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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   3667 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

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Grades, especially old ones, are of very little importance IMO.

I'll go further and claim that grades are completely and utterly irrelevant if you have literally anything at all to show for your skills (and if you don't, you're pretty screwed). I have no idea why so many American students are obsessed with them, given that nobody in the industry cares.

Right. I mean, if you are literally a fresh graduate with zero other things to show (which by itself is a bad thing, I'd expect to have at least some practical things to show) and perfect grades, it may be mildly interesting, in a way of "ok, I guess it's better than nothing", but in general nobody in the industry has the slightest interest in the grades.

I mean, my employer will occasionally list a GPA requirement/preference for senior-level openings, but i assume thats either HR's doing, or the hiring manager not really thinking things through.

HR may look at it, and if the company is big enough, it could happen that CVs with low GPAs or no GPAs would be screened out at this stage. In a smaller company, that's not likely to happen as people who actually make hiring decisions would be aware of what HR uses to screen and tell them not to do that.

Also, for a senior SWE position you should have enough experience that puts your grades years if not decades back. I can't imagine any hiring manager seriously worrying about grades made many years ago for something that is likely bear no connection with whatever work needs to be done now. At least not any manager who knows what they're doing :) Almost certainly it's something that HR inserted.

GPA requirement/preference for senior-level openings

HR is of course bad everywhere, but they sound especially bad at your employer. I interview a lot of people. We don't ask for GPA. The only job that actually verified my degrees was the very first one I got right after school.

  1. Grad school.

  2. Specific courses have massive waiting lists, and people with better grades are given priority.

  3. That one employer who will ask for transcripts. (I remember applying for a job that asked for high school transcripts as well, it was clear they were trying to extract every proxy for IQ they could get out of me.)

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