Hasn't affected me in the slightest. To be fair, I also had multiple top tier internships through college and led a bunch of events on campus. I disregarded GPA entirely while in school and focused on what I felt was impactful and important (internships, community, etc). It doesn’t mean I slacked off in school though - I definitely learned the same material and put a lot of effort into doing so. I just took the tests and assessments less seriously and applied the 80/20 rule aggressively.
Today I have a fantastic career at a Unicorn startup while multiple top tier companies contact me every quarter trying to poach me away. My parents were initially very skeptical and were pushing me to finish school but now that they’ve seen the results, they don’t care anymore either.
The real lesson here is that GPA matters initially because companies have nothing else to frame your experience with. If you give them something else, then you’ll find that they’re more than willing to overlook GPA. If you don’t give them something to anchor your skill on AND your GPA is bad, it will be rough finding a job initially. Once you’ve had quality experience under your belt, GPA should cease to become a factor.
My country had a good dose of grade inflation, so no matter how good the university was, the number itself meant that I didn't get pass the grade filter most organizations had.
Interestingly, bosses with ivy league level credentials would recognize the university and offer me jobs. So I got into a good starting job, rather than working for some corpotation like IBM or Sony like my friends.
That starting job gave me a lot of room to learn and it was a small enough company that I managed to get to know the company's clients well.
But if I had a strong GPA, it's possible I could be VP of some moderate sized tech company by 30 instead of being a top rate consultant.
It comes up quite often in interviews and I think it gives me a strong foundation to get roles that I might not be as qualified for as someone else who doesn’t have the academic qualifications. I believe the reason for this is that the academic qualifications demonstrate that I can adapt to a wide range of disciplines whilst also being able to understand those disciplines on a deep level.
I had a 3.2 in Computer Science which was just enough to let other things shine when I was getting out of undergrad in a lukewarm economy. Later it was enough to not hinder my getting into a name brand grad school, which was a big benefit. (Signaling and networking more than anything else) I was never asked about GPA outside those cases.
I suspect if I got a 2.0 I may not have learned enough along the way.
A point or two makes no difference whatsoever; and especially if you're going into a field other than what you directly studied, it's at best a weak signal that suggests (in the absence of work history) that either you have a good work ethic or you're good at determining minimum viable output.
It's also a weak signal because the factors like whether one had to work to pay for college introduce a lot of noise.
After that first job I never even listed it.
Blog, Github and highlight your small projects. That is worth more than a high gpa.
I don't hire 4.0 students because I like to have a good social atmosphere.
That seems both judgemental and poorly considered as a hiring heuristic.
I could flip this on you to make an equally invalid assessment of people: I don’t hire people who have a lot of GitHub projects because it means they have no social life.
That doesn’t seem very fair, does it?
I topped my class and got the job I wanted.. however looking back, I could see issues with this - I was good at memorizing stuff and motivated enough to get good grades even for subjects I didn't like.. there's just too many subjects and students that the college life was mostly about mugging up and not oriented towards practical aspects of engineering.. even implementing open-book tests would help to improve our way of thinking..
and during my time, most students got placed in IT despite studying ECE/EEE/Mech/etc
Everyone else, zippo.
I can tell you however when we see candidates that list their GPA it's kind of a turn off. Even coming out of school you should have some more interesting stuff to put on there.
Got a job with Deloitte in consulting.
Now an incoming PhD student.
GPA means nothing if you have an ounce of personal skills.
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