of the math/physics/engineering (Ex: literature and psychology) are pretty simple to ace. I never heard of anyone who had someone write them a paper.

MegaButts 7y ago
I'm guessing it varies a lot by school. I went to a top engineering school as an undergrad and cheating was rampant - probably something like 1/3 of the graduating class participated in cheating to some extent. I then went to another top engineering school as a graduate student and I never saw anyone cheat.
- SeanBoocock 7y ago
  Yeah I think so. I was shocked to discover that over a 1/3rd of the computer science classes I TA'd as a grad student were cheating, repeatedly, on homework assignments and tests. I had come from a culture as an undergrad (and graduate student at another university) where cheating even once was a potential expellable offense. At the very least you would fail the class. In the comp sci classes I TA'd the professor would fail the students for the assignments but no more, even after multiple offenses.
  - 6thaccount2 7y ago
    Interesting. At my university it was most certainly fail the course and possibly expulsion.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      At my school it was seen as a political issue. If you got stuck in a section that was dominated by a particular group of students, you were screwed because the class had a hard curve and the group openly and blatantly cheated. We had a faculty mentor from a different department sit in and witness what happened in an midterm, and escalated it to the administration, who made an accommodation for us.
    - tnecniv 7y ago
      I think this varies a lot by professor. Typically failing a student involves a lot of extra paperwork on the professor's part. Doubly so if it's for academic dishonesty.
  - 7y ago

mathattack 7y ago

And these same folks continue gaming the system once employed by these banks. Go figure.

soulofmischief 7y ago
Maybe that's what they want. A lot of people in general hold the view that high grades just equate to work ethic, so in the case of financial institutions perhaps they are really just concerned with the ability to produce consistent results.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Isn't a lot of banking basically about gaming the system?
- mathattack 7y ago
  Yes, including one’s own employer. Anything for the external validation. (GPA or bonus)
mattkevan 7y ago
Hmm. A lot of people in one place obsessed with getting the best numbers and willing to game the system any way they can to get them. Sounds like the cause of pretty much every banking scandal ever, from Nick Leeson, to Libor, to the subprime crisis to Wells Fargo to...

pembrook 7y ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

yardie 7y ago

> 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 project competitions. But the recruiters never looked past the GPA requirements. I would say IT and CS is far more democratic. I've met far more software engineers who don't have a traditional CS background but managed to hustle their way in somehow.

mattnewton 7y ago
When I was recruiting interns for CS at Apple, a good project trumped just about any GPA north of 1.0 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.
- sharadov 7y ago
  That's exactly what I would do, trumps grades any day.
TrackerFF 7y ago
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 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.

omarhaneef 7y ago

As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing. The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work. Let me explain. When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of them could do the job. And yet we had to pick maybe 10-30 from the school for that summer. (Keep in mind we recruited from many schools for many different positions). So you have 1000 resumes and they all seem smart and interesting and you have to pick 10. What do you do? The GPA is a great way to numerically and “objectively” make a cut. Then when you see a typo and maybe you can exclude that one and so on. The reason you have to rely on these non predictive elements is exactly because everyone signals well on the predictive elements.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
So why not try random instead? It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots, pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the results 5 or 10 years later.
- clairity 7y ago
  yup, once you've whittled down to qualified candidates, you've exhausted your (relatively) objective methods anyway, so random is your best choice then. i made this same point recently using the nba for illustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848444
- Spooky23 7y ago
  I’ve done that a few times when I’ve had to hire people very quickly. I numbered each resume without reading it and drew lots. We had 6 people interview ~30 people for 10 slots. Each person had 15 minutes to talk. Candidates were out of the running if 3 people said “no”. We stopped when we had 10 people. It worked out pretty good, but made HR angry. We ended up with 2 bozos, but the rest were pretty great. I worked at another place years ago where we would mentor call center agents to become DBAs and Unix people. Those folks were all awesome, and a few had GEDs only. One of them called me to thank me for the opportunity, he just became a CIO! Personally, if you have the time, you can mentor and get better results from a marginally qualified, engaged candidate than a person with the right credentials.

cbanek 7y ago

In my time in school for Engineering (UIUC), I think the "gaming the system" was mostly with the group projects. Many high level classes such as processor design made people form into groups of 2, 3, or 4 people to do a project. Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade. None of this is of course considered cheating, but a number of people skate past projects all the time. I do agree though, that once it gets to job interviews, those people typically fare less well. Of course in engineering, some people would still try to focus on the easiest classes to fulfill the requirements and maximize their GPA, but GPA only seemed to really matter if you were going to grad school. Other than that, anything 3.0+ is good enough to get an interview for an internship.

leetcrew 7y ago
> Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade. I was never assigned a group project in college that I didn't feel was a complete waste of time, but this situation is actually pretty easy to avoid if the professor cares. one of my professors would require group members to individually submit reviews of their teammates with each milestone on the project. basically "did they do their fair share, less, or more?" if on average your team felt you went above and beyond the call of duty, your individual grade would be the group grade multiplied by r > 1, and the opposite if everyone felt you were a slacker. the scores were normalized so if everyone rated each other as exceptional, r would just be 1. it didn't make the distribution of work perfect, but it made everyone pretty interested in at least appearing to contribute.
tnecniv 7y ago
I agree with you mostly, but to add my own take: I've seen the cutoff for more desirable engineering jobs being 3.5, which is also basically the cutoff for competitive grad schools. The real distinguishing factor at that point is what kind of lab work / extracurricular projects you've produced, and it's a lot harder to hide behind a group then.

dominotw 7y ago

not very different from grinding leetcode to land a gig at FAANG We are not really different from 'those types of employers'

peter303 7y ago

I dont think engineers can fake it in a real world tech job. I can spot a phony software engineer rather quickly.