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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

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stevebmark·

A nice story, and a unique situation from someone who obviously shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.

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Luck is a part of life. I guess the key takeaway here to focus on your craft and showcase your work.

I found this quote interesting and worth sharing:

> I remember that my manager specifically pointed out that he didn’t care about where I went to school or my GPA — he said something like “it only matters what you can do.”

Both which school you go to and your GPA try to be proxies for what you can do. They are probably even reasonably good proxies (for some jobs). But on the other hand too many people rely on them, so as a manager you can get great hires by finding brilliant people who are undervalued on those metrics, and thus not as strongly fought over on the market.

And of course at some point in your career nobody should be asking for your GPA or school anymore because by then there should be much better ways to communicate your ability.

I too got my first job in tech at Apple in 2012 without a CS degree or taking any LeetCodes.

I got discovered due to my frequent shitposting in the comments section of TechCrunch.

I don't offer any career advice.

Yeah, I'd bet that there was probably only a handful of people like this in the entire intern class. I wouldn't put all my effort or hold out for a case like this. Your time would be better spent doing LeetCode.

Well, the title is not "How to get a job at Apple without..." is it?

I dunno it’s actually not too atypical. My team is half graduates and half drop outs.

Yep.

I also personally managed to drop out of both high school and college.

I guess it serves as a reminder that anything is possible, however (extremely) unlikely.

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