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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking and consulting.

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Expanding on your comment, to get into a good school and make the connections that would help you in the future, good grades are table stakes. And for certain minorities, good grades are assumed and you have to have achievements on top of that to stand out. Sure, there are many paths to success, but just like investing, where the ROI probabilities would be better if you put your money into an index fund as opposed to the state lottery, the ROI probabilities from developing a good work ethic and getting into a good school are better than alternatives. As a parent, you are using your knowledge and experience to make optimization decisions that the child might not be able to envision or foresee. Different children need different kinds of parenting techniques. I don't see how anyone can claim that either project-based parenting or tiger parenting is the be-all and end-all to raising a child.

You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter). After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.

Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school.

It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in very short supply relative to demand for over a decade now. Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc.

I just see this argument as very tone deaf because there are hundreds of millions of us regular people out there, and academic achievement is the most surefire way to get noticed and be given opportunities if you aren’t lucky enough to come from an important/influential family.

It’s not only about the grades themselves but how they pipeline the rest of your career and credentials. Rich people can shmooze and scheme to get some of those credentials and opportunities for their kids without the grades, but not us regular folk.

> but they still look at where I went to college (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to get because of where I worked at my first job), etc.

No one has ever asked me about my schooling and I haven't had a school on my resume in over 10 years. Do they look at it because you put it on your resume?

I am still early in my career. And many jobs I have applied for/am interested in unfortunately index on having gone to a good school. I’ll probably never work for one but I’m pretty interested in HFT and quant hedge funds, and have interviewed with them before, and am of the understanding that having a name brand college on your resume is a soft requirement.

"Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college.."

How do you know that? Do they mention it? I'm really curious on this one.

Other than the rare alum, I haven't had anyone comment on my undergrad more than a year or two out of it. Recent jobs and projects make up the vast majority of any conversation.

Biases work quietly. A recruiter that favors Ivy League grads does not comment on that to the candidates they contact, and obviously doesn't to the ones they don't.

To echo the sibling comment, it’s more for getting past screening than for anything involving interviews. Although it likely does add some implicit bias even for later interviewers/hiring managers who see my resume even if they don’t mention it.

I really wish I hadn’t bothered studying electrical engineering at a mid-tier school. There’s zero EE jobs available for that kind of graduate. You just can’t get recruiters to look at your application. Half of my graduating class is stuck doing self-taught DBA work for the local bank, telephone pole, or health insurance company. It’s so frustrating.

I agree with you 100%. Almost all of my EE group of friends weren’t able to find jobs right away! Even internships were limited. Almost everyone learned coding languages in demand around Silicon Valley and were able to find employment! 4 years of EE went to waste. Sad.

You are right: you can't get recruiters to look at such an application. This applies to CS as well, not just EE. They only look at the top 10 or so schools.

The trick is to get a job without a recruiter looking at your application. The only way they'll help you is to speed up the trip your resume takes to the bin. Your task is to bypass them.

However, once you get your first job in the Valley everything changes. Suddenly the very same recruiters will spam you with offers. They operate like web scrapers: ingest resumes from top 10 CS school grads OR employees of SV companies :)

So how does one get such a job? You'll probably have to take a chance on a small company that doesn't have a wall of recruiters yet and talk to the people who actually need to hire someone. Show them a project that will impress them.

PS: there are probably good recruiters out there, but the chances of meeting them are slim. Personally I'd go with the "bypass" heuristic for the first job.

The reason software is different is simply that it is a recently developed industry.

If you look back, all industries start this way. The most heavily-credentialed and tightly-regulated field you can think of today started off as a bunch of hustlers making it up as they went along.

It didn’t last for those other industries and it likely won’t last for software.

I am not sure, software is a bit like a trade, you actually build something only it is virtual and if you build it they will come, nobody can stop you from building things.

Medicine, Law or consulting are services, not actualy creating any actual new value. They build their moat by making the license very hard to obtain and making one's status and prestige the most important thing. You do need licenses to do certain trades but they are usually not that hard to obtain and the prestige of the institute giving them is less important.

It's curious that you are defending a system that evidently provides poor social mobility, because the person who is trying to de-emphasize it's significance is rich.

I agree, but there can be some exceptions. I got auto-rejected when applying for a law conversion course because of my A Level grades. I have a first class degree, a master’s degree with distinction and a phd.

You dodged a bullet there then at least :)

Yeah where you got your degree from still matters. And you get in to the best schools by getting good grades.

Yup I came here to say the same thing; I'd go further and say it's not just mega rich families but most of the middle class. You got options even with just a little disposable income (ie paying for clubs can unlock a career, for example).

For those from traditionally working class background, differentiating from your peers through grades is essential to unlocking funds that can take you where you want to be.

That's why through the pandemic school grades (in the UK at least) have been so sensitive; they deployed an algorithm last year which probably mostly got it right but also (because it was averages) didn't pluck out those from the poorest backgrounds who would have managed to differentiate themselves.

Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that.

Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters.

Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much less for creative and fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid I will never allow my children to play that game.

> will never allow my children to play that game

I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.

I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets.

Sounds like a weird tone?

Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that other people "beat homeless people in the streets", because their parents allowed them to do that?

Beating up people is immoral and illegal. Grinding for grades is neither. I don't really see the connection.

For most people the beaten path is how they get on the ladder towards building wealth. You can always hop off the well worn part of that ladder but you can’t easily get back on it once you’ve fallen off.

You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution are only important if you can get yourself into a position where you can use them. If you are a peon it’s quite hard to make a difference in the world even if you have those in spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might vary but going through the well worn path is tried and true.

Grades are an easy way to communicate your value. They stop mattering when you have alternative way to show your value (e.g. work experience).

Finding non traditional ways to demonstrate your value can be hard and is a skill that isn't really tought. If you're going to not care about grades you better be sure you know some alternative way to show your potential value.

Grades correlate with learning ability, executive function, and communication skills.

Good grades aren't the goal. Good grades are an indicator other people can use to gauge your preparedness for a job or opportunity.

Good grades are also an indicator of being able to optimize for grades. Being able to optimize a metric is a good thing, but the problems is that typical students spend 20 years learning to optimize that one and only metric. Therefore it's no surprise out-of-school students are often only good at optimizing similar metrics, and suck at the general creative + critical rational thinking that's required in life.

(I think I'm basically paraphrasing another PG article here, but this opinion mostly comes from my own experience working with both people from higher education and early drop-outs)

They are an imperfect indicator for sure but i fear we don't have anything better.

Is this not just an argument over terminology? I think most people realize that grades are just an approximate measure of learning ability. I doubt many parents would prefer that their kid cheated on every test to get straight A's rather B's from honest studying. When most parents tell their kids to get good grades, they mean "study hard and show me you learned", not "go get good grades by any means necessary".

If there was a better measure of learning, executing, communicating, and leading than "grades" at the pre-collegiate level, then I'm sure we would've found it by now and used that instead. For me to be convinced that grades don't matter, I'd have to see proof that there is no correlation between successful people and good grades at a population scale.

It is downright wonderful that you think “when most parents tell their kids to get good grades, they mean "study hard and show me you learned", not "go get good grades by any means necessary".”

That’s simply not true in many cases. There are tons of parents out there to whom the grade matters more than the learning. Those aren’t good parents, and mine weren’t like that (I would’ve been destroyed, frankly), but many of my friends’ were. I suspect the proportion is much higher than you’d suspect.

> Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families.

Not really, while its generally better to have a qualification than no qualification 48% of people with a degree are in a job that don't require it.

Qualifications don't matter if everyone has them, this is because employers care about the skills some one has not the lectures they sat through. Skills are difficult to develop lectures are easy to sit through. If every one has those qualifications supply/demand kills the need for those jobs.

If you sacrifice building up skills to chase grades you have a near 50/50 chance of ending up working behind a till with €50k in debt, not a good position to be in if you are not mega rich.

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