Yahoo fires HR head. To focus on GPA for hiring.

Another story from the HN front page mentioned the value of a college degree in today's workplace. With all this pressure on tuition fee rises and the (wrongly) perceived lack of value in a university-level education it would make sense for a high GPA to mean even less than before.

Regardless of what the silicon valley types believe Yahoo is still a fairly attractive company to work for, and with Mayer at the helm I can see it becoming a great place to work.

For once I'd like to see a tech company openly come out and say "grades mean nothing" and to persuade those gifted few that cared more about real-world projects than writing a route planner for the London underground in Prolog. Don't get me wrong, grades do mean something, but when you're looking to work in the big leagues you'd hope that their recruitment process could discover the difference between a great programmer and a great academic.

HN's headline is incredibly misleading, and no doubt a feeble attempt to corral the anti-education crowd. FTA:

"That has included the requirement of the addition of solid college grade-point averages and a preference for higher-level educational institutions for incoming resumes.”

Not a focus on GPA, an addition of it.

A lot of people will argue that GPA/educational background is meaningless, but I'm hard-pressed (knowing, as I do, people within my major who have 2.0 GPAs and 4.0 GPAs) to believe that if you must choose between two entry-level candidates -- both of whom have great open-source contributions and interview well -- that you shouldn't take the more academically qualified one above the other.

Meta: I clicked on the link to the story, got an "intro page" which was really just a giant advertisement, and was ultimately shown their main story index (rather than the article itself). What a complete and utter failure.

So, in short, big companies still don't get there doesn't have to be a correlation between GPA, educational background and actual skill to work?

Today with the internet, blogs, Github and other such things, I just don't get it!

I think it's best from the show west wing which said grades in college are best to assess how you do in college. That being said it's an assessment of grading which very class to class not on knowledge.

Serious question.. what's better/worse, someone with no college at all, or a college degree and a bad GPA, assuming everything else about these hypothetical candidates is equivalent?

What's the safer bet? "The devil you know" (the sub-average college grad) or "the devil you don't know" (the person with no college)?

This is starting to smell a bit cargo cult.