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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Man, I wish I was working for them, but I haven't even graduated yet. It'd be really cool to be involved with this stuff.

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Keep your grades up. When I was in college NVidia had, emblazoned in bold text across their intern ads, that a minimum 80%+ was required for consideration.

Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for. It betrays a belief in bad/unreliable indicators/metrics.

It betrays a desire to avoid a large chunk of bad candidates while discarding only a few good ones.

Not everyone has the time to do well in college even if they have the ability. I worked 30-35 hours a week every week in college. I can guarantee that I would have gotten a 3.9 or 4.0 had I been able to not work, but I didn't have that luxury. Oh well, I got out with a 3.2 which seemed good to me.

I agree, but my point stands that most of the people getting bad grades probably deserve them despite the few who deserve better. Companies who want to make the best use of their limited hiring resources would be served by avoiding people with low GPAs.

Even with a 3.2, you probably beat most kids at an engineering school. Although I've heard of engineering schools where half the class has a 3.5, but at my school our top guy had a 3.8, nobody had a 3.9 or 4.0 no matter how hard they tried. I was in the top 20% with a 3.3

Which school, if you don't mind my asking?

If I were you, when applying for jobs, I would state you worked full time while in school. I'd definitely take a second look at a mid-GPA candidate who had an awesome work ethic like that.

Very good point. I was in much the same boat as the OP. There is a lot of respect out there for people who've worked their way through school.

Be careful not to emphasize it too much though, lest it seem like you're making excuses. Maybe the person considering you for a job did the same thing.

Also, not everyone has the luxury to go to college at all.

Not my experience in college at all. The bad hackers were the ones at the extreme ends of the scales - the borderline-failing ones were expectedly terrible, and the top-marks usually had some other major handicaps that made them remarkable people but terrible colleagues (extreme lack of team work ability, zero communication skills, tactlessness, gigantic egotism, etc etc).

The best hackers (rather, the ones you'd want to work with) tended to fall in the middle of the pack. Decent marks, not great. Didn't spend their days trying to ace the next exam and spent a lot of time hacking on cool projects instead.

My own experience in college is that marks in the middle of the pack made the best employees, and in fact nowadays an extremely high GPA is a yellow flag when I'm reviewing resumes (though obviously, not a disqualifier at all).

Keep in mind at this school 80%+ would put you in the top 10-15% of all marks. I'm not against filtering for low marks, but in this case NVidia set their sights on the top 10-15% of the student population and disqualified everyone else as a matter of course. IMHO a dumb move that unnecessarily turned away a lot of qualified people.

Just wanted to chime in and say I am having the same experience.

We're not really talking about hackers here though. To me a hacker is ripping through code getting it done. But that works better in the software world where it is relatively easy to make a mistake.

I don't work at Nvidia, but working in the hardware field things go a bit slower. You need people who pay attention to detail and follow the process to a T to avoid costly mistakes and rework. Thats why "people who could put up with the bullshit that it took to get into the top 15%" and "people who are intelligent enough to design chips at a high level and disciplined to follow the process to avoid blowing hundreds of thousands of a dollars per mistake" have more cross over than high GPA and good ruby on rails hacker. It is just a different mindset and a different set of economics to be building slow iterating hardware vs quick iterating software.

It's a good point - FWIW, the jobs I was looking at were strictly software positions, but it stands to reason that the corporate hiring culture would be based on the needs of hardware people.

Agree. Hardware design is a much slower and deliberate process. The EEs and CMEs I know who are the best at hardware really are completely different from the best software people I know. I don't think there's a great deal of overlap between the two groups.

I see hardware design as mostly the same as software. There really isn't much difference to it. You can have flashes of genius and figure out how to implement a solution in minutes, just like in software.

And just like for production software, you have to test your code to death to make sure there isn't any bug. For instance, we usually booted Linux on CPUs to make sure nothing would go wrong (and things would usually go wrong around cycle 1,000,000,000! Debug that)

I imagine at a high level software that is well tested an goes through QA is a lot like hardware (or other engineering in general). But my experience in software was at a startup where if it compiled an built, we all shouted SHIP IT immediately (and were only half joking). We had great hackers doing tough things quickly, but there were definitely times we cut corners on testing knowing we could just patch it later if need be.

So you don't have a problem correlating high marks with "lack of team work, communication skills, tactlessness, gigantic egotism, etc etc" yet you have a problem with NVidia correlating high marks with good devs?

The brightest kids I knew got 80% without trying. If you're bright enough to work at NVidia and can't get 80%, you're lazy. I'm sure they missed some talent but saved a ton of time not having to interview mediocre students.

A friend of a friend was asked to implement sqrt in hardware during a phone interview with nVidia. If you're smart enough to do that and you can't maintain the equivalent of a 2.7 GPA then that betrays a poor work ethic.

Or far more interesting questions abound than the ones in your "Communications 101" class. (Also, top 80%+ isn't the same thing as a 2.7 GPA - completely different systems.)

Do you mean top 20%? Because the top 80% is well, almost everyone. Or the 80th percentile would be the top 20%.

I'm not nitpicking, I just took the 80% to mean 2.7 as well.

He didn't say top 80%, he just said 80%, which I took to mean an average score of 80%.

Also, "this class isn't interesting so I'm going to badly in it and screw up my GPA" is a pretty immature and foolish attitude.

I think their interview's might be a little uneven. I was asked how to swap the values of two registers in hardware and I said something about muxes and lines. When the interviewer sounded skeptical I started expounding on different types of latches and their properties. In retrospect I think they wanted the xor trick, but that's really a firmware or software thing. Needless to say I didn't get the real interview.

Nah, it just means that they get a large number of applicants. If I had to WAG, it means they'd filter out about 50% of the good programmers and 90% of the bad ones.

I also believe that grades correspond better with ability in chip design then it does in programming. (I've actually done both. Chip design is fun, but I'm addicted to very short code-compile-test cycles.)

Also remember that most companies arent willing to spend nearly as much recruiting effort per candidate for interns, and understandably so. I interned at NVIDIA a few summers back (although in software not hardware) and the university recruiter said that they more or less don't consider applicants with less than 3.5GPAs for internships. At my school, probably 80% of the people I knew and considered to be "good" programmers had above that, so I think its a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

It likely just means that they prefer to have many false negatives (rejecting good employees) and reduce the number of false positives (accepting poor employees). If the size of their applicant pool is high, that's a trade-off they can afford to make.

Work on interesting projects, be active in the appropriate communities--that gets you noticed. Grades aren't everything.

That was my MO during college, and it seems to have worked pretty well for me ;)

Some companies though, will refuse to look at a resume, regardless of how richly experienced it may be, simply based on the fact that you failed to hit an arbitrary bar during college. To me this is lunacy.

That's exactly what I did, and I work at NVIDIA. What a company says at career fairs is not necessarily applicable to everyone.

In this case, perhaps this issue should be raised internally at NVidia. I for one didn't even bother applying, since having interned at companies that filtered strongly by grades, this was a major red flag.

Candidates with significant work experience - even ones still in college - are in high demand everywhere and have a lot of choices. Even a non-ninja-rockstar-guru like me had internship offers piling up outside the door. In this case it would benefit the company to not put things into job ads that don't actually matter.

No offense, but I'm going to be blunt:

If you were putting yourself through college, paying as you go, then as long as you managed a low "B" I'll probably cut you a break. You'll get a fair shot.

If you decide to skip college and throw yourself into work, I'm not going to hold it against you. That being my background, I generally see it as a plus.

If you went to college on someone else's dime, your parent's or the bank's, and have such a weak work ethic you couldn't be bothered to apply yourself then odds are you aren't going to bring anything special to the table at the work-place.

I'm sure there are a lot of cases where it's not fair, but there's few things that annoy me more than an inflated sense of entitlement, and for good reason. In my experience it's a great indicator of a poor performing employee. Generally with drama, generally thinking a lot of themselves despite negligible contributions to the business.

There's a disconnect here. You're falsely associating "average marks" with "didn't apply yourself", which simply isn't true, particularly in our field (I'm assuming you're in software).

I wasn't blessed with an unusually powerful intellect. I knew guys in college who would just get the course material after a couple of hours. For the rest of us earning marks meant many dozens of hours pounding a book, and at that point you run across the very real limitation of having 24 hours in a day.

The vast majority of college students have to make a very real tradeoff - marks vs. practical experience. For me, I chose not to invest dozens more hours to eke out 10% more on the exam, and instead chose to put it into hacking on relevant projects that taught me new technologies.

My marks were certainly not poor, they were perhaps 1 std. deviation above average. Decent, not great. Could they have been higher? Sure, but I'm no ubermensch, it would've meant a large sacrifice in another area.

If that's your image of a student not applying himself, then guilty as charged. I for one don't regret it for one second - after all, I hacked out a lot of stuff in those 4 and a half years (paid my way through schools by not having summers and staggering internships between semesters instead), and had a number of offered before graduating thanks to it. I'd hate to imagine my position if I'd just stuck to acing the school work and never hacking anything on my own.

Again, this goes back to my original point: companies that weigh marks heavily in recruitment are making a lot of fundamentally unreliable assumptions and rejecting candidates (before interviews, even) on what is IMHO a weak correlation to on-the-job performance. With the exception of a small minority of extremely smart people, someone with top marks had to sacrifice something major to get there, and in my experience that "something" is often something that gravely impacts employability.

Incidentally, I interned at nv and my cumulative average at the time of applying was somewhere in the high 60s. Don't believe everything it says on the box ;)

(I was a software intern, but the job I had applied to asked for 80% as well.)

> Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for.

I worked for NVIDIA in a key group on key projects, and I never even finished my university degree (though my grades were very good). To make a general and hopefully obvious statement, if you're hiring someone fresh out of school with a bachelor's degree but no real-world accomplishments, you have to judge them by some objective measure, and grades are part of that. If you're dealing with someone with real-world accomplishments, it's a completely different matter.

When interviewing people during my time there, I personally never so much as glanced at their GPAs. But then again our group generally only hired people who had (and would soon have) Ph.D. degrees or experienced hackers whose past work spoke for itself. I imagine if you're hiring for entry-level positions, you need a very different approach just for the first round of culling due to the sheer volume of applicants.

I used to work at NVIDIA as a hardware engineer and would go to nearby university career fairs to recruit new college grads. There's no absolute rule regarding GPA but generally 3.5 was the minimum cut off.

NVIDIA was also the only company I knew of that required candidates to take a written exam on the spot at the career fair. Scary stuff. The problem is there are too many applicants to look at so any kind of filter (administered fairly) is better than none at all.

I actually worked for ARM, but not on their main architecture. I worked for a satelite office acquired a few years earlier, which was spun out again last year. The project was a dynamically retargettable compiler for DSPs.

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