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Comment by dripton | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful. If I were teaching the class, you'd get the A and I'd remember when it was time to write recommendations. But I remember some professors who might have failed a student for pulling something like that. Or even accused him of cheating, for "sneaking in an unapproved piece of rogue equipment." You need to pick your spots.

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Identifying professors that would fail someone for this is actually worth a failing grade.

(Though at the age when you are most likely to be a student at a university it probably would seem better to conform and get a good grade)

What aspect of identifying them would make it worth it? I can see some potential fringe benefits -- don't take future classes from that prof, etc. But it's hard to imagine that those fringe benefits would actually be worth the drop in GPA, which does matter.

What does GPA matter for? Except special circumstances, like scholarships or visas tied to GPA? I stopped 7th grade and truly dropped out at 10th, so I'm biased. I've just never heard of GPA actually mattering.

Many companies, including the one I work for, use college GPA as a filter. The theory is: you miss some good folks by filtering out people below 3.5, but you save a lot of effort on a group that has a much higher proportion of bad candidates. If there are enough good candidates above 3.5, this can be a worthwhile trade.

Of course, there are ways around this (become famous in the industry, work somewhere else first and do well there, etc.). But most resumes, especially of new grads or people who have only been in the industry for a couple of years, will be run through this filter.

Not caring about your GPA sounds like a great way to filter out companies that use bogus criteria as a way to filter prospective employees.

That's an option, but you're going to end up filtering out a lot of the best companies to work for if you go that route. I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well.

All depends on what you value. Personally, it seems like getting a high GPA isn't very difficult, so why not do well in school to keep your opportunities as open as possible? Doesn't seem worthwhile to do poorly for doing poorly's sake. That's just me though. Everyone has their own priorities.

YMMV but those are all terrible companies to work for.

Consider this they collectively employ ~ 100,000 people and have produced basically zero innovation in the last 3 years.

PS: Though they also have fairly wide side doors so many of their current employes have not gone thorough their screening process.

OK. But employee surveys consistently show that people working at these companies are highly satisfied. That doesn't mean you'd be satisfied there, but I don't see how you can say that they are not good companies to work for.

You have to consider what those surveys measure, i.e. people who WORK there, not people who HAVE worked there. Thing to remember about top-tier tech companies is that anyone who CAN get a job with them can also pretty easily get a job somewhere else. This means that people who are unsatisfied don't stay very long.

So would you say that comparatively low attrition combined with high self-reported satisfaction indicates that a company is a good place to work?

You imply that innovation is the only thing an employee would want to participate in. I wouldn't have a problem working on a great team making great high quality products that are not innovative.

If you're not the sort of person overly concerned about GPA, then Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter may not be companies you want to work for anyway.

> I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well.

Nah, even dropouts are welcome at Google. A high GPA is a point in your favour, but not the only thing that matters. (At least once you have some experience. I don't really know how we hire fresh graduates. But as far as I can tell we take everyone who has a pulse and can program.)

Weird. When I interviewed at MS, education never came up at all. Just lots of algorithms questions, from ~9am to 7 in the evening. I was about 24 at the time.

I wouldn't ditch GPA for no reason, but avoiding a bad professor and getting a good one seems far more valuable overall.

I'm assuming you sent in some kind of paperwork before walking up and interviewing - did that perhaps include a resume with a GPA on it?

Are you seriously putting your GPA on your resume?

Personally no, but I did when graduating college. I mostly found it ridiculous to pretend that if something didn't come up in the interview, it didn't come up in the hiring process at all, as though Microsoft practices the kind of open audition that my local bar ran last week.

No. I dropped out of school at 15.

When I was asked to send my resume to Google I fired up Emacs, wrote one page of previous positions and what I worked on there, and one page on what my interests are. Both professional and spare time interests. I spent about 15 minutes writing that resume, read through it once and then emailed it to Alan Eustace.

I don't remember if I even mentioned which university I had attended and whether or not I had finished a degree. Nor did I make a single mention of what programming languages I know or any of the tedious stuff people tend to use for bulking up their CV.

(I was told that Jeff Dean, who was one of my interviewers, said that he couldn't wait to meet someone who writes software, races cars, welds and has just finished a course in logging timber using an good old-fashioned chainsaw)

Rather than focus on artificial metrics like GPA you should focus on who you want to become. If you model yourself after the kinds of people who would flunk a student for pulling a prank that both demonstrates a sense of humor and great command of the subject matter, you will lose in the long run. In that way it is useful to identify such people so you can stay away from them, and more importantly, so you can warn your fellow students about them.

Who you look up to and learn from matters a lot.

If you want a life in academia, you need to conform and be obedient. At least until you have established yourself as sufficiently brilliant to be able to behave more rationally. Personally I don't really understand why one would want a career in academia, but hey, for some people merit badges and titles are really important and I'm not judging.

When you are young you think getting a degree and getting good grades matters more than it really does. It matters for those initial few years of your career, but once that phase is over it doesn't matter. And it matters more if you are unremarkable.

What really matters is the people you get to know at university. That's a really big deal because you will run into these people for decades to come. And you will meet people you can learn from, with whom you can collaborate etc.

As for companies like Google, Microsoft etc: there's myth and then there is reality. If you come in the front door, your alma mater and GPA will matter if you are a new graduate. If you spent your career worrying about becoming good at what you do and to collaborate with other people who are good at what they do, you won't be "coming in the front door".

I never finished a degree, but I did get a job at Google. And yahoo before that. And so on.

I got in the door because they knew I worked on things that were very relevant to them and that I probably wasn't a total fuckup. I still had to make it through the interviews though. And I did.

Of course, it should be mentioned that the hiring process at Google at the time put undue emphasis on GPA and what your alma mater was. I saw lots of people get rejected due to the university they went to or even really minor blips in their academic record. I found this disturbing. At the time Google had lots of data showing that certain metrics are not predictors of later performance. Among them GPA and alma mater. But they needed some way of cutting the sheer influx of applications down to a managable size.

If I had focused on getting a degree rather than work on interesting problems I doubt I would have gotten a job at Google. I would have been compared to a much, much larger population of unknowns and I doubt that I would have managed to stand out. Are you aware of how many people out there have good grades and good looking CVs? I do, because as an engineer at Google at the time I spent a lot of my time reading applications and interviewing candidates.

What is important is who you become. You want to find something you love to do and something you have a talent for, and then become good at that.

Not necessarily. obstinate just pointed out that a GPA filter might actually be a reasonable practice for legit companies that would be good to work for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Michael Dell, Bill Gates

Gates knew his family was rich enough that he could go back and finish his degree if the business didn't pan out. If you've got that financial cushion and you've got something better to do with your time then sure, drop out. But dropping the GPA "just because" is probably not your best option.

There's a big difference between being a college drop-out and being a high school drop-out.

The latter realized the futility of it sooner than the former.

Eh, a compsci degree would have helped me in some cases. I ended up studying algorithms and such by myself anyways. OTOH, I've interviewed people with degrees in cs and they couldn't even explain binary search, let alone implement it.

I dropped out cause my teachers were atrocious. My algebra teacher couldn't explain why absolute value was a function, just that it was and we must learn it, period. Another teacher said "computers just use binary". When I pointed out I often saw hex, instead of pointing out why base 16 is a good fit for writing binary numbers, she just stammered that computers were just binary. Still my fault for giving up, but I had enough reason at the time.

Wow, sounds like the typical heres-the-teaching-plan-dont-ask-me-why, NCBLA, spoon-fed idiocracy. Back in highschool, thankfully we had one honest guy that just let us do whatever the fuck we wanted (which was pretty awesome).

All of the borderline-useless hazing you might have missed at a "top 50" school (one of the UC's):

    - Java to MIPS asm compiler in both Java and C++
    - Reimplement the major parts of OpenGL pipeline in C++
    - Hack on MINIX 2.x kernel, reimplement some *NIX tools
    - Gates up superscalar, pipelined, branch-predicting, microcoded integer CPU in VHDL and its own microcode language
    - Caching HTTP/1.0 proxy server
    - Interface various hardware to PICs, FPGAs and PALs
    - Problem sets upon problem sets, ad infinitum
    - Coed dorms where the doors are always open, but you won't have time for more than just hooking up
    - Sleepless all-nighters (2-5 per week) and all the junk food your meal plan can afford (because you won't have time to cook)

Worse. My parents had a rather religious phase and sent me to a religious school. Science teacher literally said "carbon-14 dating is a lie from scientists that hate god". If I'd have read The Selfish Gene, or even A Brief History of Time as a kid, it'd have saved me a lot of time.

Those things you list seem relatively good, no? Making a microprocessor from gates while " just hooking up " sounds pretty near idyllic.

Could you expand about absolute value? Is seems reasonable to me to think of it as a function.

Maybe pedagogy recapitulates history of mathematics. "What is a function?" is kind of a wrong question, because "function" is just a word (what is it you need a "function" for?), but in a lot of early mathematics the idea tended to describe a sort of physical intuition, that a function was something like the shape that something physical (like a string under tension) - remember that in the early days mathematics was more a branch of physics than a discipline in its own right. In nature things tend to change smoothly - what we now call "analytic functions" - and you wouldn't ever have a sharp inflection point like there is for absolute value at zero.

A more modern notion of a function only really came about after the discovery of the fourier transform, where it turns out that functions like absolute value (and sillier things like the dirac delta) have a fourier transform, and, worse, some perfectly ordinary functions like sin have fourier transforms that come out as these weird things. Eventually (and, I suspect, partially because the tools of fourier analysis were so useful) people started treating "something that can be fourier transformed" almost as the definition of a function.

(The present set-theoretic definition of a function is even more recent; I would assume it comes from Russell/Hilbert/etc.'s efforts to give mathematics a formal foundation by expressing everything in terms of set theory)

Well it was introduced as "absolute value uses lines on each side. It means you drop the negative if there is one". I asked what the point of it was, cause it sounded sorta useless. Instead of saying "OK, well, how would you express distance, x1-x2?", she was just stuck.

I suppose that's what happens when you have general teachers that don't really know maths or science, don't really feel that it's interesting and offers amazing ways to look at the world. In fact, I'd be surprised if she actually knew beyond what she was teaching. It's not like middle grade teachers have to take advanced courses, and they do have a wide workload.

I'm familiar with this, but I don't get the relevance. Explain?

It only matters to people that enjoy taking tests and those that can't be bothered to understand what being successful at a job requires.

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