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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

How can good grades ever be a minus?

I think he's saying that if you are applying to a job and have more than 0 experience, you shouldn't be relying on your GPA as a selling point.

And I agree - GPA is pretty irrelevant to anything in the business world. All it proves is that you can play by the rules in the school system - not a real indication of your experience, skills, or relevant knowledge.

Success in much of the business world requires you to play by the rules of the business system, which may be as capricious, arbitrary, pointless, stupid, and orthogonal to relevant knowledge [1], as success in the school system.

For every hiring manager who takes the approach that anyone putting their GPA on their resume is an asshole or an idiot, there's three others who think that there's something wrong with a junior applicant who doesn't put their GPA on their resume.

Unless you tell the applicant what you want to see, they have no idea which of these two hiring managers you might be. Instead of downmarking people for having the audacity to present this information to you, perhaps you could just ignore it?

[1] Which the hiring manager in this thread has unironically demonstrated.

Without any evidence to back up your claim I could just as easily claim that for every hiring manager who cares about seeing a GPA on a resume there are three others who think there's something wrong with an applicant with any experience who does put their GPA on their resume.

If you have to use it as a selling point, it means you don't have more compelling things to show.

Including 7 ASCII characters on your resume does not imply that you don't have more compelling things to show.

They're not a minus in and of themselves. But more than a few hiring managers will prefer someone who obviously worked hard and has a transcript that moves from a B/B+ average to A's the last several years than someone who has an A in every class they're ever taken. If you're not going into academia or research it's much less important that you be a genius and much more important that you're willing and able to put in work over months or years to achieve an objective.

Getting 100% on a math quiz in elementary school is also not a minus, but approaching employers with that information as a means to sell yourself leaves them thinking that you have nothing to offer the workplace.

Dumb people prefer the company of other dumb people.

Yes, I have seen a 4.0 taken as a negative sign for people that are overly focused on following the rules. Less common is some people have a GPA limit and will not higher people over it. That limit can be as low as 3.2 in one case.

This more for undergrad as most people are expected to pull a ~3.8-4.0 in grad school making the number meaningless.

PS: On average I suspect it's a net gain for your first job, but adding a GPA after that is likely a larger risk than you might think.

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