Hacker News Reader

Comment by _asummers | Hacker News Reader

The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alma mater, I don't exactly know how to evaluate it -- there's no "well this guy went to CMU or MIT, so I can assume a modicum of strengths". I wouldn't turn down a candidate for an interview because of their school (or lack thereof), but coming from top schools generally frames you in a different way, in my book. If anything, I tend to gauge the difficulty up slightly more quickly in my questions.

View on HN

If an applicant has less than a couple years experience, it's fair to expect/ask for GPA. If they have a lot of independent projects and a clear passion, I'll often excuse a low/missing GPA.

GPA is about as flawed as alma mater, but I think combined they give a useful signal.

In lieu of GPA I ask what kind of classes they took and what were their favorites. That list is a much better indicator, I think. It also lets you gauge what kinds of questions you can reasonably ask and the types of solutions that you can expect. If someone didn't have to study graph theory, they likely won't see a graph theoretic answer and you shouldn't as a question that leads heavily to that type of solution, and if someone studied a lot of combinatorics, you might see them bijecting your problem to other problems they've seen.

Oh yeah definitely, I meant just for the resume filtering stage.

But if they haven't studied graphs and are unable to give you rigorous answers, will you forgive them because they haven't taken the right classes?

It seems to me you should ask questions you expect the candidate to be able to give good answers for, period.

My philosophy is that you ask questions either a) to ensure someone knows material they say they do (if you claim you have a bunch of Java experience, you are expected to know how java.util.collections works or how the final operator works, as examples) or b) to see how someone thinks. The questions I ask sometimes truly do not have answers, but seeing the walls pop up and the candidate try to work around the walls tells me a lot about how they will approach problems in the workplace.

In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester for each, and then you're done. 50% of the student body does this. The hardest would be to double up on lab sciences (physics + chem, for example, or physics + neuroscience), which entails about 20 hours/week of classes, 30-40 hours/week spent on problem sets, 2 midterms and a final.

I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."

>"You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."

Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.

Parent poster is speaking from the perspective of a hiring manager trying to evaluate the candidate. From that perspective, the critical question is "Will this person perform well at my company if I hire them?" Gaming the college degree system and learning the domain-specific information needed to perform well at a job are very different skillsets. Assuming a small team with a focused mission, general work ethic and ability to quickly absorb information correlate well with the latter, but not the former. (In a big company where nobody knows what anybody else is doing, the correlation often goes the other way and ability to game the system correlates better with success, but usually those don't have individual hiring managers evaluating resumes.)

Grade inflation has really made these inferences even more difficult; for example, the median grade at Harvard is actually an A- (not the well-balanced distribution you hypothesized).

No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the Carol Joyce Oates interview.

It's possibly gone up since I was college-aged; this was from when I was living in Boston and hanging around a bunch of Harvard students in 06-07.

The grade inflation has been going on at Harvard for longer than that. Best not to rely on anecdata over data. Especially since the group of Harvard students you hung out with was likely far from a random sampling.

The median course grade at Harvard has been A- for over 20 years.

It's inflated, but then again, how much Harvard coursework mastery is actually necessary for your job?

In the state school I went to in the 90s, they were acolytes of the bell curve.

Mastery or not, if your score bumped you out of the curve, you were getting a B.

Friends in Ivy League schools would get As or incompletes.

The hardest part of an Ivy League degree is getting in. No guarantee of education.

By the same logic, you should never have been given the job you have today. Is the logic faulty or correct?

I disagree. What in my post said that I wouldn't have given myself a shot? I would have brought myself in for an interview and interviewee me would have to had proven myself to interviewer me, same as someone from an elite school or a dev bootcamp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com