Comment by nyrulez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyrulez | Hacker News Reader

Dangerous advice IMO. I interview folks regularly at a top tier firm and a good school/track record is perceived as a strong indicator of future performance. We can debate if that's really true till eternity but that's what lot of folks do today and I don't see that changing for quite a while. I interned at Google long time back (+ had an offer from them) and school performance factored in pretty strongly (along with my transcript).

We do coding tests of course but that would be too limited on its own.

Personally, I would be not where I am without college and ton of courses in CS. Topics like Database normalization, query optimization, ton of OS concepts, discrete math, algorithms/data structures are important for any CS career and could be read on their own but why not just take courses and study them in college instead of trying to rely one's self discipline to cover all of that.

If you are starting your own company, maybe it matters less but even there I am not sure.

What about the value of actual projects? I have a high GPA, but I'd be pretty disappointed if a company didn't stop to look at any of my github projects before they considered me. Those repos show off my creativity and my desire to build interesting projects with interesting techniques.

My high GPA comes from doing what I'm asked, not from being innovative, interesting, or overachieving. I like to think of it as GPA hacking, maximum results for minimum work.

Unfortunately a lot of the decision making comes from the interviewing part of it. I agree companies should look more at actual past projects (and I had plenty to boot), but I didn't find folks looking at that too much as I would have liked.

But if the projects have significant value and are well known, that's a different thing altogether, that comes off as a big plus IMO. They just need to presented well - just a code repository somewhere is less likely to get attention than working stuff people are using actively.

But apart from that, projects make you a better CS/hacker and it shows - it shouldn't be done for getting a job but just because you are passionate and want to contribute - and trust me it will show if you do try to leverage that for getting hired later.

The Proven ability to learn is an important skill when evaluating candidates for hire, among other very useful skills. Whether the proof is in an academnic arena or practical experience.

I think a lot of this is dependent on the company and what you are trying to do. Every other company out there needs programmers. But not all of them need software engineers.

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