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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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