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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.