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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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