Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

AFAIC, the way to do it is to go to a school that lets you get at least one internship/co-op under your belt, then use that to never tell anybody your GPA (if it is shit anyway, no harm telling people your GPA if it is good). Works best if you can get the people you interned with to make an offer to hire you straight out of school. After that first job I don't see GPA mattering much one way or the other, your last employer should carry far more weight.

My entire school career I never broke a 3.0 (for general courses) for more than a year, but everything has turned out pretty swell for me. I mean, I did get lucky getting accepted to the college that I did with my high-school GPA, but after that it was fairly merit-based I like to think.

Looking back, I don't have regrets. I didn't give myself a heart attack or turn myself into a nervous wreck but I still learned what I wanted from school and enjoyed the process.

Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/03/27/i-interviewed-at-goo...

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-t...

That's why the recent announcement that they've found zero correlation between GPA and job success was such a big deal: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

FYI: In 2007 was hired as a new-grad software engineer at Google with a college GPA of 2.66

So Google didn't have any minimum GPA requirement. I certainly was asked about the low GPA during my interviews, but it clearly didn't stop them from hiring me.

Out of curiosity, how did you explain the low GPA?

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Google made the headlines of a fairly popular article (I think it was featured recently) with dropping that after empirically convincing themselves it was useless.

Also, take the advice of someone who's seen that crap work: never work for any company where HR can have the decisive call in hiring someone or not -- or any serious call in the hiring process of anyone who won't work in HR, for that matter.

Their data is restricted to a set of people that all got a minimum GPA of 3.5. There could still be a correlation if the range of GPAs were greater.

Doesn't that mean "zero correlation between job success and GPA above Google's minimum requirement" ?

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Guess I have a reason not to work for Google after all.

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Google asked me for my grades when I was fresh out of school; after that, they never have.

>>after that, they never have.

How many times did you quit and rejoin Google?

They asked for mine, rather early in the interview process I might add, in 2008 or so. I politely declined.

If I might ask, how did you go about declining, and what was their response?

Hard to say, I ended up finding funding for a project while I was in the process with them. We never really finished.

Would they expect your grades to change?

A good point; I never joined Google the first time around. I simply assumed that that data would have been discarded. It is quite possible, they have all that data in their system every time they call me for interviews or whatever.

> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.

Ah, well yes. Any sort of grad/medical school is absolutely going to require you to to pay close attention to your GPA. I don't think most students are looking to go that route though; I certainly wasn't.

I wouldn't call missing those things "the end of the world" unless you are really dead set on that route.

Most undergrads have no idea where they will end up in life. I certainly could not have predicted the graduate programs I considered - none of them having anything to do with my EECS major.

Getting poor (or even average) grades closes many doors, especially in these days of grade inflation (at many, but not all schools).

Fair point. I had a plan and thought I roughly knew the requirements. I can see how students who are more exploratory would need to be more careful.

This isn't necessarily true. I had a 2.9ish GPA as an undergrad history major but I still got into a respectable engineering masters program (NC State) based on career merits. Granted, that was 10 years after I entered the workforce as a technical professional, but even so, there are many ways to reach any given end state, via hard work, excellent communication skills, and [hopefully] a strong network.

With excellent communication skills, and hard work, AND a strong network, you could get very far anyway.

Matter of fact those are 3 skills that are always in demand because anyone who possesses them can avoid truly coming to grips with the question in this thread: The necessity of good grades in determining your career.

I don't think you can bundle medical sciences and something like math/physics/engineering. To be a good doctor you need a good amount of analytical skills and intuition built on experience. But the most important of all is really, you need to have a lot of memory storing capacity.

Bulk of medicine is how much you can remember. There is nothing like, let me work this out on a paper or fire up a REPL, in fact in their case- Something like putting a patient on pause while you refer a book is totally unacceptable. So remembering stuff all around.

I realized this pretty early and decided not to be a doctor. I just can't imagine my self memorizing things at such detail.

I was only responding to the "GPA matters for nobody after a few years" comment, by demonstrating that for a select subset of university students (pre-med) it's simply not true.

While true for the aggregate, there are always exceptions. I know someone who had a GPA <= 2.3 from a mediocre state school that went to medical school in the Caribbean.

The person did so well on Step 2 that s/he was invited to transfer back to the US at a fist tier medical school, and is now the director of cardiology at a prestigious hospital.

It applies if you want to switch schools. We used to call it "failing in".

For federal engineering / IT / Software jobs, they often specify that you have to have a 3.0 or higher in the credits relevant to your field. They probably hire people with low GPAs that meet their other requirements, but that's what they advertise.

Also, it used to be repeated quite often that most of the bigger tech companies (IBM, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc) were extremely difficult to get into if you didn't have a 3.7+ from a well known school. I don't know how true this was, but when I first started school, I was worried that if I didn't perform well enough, that it could potentially affect my chances of finding interesting work.

I personally don't give a shit about someone's GPA. When I was going through my technical training in the military, we had people who barely passed the written exams, who would then proceed to complete the practical exercises faster and more accurately than anyone else. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.

Hmm, I didn't go the federal/contractor route, I went the "bigger tech company" route but I suppose I may have bypassed the GPA bar by getting hired fulltime while an intern. Had I not done that, my plan was to start with smaller startups.

shrug, maybe I was luckier than I give myself credit for.

A high GPA from a well known school will definitely help someone right out of college get a job if they don't have any other qualifications, but it's not a strict requirement.

> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

No but they care about the job you had before that job, which happens to depend on GPA and so on.

Not saying it is right, just it is not as simple.

Its much more common outside of engineering. In legal services, and I believe management consulting, its a major factor 5-7 years into your career. Heck, every legal employer still asks for my undergraduate transcripts, and I'm six years and three jobs and grad school distanced from those!

A woman I know of, in her early 50s, with an MBA, was asked about her undergraduate GPA, and if I recall correctly her SATs when applying for a job a couple of years ago. This made me wonder about the common sense of the employer; her too, maybe, for she is not working for them.

Stealth ageism. There's a local printing company near where I live famous for being the only large employer in the area demanding high school transcripts LOL. Legal or not, its a signal of old people need not apply.

I'm old enough, and grade inflation has been going on long enough, that my "pretty good" HS GPA at the time makes me look like I merely showed up for attendance compared to the recent grads. Now if they wanted a percentile instead of a GPA, then I'd have an excellent chance. But they very intentionally want a younger workforce by whatever borderline legal method necessary, so they ask for GPA...

I've been asked about GPA after my first job. Only once thus far though.

Sometimes.

I graduated with a 2.8 and an Art degree from a state school (albeit a good one). I thought most of my assignments were bullshit and didn't do some of them - who wants to design another fucking brochure for a fake client. I spent my senior year learning how to program and launching an app (Red Cup on the App Store for those interested).

Not doing the schoolwork and instead focusing on actual career development got me a job when I graduated. I've never put my GPA on my résumé, and I never will. It doesn't matter for the things I want to do in life.

so basically you have confirmation that the degree was useless (in the sense that you didn't use the stuff learnt ibn the degree in your professinoal life). Therefore, your GPA in that degree is meaningless.

Imagine you didn't do this, but instead got a job that did utilise the degree…would your gpa matter then?

You act like I don't use my Art degree. Not only did I program my apps, I designed them too. I think a lot of the work was useless and antiquated, and didn't prepare any of my classmates and I for a life in the age where software is everywhere. I noticed that every one of them would have the same degree as I, and with a better GPA, so I learned a new skill as well.

I use Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop just as much as I use Xcode in my professional life - and that's quite a bit.

Huh? I have never known someone whose employer demanded to see a transcript. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't believe it is as common as you seem to imply. Graduate schools want transcripts, yes, but they are generally more concerned with GRE scores than GPAs.

Google asked for a transcript when I interviewed (late 2008, about 3 years out of school). I told them I could get them one, but it would take 2 weeks and my other offer was getting antsy. That was the last I heard of it. My offer letter arrived about a week later.

Very often, things that are hard & fast requirements aren't actually. According to the media, Google was in a hiring freeze when I was hired and wasn't hiring anyone. According to the blogosphere, they only hire people with 3.7+ GPAs, yet I had a 3.0.

Never wrote my GPA and got a job offer from 2 top tier tech companies. One asked before issuing the offer. Software programmers have it easy because at age 20 half our CV is experience, while an industrial engineer is lucky if they set foot on a factory floor.

I totally agree with this. I recently had a job interview at a great company (I have a friend who works there so I know all the details) and was interviewed by three engineers who loved me. I got an email from someone in HR saying the engineers thought I would be a great fit and they wanted to hire me as long as I had at least a 3.0 GPA. Turns out I was about 0.1 point short and that killed my chance to work there. GPA plays too big of a role in most HR departments.

The solution to this is standardized Z-scores for every subject, so everyone is on a normal distribution and it's the same no matter which major you take.

And that doesn't even consider pre-university studies, where having less than an A/B average certainly does make you unattractive to all decent universities!

Our entire educational system is geared around "Produce excellence or die trying, there is no place for mediocrity." Predictably, this causes students to look for ways to easy apparent excellence.

The fact that actual excellence comes from a philosophy that's more like "Do the impossible, see the invisible" than "successfully regurgitate 100% of what you were told" doesn't even show up in the educational system until the grad-school level.