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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

> Grades aren't a super important determining factor

i would disagree with this. they are THE determining factor in 9 out of 10 things you want to do post-college, and grades follow you for LIFE.

the reason i started a company is because i didn't have the grades to do anything else except be a bottom-rung coder (not even at a "good" company), which I did for a few years after school. i graduated a very good UC with a 2.01 C average (i BARELY graduated, i was put on academic probation 3x, and took an entire quarter off at one point). i'm not kidding around when i say "i'm a terrible student" like some people do - i actually had D's and F's and plenty of W's on my transcript.

even with 5+ years of owning a successful business, if i were to apply to b-school or masters/phd program, they'd probably reject my ass. when was the last time you heard of a C student getting into a worthwhile grad school?

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I don't know what kind of companies you're interviewing with, but I assure you that my present employers, my previous employers, and the ones before that had no idea what my GPA was. While grades do follow you for a while, it's a gross overreaction to suggest that they follow you "for life" in a business setting.

i was just saying they follow you for life if you want to do anything that requires grades. the "other stuff" you do doesn't always make up for the fact that you got shitty marks.

I've found college grades to matter for only two things:

1. Your first professional job after graduation 2. Your grad school application

Nobody else cares.

i think my point is that your first job, and/or grad school studies, have extremely far-reaching effects on your life trajectory.

for example, if i had good grades, i'd probably have gone to work for a google-esque company, or gone to grad school, and i would NOT have started a tech business.

my life would have been completely different if i had good grades.

And #1 definitely isn't always true in my experience. I'd guess that smaller companies are less likely to care about grades.

GPA is maybe a useful indicator of work ethic, but there are so many factors it's hard to be sure of that.

I also found that your second professional job depends heavily on your first professional job, which in turn depends on your GPA.

I wouldn't discount the importance of your GPA.

Even big ones don't necessarily care. I worked for Sun Micro right out of grad school, and nobody ever asked to look at my transcript. I've heard intel did.

They matter a lot for grad school, though.

Huh? I'm telling you how top graduate schools consider applicants. They usually weight research and letters the highest, then grades, then GRE scores.

yeah, and i'm telling you how i was utterly unqualified for any of that, because of my grades.

As a counterexample, I had terrible grades and dropped out of university in my second semester. I've never once had anyone ask me about grades or about my schooling in a professional context, and I've worked at some pretty fantastic companies. I can't speak about grad school, as I know nothing about academia, but a significant proportion of the best technical professionals I've worked with didn't graduate university; I've even worked with a few that didn't graduate high school, but still work for top tech companies.

A referral from an employee who knows that you are competent and reliable is worth more in the hiring process than anything you could list on your CV.

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