One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event and was too proud to admit to my parents I should probably just withdraw. This dropped my gpa from a 3.3 down to a 2.6. Two years later when I graduated my GPA was still below a 3. I remember I was sitting at an interview with John Deere and they told me that someone with my academic failings probably wouldn’t do well at John Deere. Broad rejections from General Motors, ford, Boeing, many others. But Microsoft and Google did not seem to care at all. I was told I got a solid yes from all my Microsoft interviewers and was actually able to negotiate a level bump up and a larger signing bonus. For me it showed that Microsoft/google are thinking holistically in their HR decisions, and only use GPA as a signal. I hope my success at Microsoft since then is an indication that they made the right call.
It's not just the big companies. I've not heard of anyone rejected from a dev / it job for grades. I'm sure it does happen, especially in highly competitive, exam driven Asian countries. But otherwise? Not a single company even asked me about my grades in the first place. If you're doing a practical interview, they're not relevant.
And if I happen to somehow live in a bubble because I've not heard of those - in that case, keep in mind there's enough positions/companies to create that bubble.
I took my GPA off my resume as soon as I graduated, since it lost me so many interviews prior to that. I literally had recruiters at job fairs (which had not listed a minimum GPA in the requirements) hand me my resume back and say I should save this copy for a company that will call me back.
About a month after I graduated, I interviewed with a company (white board and actual coding); it went well, we were talking when I could start and salary range. Then someone from HR showed up with forms to fill out:
"Are you from industry or straight out of school?"
"School"
"Okay we'll need your GPA"
As soon as I told them my GPA, the interview tone changed and I never heard from them again.
At the company I did get hired at, they said they normally ask for GPA and it was an oversight in my case. They would not have flown me out for an interview had they known what it was.
Also, while on this topic the recruiters at CAT are incredibly rude about this; I didn't even go to their table at the job fair since they did list a 3.5 minimum GPA. However, I overheard them yelling at someone with a 3.4 GPA for wasting everybody's time for daring to show up with something below the minimum requirements (as if other companies don't use the "minimum requirements" as a "wish list" field).
Sure, that's why I mentioned dev/it companies specifically. Those old school companies are automotive/aviation engineering with dev/it related departments, which is not the same.
It’s a good distinction and I haven’t noticed dev/it companies caring about GPA. I went to school at Penn State where the engineering career fair was dominated by old school companies which cared a lot about GPA.
Investment Banks, Management Consulting, Big Law, not so much either...granted, a Harvard grad with 3.5 will get more slack than a kid from Random State School with similar grades and major.
But still, many of the companies mentioned above still just look at the GPA - not so much at the actual content. Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!) because in the end - recruiters don't care whether you took Introduction to Theater, or Math 55 at Harvard.
So yes, at least big tech - even though the technical interviews can be tough - are indeed making the opportunities more accessible. You're not getting blanket rejections based on your freshman grades.
> Career coaches for places like that will advise college students to focus on maximizing grades, at the cost of intellectually demanding classes (or anything, really!)
At MIT, some undergrads could get hired as research assistants for professor's projects (usually working under the direction of one of the professor's grad students). But MIT undergrads can have punishing courseloads, and it wasn't unusual for students to get overwhelmed with classes, and ghost the research side job. I'd hear grad students say that it seemed silly for one of their undergrad assistants to trade a recommendation from a well-connected professor, for only a slightly better GPA. But, in hindsight, I suppose that the undergrads knew what they were doing.
The most bizarre part about the John Deere interview is after all those derogatory remarks, they emailed me a week later asking me to fly to headquarters for another round of interviews. Despite having no offers, I turned down the interview. Was pretty upset about the way the interviewer had treated me.
I would have asked why that was. Do they lock employees in a room alone, and force them to solve problems without help or any outside interest? If not, then GPA is not relevant. If so, I will be shorting your stock.
> I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event
Sadly, that's exactly what the universities here (not US) seem to measure: your ability to cope with an unmanageable mess called life. They overload you with schoolwork and those who are either gifted enough or able to cope with it will graduate.
A "life event" sounds something like a death or major illness of a loved one, an unexpected loss of financial support, a health problem, car accident, or some other third-party issue external to one's schoolwork. Penalizing these people doesn't filter for those who can cope; it sorts for those whose "life events" happen to occur after they graduate.
It all makes more sense if you stop looking at it as a "system" and just look at how it empirically works. Nobody is optimizing for anything, not even their own self-interest. We're just doing what we're doing because that's what we do.
Generally yes. I've been interviewing people in tech for about half a decade, and it never occurred to me to ask about their grades. It is irrelevant compared to testing how well the applicants know what they need to know for work.
Besides, partially thanks to grade inflation and partially due to arbitrary syllabi, universities grade students very unreliably. I can imagine a scenario where a recruiter or an interviewer would bother to work out what grades mean in one or two local universities if they recruit most of their employees from there. But in large tech companies that recruit regionally or globally, there is simply no way I, as an interviewer, will spend the time investigating how some professor in a college or university I have never heard about tends to grade their students and on what subject matter. Just think about how ridiculous that sounds.
The universities do not prepare people for work in tech anyways. There are tremendous practical knowledge gaps fresh graduates have compared to anyone who has been in tech for barely a year. A dropout candidate genuinely interested in the practicalities of work in their tech segment will easily outperform a 4.0 GPA BSc graduate who fails to engage with the subject matter.
More and more candidates are skipping BSc degrees and instead spending time building their portfolios targeting specific companies (using the appropriate frameworks, programming languages, and tools). They tend to be good hires and often want to prove themselves more than university grads. This works out for the team (the employee shows more engagement with work and more effort) and the employee (higher work satisfaction).
I am not saying that a university degree or your GPA is meaningless. I am sure some companies care about the latter, and many still care about the former. But compared to actual know-how, just undergrad degrees and 4.0 GPAs do not stand a chance.
That is not true at either Meta or Google. Final hiring decisions are made by either hiring managers directly or by a committee of senior engineers/managers if the interviewee is not placing directly into a team.
HR is there to make sure you’re not making biased decisions against protected classes or to flag if the candidate said something inappropriate in an interview or something, but they have no say in evaluating the candidate’s ability to actually perform the job. That evaluation is based almost entirely on the interview feedback; once a candidate is in the interview loop, grades make very little difference.
One of the most skilled and talented guys I ever worked with was hired without a degree, while he was still a teenager. This was at a big tech company.
He'd been hacking on various projects for years in his free time and had an exceptionally well written blog that detailed these. And he blasted through our interview loop like a guy with decades of experience. I feel he was one of these rare genius types that any hiring manager would be crazy to reject.
In a similar vein, I had good grades, but from a non-cs background (I studied engineering physics). A lot of recruiters were turned off immediately when they heard "physics" and not pure CS or ECE. Google was interested, though.
