6 ms·

One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. I had a semester where I failed almost every

One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event and was too proud to admit to my parents I should probably just withdraw. This dropped my gpa from a 3.3 down to a 2.6. Two years later when I graduated my GPA was still below a 3. I remember I was sitting at an interview with John Deere and they told me that someone with my academic failings probably wouldn’t do well at John Deere. Broad rejections from General Motors, ford, Boeing, many others. But Microsoft and Google did not seem to care at all. I was told I got a solid yes from all my Microsoft interviewers and was actually able to negotiate a level bump up and a larger signing bonus. For me it showed that Microsoft/google are thinking holistically in their HR decisions, and only use GPA as a signal. I hope my success at Microsoft since then is an indication that they made the right call.

anilakar 4y ago
> I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event Sadly, that's exactly what the universities here (not US) seem to measure: your ability to cope with an unmanageable mess called life. They overload you with schoolwork and those who are either gifted enough or able to cope with it will graduate.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  A "life event" sounds something like a death or major illness of a loved one, an unexpected loss of financial support, a health problem, car accident, or some other third-party issue external to one's schoolwork. Penalizing these people doesn't filter for those who can cope; it sorts for those whose "life events" happen to occur after they graduate.
  - cryptonym 4y ago
    Agree. It sounds like that joke where HR randomly put half of applications to the bin because they don't want to hire the unlucky ones.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      It all makes more sense if you stop looking at it as a "system" and just look at how it empirically works. Nobody is optimizing for anything, not even their own self-interest. We're just doing what we're doing because that's what we do.
viraptor 4y ago
It's not just the big companies. I've not heard of anyone rejected from a dev / it job for grades. I'm sure it does happen, especially in highly competitive, exam driven Asian countries. But otherwise? Not a single company even asked me about my grades in the first place. If you're doing a practical interview, they're not relevant. And if I happen to somehow live in a bubble because I've not heard of those - in that case, keep in mind there's enough positions/companies to create that bubble.
- mips_avatar 4y ago
  All the old school companies (GM/Boeing/GE/etc) had a cutoff of 3.0-3.2 GPA to interview. So my GPA was a major issue.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Sure, that's why I mentioned dev/it companies specifically. Those old school companies are automotive/aviation engineering with dev/it related departments, which is not the same.
    - mips_avatar 4y ago
      It’s a good distinction and I haven’t noticed dev/it companies caring about GPA. I went to school at Penn State where the engineering career fair was dominated by old school companies which cared a lot about GPA.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    And recruiters at companies that didn't list a minimum (e.g. Cisco, HP, MS, Amazon, Google) told me not to bother applying with my GPA. Company I did get hired at, which is definitely a software company, told me later I only got hired because nobody thought to ask me my GPA.
- verisimi 4y ago
  Yes. But you did your part to keep the education/licensing industry going!
eloisant 4y ago
> One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. The question is, are you getting an interview if you have low grades?
- mips_avatar 4y ago
  For Microsoft and Google the answer was yes. Which was kind of funny because those were my top two choices.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    This was almost 20 years ago, but both MS and Google recruiters took my resume but told me I wasn't getting a callback with my GPA.
- clnq 4y ago
  Generally yes. I've been interviewing people in tech for about half a decade, and it never occurred to me to ask about their grades. It is irrelevant compared to testing how well the applicants know what they need to know for work. Besides, partially thanks to grade inflation and partially due to arbitrary syllabi, universities grade students very unreliably. I can imagine a scenario where a recruiter or an interviewer would bother to work out what grades mean in one or two local universities if they recruit most of their employees from there. But in large tech companies that recruit regionally or globally, there is simply no way I, as an interviewer, will spend the time investigating how some professor in a college or university I have never heard about tends to grade their students and on what subject matter. Just think about how ridiculous that sounds. The universities do not prepare people for work in tech anyways. There are tremendous practical knowledge gaps fresh graduates have compared to anyone who has been in tech for barely a year. A dropout candidate genuinely interested in the practicalities of work in their tech segment will easily outperform a 4.0 GPA BSc graduate who fails to engage with the subject matter. More and more candidates are skipping BSc degrees and instead spending time building their portfolios targeting specific companies (using the appropriate frameworks, programming languages, and tools). They tend to be good hires and often want to prove themselves more than university grads. This works out for the team (the employee shows more engagement with work and more effort) and the employee (higher work satisfaction). I am not saying that a university degree or your GPA is meaningless. I am sure some companies care about the latter, and many still care about the former. But compared to actual know-how, just undergrad degrees and 4.0 GPAs do not stand a chance.
gibolt 4y ago
Even this terminology is ridiculous (I know it is paraphrased). Academic 'failings' for having a B average. Having good grades across the board is great, but not having interest or success in the narrowly tested and unrelated subject is just silly. The main metrics that matter when evaluating someone is how they are now and how fast they progress(ed).
- mips_avatar 4y ago
  The most bizarre part about the John Deere interview is after all those derogatory remarks, they emailed me a week later asking me to fly to headquarters for another round of interviews. Despite having no offers, I turned down the interview. Was pretty upset about the way the interviewer had treated me.
  - LadyCailin 4y ago
    I would have asked why that was. Do they lock employees in a room alone, and force them to solve problems without help or any outside interest? If not, then GPA is not relevant. If so, I will be shorting your stock.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Investment Banks, Management Consulting, Big Law, not so much either...granted, a Harvard grad with 3.5 will get more slack than a kid from Random State School with similar grades and major. But still, many of the companies mentioned above still just look at the GPA - not so much at the actual content. Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!) because in the end - recruiters don't care whether you took Introduction to Theater, or Math 55 at Harvard. So yes, at least big tech - even though the technical interviews can be tough - are indeed making the opportunities more accessible. You're not getting blanket rejections based on your freshman grades.
- neilv 4y ago
  > Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!) At MIT, some undergrads could get hired as research assistants for professor's projects (usually working under the direction of one of the professor's grad students). But MIT undergrads can have punishing courseloads, and it wasn't unusual for students to get overwhelmed with classes, and ghost the research side job. I'd hear grad students say that it seemed silly for one of their undergrad assistants to trade a recommendation from a well-connected professor, for only a slightly better GPA. But, in hindsight, I suppose that the undergrads knew what they were doing.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    > I suppose that the undergrads knew what they were doing. Based on what evidence?
iilnmq 4y ago
One of the most skilled and talented guys I ever worked with was hired without a degree, while he was still a teenager. This was at a big tech company. He'd been hacking on various projects for years in his free time and had an exceptionally well written blog that detailed these. And he blasted through our interview loop like a guy with decades of experience. I feel he was one of these rare genius types that any hiring manager would be crazy to reject.
hgsgm 4y ago
Google didn't allow imperfect grades until after Marisa Mayer lost power. She demanded perfect grades like she got.
astkaasa 4y ago
Did you try Oracle? It's famous to use GPA to drop people afaik.
skzv 4y ago
In a similar vein, I had good grades, but from a non-cs background (I studied engineering physics). A lot of recruiters were turned off immediately when they heard "physics" and not pure CS or ECE. Google was interested, though.

anilakar 4y ago

> I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event Sadly, that's exactly what the universities here (not US) seem to measure: your ability to cope with an unmanageable mess called life. They overload you with schoolwork and those who are either gifted enough or able to cope with it will graduate.

mitthrowaway2 4y ago
A "life event" sounds something like a death or major illness of a loved one, an unexpected loss of financial support, a health problem, car accident, or some other third-party issue external to one's schoolwork. Penalizing these people doesn't filter for those who can cope; it sorts for those whose "life events" happen to occur after they graduate.
- cryptonym 4y ago
  Agree. It sounds like that joke where HR randomly put half of applications to the bin because they don't want to hire the unlucky ones.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    It all makes more sense if you stop looking at it as a "system" and just look at how it empirically works. Nobody is optimizing for anything, not even their own self-interest. We're just doing what we're doing because that's what we do.

viraptor 4y ago

It's not just the big companies. I've not heard of anyone rejected from a dev / it job for grades. I'm sure it does happen, especially in highly competitive, exam driven Asian countries. But otherwise? Not a single company even asked me about my grades in the first place. If you're doing a practical interview, they're not relevant. And if I happen to somehow live in a bubble because I've not heard of those - in that case, keep in mind there's enough positions/companies to create that bubble.

mips_avatar 4y ago
All the old school companies (GM/Boeing/GE/etc) had a cutoff of 3.0-3.2 GPA to interview. So my GPA was a major issue.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Sure, that's why I mentioned dev/it companies specifically. Those old school companies are automotive/aviation engineering with dev/it related departments, which is not the same.
  - mips_avatar 4y ago
    It’s a good distinction and I haven’t noticed dev/it companies caring about GPA. I went to school at Penn State where the engineering career fair was dominated by old school companies which cared a lot about GPA.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  And recruiters at companies that didn't list a minimum (e.g. Cisco, HP, MS, Amazon, Google) told me not to bother applying with my GPA. Company I did get hired at, which is definitely a software company, told me later I only got hired because nobody thought to ask me my GPA.
verisimi 4y ago
Yes. But you did your part to keep the education/licensing industry going!

eloisant 4y ago

> One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. The question is, are you getting an interview if you have low grades?

mips_avatar 4y ago
For Microsoft and Google the answer was yes. Which was kind of funny because those were my top two choices.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  This was almost 20 years ago, but both MS and Google recruiters took my resume but told me I wasn't getting a callback with my GPA.
clnq 4y ago
Generally yes. I've been interviewing people in tech for about half a decade, and it never occurred to me to ask about their grades. It is irrelevant compared to testing how well the applicants know what they need to know for work. Besides, partially thanks to grade inflation and partially due to arbitrary syllabi, universities grade students very unreliably. I can imagine a scenario where a recruiter or an interviewer would bother to work out what grades mean in one or two local universities if they recruit most of their employees from there. But in large tech companies that recruit regionally or globally, there is simply no way I, as an interviewer, will spend the time investigating how some professor in a college or university I have never heard about tends to grade their students and on what subject matter. Just think about how ridiculous that sounds. The universities do not prepare people for work in tech anyways. There are tremendous practical knowledge gaps fresh graduates have compared to anyone who has been in tech for barely a year. A dropout candidate genuinely interested in the practicalities of work in their tech segment will easily outperform a 4.0 GPA BSc graduate who fails to engage with the subject matter. More and more candidates are skipping BSc degrees and instead spending time building their portfolios targeting specific companies (using the appropriate frameworks, programming languages, and tools). They tend to be good hires and often want to prove themselves more than university grads. This works out for the team (the employee shows more engagement with work and more effort) and the employee (higher work satisfaction). I am not saying that a university degree or your GPA is meaningless. I am sure some companies care about the latter, and many still care about the former. But compared to actual know-how, just undergrad degrees and 4.0 GPAs do not stand a chance.

gibolt 4y ago

Even this terminology is ridiculous (I know it is paraphrased). Academic 'failings' for having a B average. Having good grades across the board is great, but not having interest or success in the narrowly tested and unrelated subject is just silly. The main metrics that matter when evaluating someone is how they are now and how fast they progress(ed).

mips_avatar 4y ago
The most bizarre part about the John Deere interview is after all those derogatory remarks, they emailed me a week later asking me to fly to headquarters for another round of interviews. Despite having no offers, I turned down the interview. Was pretty upset about the way the interviewer had treated me.
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  I would have asked why that was. Do they lock employees in a room alone, and force them to solve problems without help or any outside interest? If not, then GPA is not relevant. If so, I will be shorting your stock.

TrackerFF 4y ago

Investment Banks, Management Consulting, Big Law, not so much either...granted, a Harvard grad with 3.5 will get more slack than a kid from Random State School with similar grades and major. But still, many of the companies mentioned above still just look at the GPA - not so much at the actual content. Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!) because in the end - recruiters don't care whether you took Introduction to Theater, or Math 55 at Harvard. So yes, at least big tech - even though the technical interviews can be tough - are indeed making the opportunities more accessible. You're not getting blanket rejections based on your freshman grades.

neilv 4y ago
> Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!) At MIT, some undergrads could get hired as research assistants for professor's projects (usually working under the direction of one of the professor's grad students). But MIT undergrads can have punishing courseloads, and it wasn't unusual for students to get overwhelmed with classes, and ghost the research side job. I'd hear grad students say that it seemed silly for one of their undergrad assistants to trade a recommendation from a well-connected professor, for only a slightly better GPA. But, in hindsight, I suppose that the undergrads knew what they were doing.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  > I suppose that the undergrads knew what they were doing. Based on what evidence?

iilnmq 4y ago

One of the most skilled and talented guys I ever worked with was hired without a degree, while he was still a teenager. This was at a big tech company. He'd been hacking on various projects for years in his free time and had an exceptionally well written blog that detailed these. And he blasted through our interview loop like a guy with decades of experience. I feel he was one of these rare genius types that any hiring manager would be crazy to reject.

hgsgm 4y ago

Google didn't allow imperfect grades until after Marisa Mayer lost power. She demanded perfect grades like she got.

astkaasa 4y ago

Did you try Oracle? It's famous to use GPA to drop people afaik.

skzv 4y ago

In a similar vein, I had good grades, but from a non-cs background (I studied engineering physics). A lot of recruiters were turned off immediately when they heard "physics" and not pure CS or ECE. Google was interested, though.