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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

What you do get at the top schools are students who excel at being good/great "students" (ie excelling within a predefined system). Some companies probably want that sort of quality, and are okay with having a large number of false negatives with respect to technical talent.

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I am firmly of the opinion that getting a high GPA in a degree program is a strong indicator of determination, focus and work ethic -- qualities that are essential to "technical talent", that people who complain the loudest about formal education often lack. Setting a high bar for academic achievement enriches your applicant pool more than most other signals.

So while I think that credentialism is bad when taken to an extreme, I do think that credentials still have value.

Actually Google found that GPA is a weak indication of how a person performs. Apparently, according to Google, the GPA is only weakly correlated with job success in the first year or two.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...

I didn't say that I believe in GPA as a stack-ranking score. I just believe it has value when you're comparing someone who barely graduated with someone who graduated with honors. Even Google uses GPA for new grads (so says the article), probably for similar reasons.

Also, as long as we're being pedantic: "success at Google" is not clearly related to "success in a small company", or even "success in the world". We don't even know what they mean by "success".

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