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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Who told you that your GPA rules you out?

If you have actual experience, nobody should care about your GPA. Or even whether you have a college degree. Lots of people at Google don't. If you're still in college it might be an issue, but if you have something to point to you still have a shot at getting into the interview process.

The interview process is hard. I won't lie to you about it. Even if you belong at Google, there is a good chance of not making it through on the first try. But your odds are infinitely worse if you don't even try.

Speaking personally, I didn't apply to Google for years because the core Google languages are Python, Java and C++, while my professional experience was all in Perl. Eventually I did apply, and discovered that it never would have been a problem. And in fact I'm doing most of my work in internal languages that nobody comes here knowing.

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Internal languages? Why would Google make new languages when there are already many great ones already available? It sounds counterintuitive and inefficient. Please answer if you can.

There are lots of good reasons to create specialized languages for hard problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language and http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html both address this. Google has lots of people who are capable of creating those languages, who faced hard problems to solve that hadn't been tackled on the same scale elsewhere. Sometimes they wrote languages, and some of those have been widely adopted internally.

If the language is well-suited to the task, this is in fact an efficient approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawzall_(programming_language)

Most of the "great" languages were at one time internal to a company or research group.

http://golang.org/

That one actually seems more supply-driven than demand-driven. Google hires huge piles of accomplished people, and the senior ones then continue to work on whatever it is that they do, because they're well-known and independent enough that it's hard to assign them to projects they don't want to work on. So they hire Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and the result is a programming language inspired by C and Limbo, because that's what they do. =]

to be fair, nobody explicitly told me that gpa rules me out. but after i revealed my gpa, the youtube employee who reached out to me suggested that my resume would be discarded if my gpa was below 3.5, and even then, they unofficially shoot for 3.7. i only graduated in 2009, and as a self-taught programmer who graduated with a Psychology major, i have almost no training in computer science (i couldn't tell you what a bubble sort is; i find abelson and sussman totally uninteresting save for the box and pointer diagrams). but i did at least make it through real analysis and abstract algebra for fun and i do have a unique combinatoric proof of a summation identity to my name.

The GPA comment refers to people being hired for a first job straight out of college. Get industry experience, and nobody will care what your GPA was, or whether you even have one.

That said, you won't get through the Google interview without filling in some of your CS holes. You don't need to know what anything is called, but if you don't understand why quick sort and merge sort are efficient, you'll have trouble with the interviews.

That said, if you made it through real analysis and algebra, then the CS stuff you need shouldn't be too hard for you to learn. Really. If your interests include math and CS, one fun place to start is trying to tackle Project Euler problems. While doing that, read a few books, and you should be good to go.

My GPA was 3.0 and I was hired without much of a problem. Had about 4-ish years of industry experience.

It's the lack of formal CS that'll do you in...you have to know some of the theory to get past the interviews. They don't care how you learned it, but they care that you know it.

Just apply. Try. It's worth it.

The stuff about the GPA seems like a giant myth. I don't even remember my college GPA and I had a few rounds of interviews at GOOG.

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