1. had a health crisis
2. the grades started out poor, but steadily rose and was getting A's by senior year
3. took the toughest classes in the school, not the easy A's
4. had a full time job to pay the tuition
Some not so good answers:
1. whatever, dunno
2. trust me, I'm good
I wouldn't want to invest in someone who would pay about as much attention to their work as they did to their grades.
After all, if it was your money, would you?
I myself have had negative experiences with the Google recruiting and offer process. I have friends and know people who have had Google recruiting horror stories. Everything from recruiters being over 30 mins late for final interview rounds (which throws off everything), to people being promised one office location but actually be given another after they sign, to the pressure "interns" with non-guaranteed host-matching offers go through. That host-matching system in which students might get a Google internship offer "but not really, cause we'll see if there's a team for you" is honestly not only demeaning, but outright cruel to college students who have to turn down other offers and add that huge weight into the already excruciating stress of school.
Overall I got the sense that Google simply knows it has the leverage and the desirability-- which is true for a lot of SV companies-- but they actually leverage that in their favour by playing the candidate in the way that best suits their needs.
I honestly hope any Google employees reading this raise the issue internally. Once you're out of college it's easy to forget, but stuff like this is very stressing and a huge downer for college kids. And it can be better-- I honestly haven't heard of a company that has so many "recruiting errors" as Google.
When you're interviewing candidates, you can never be sure. You're always playing the odds, and hiring a bad candidate can be very expensive.
I won't claim that a high GPA guarantees a good hire, it certainly does not. But it improves the odds.
If by FSAE you mean the Formula SAE racing competition, some engineers have excellent intuitive feelings about machines that is independent of academics. But other kinds of ME require the math to get the job done, and for those you need an ME that can do the math.
More than anything I would think the GPA would be a filter at the beginning of the interview process, not the end of it.
I would hire based off metrics related to depth of knowledge in the field, experience, and creativity.
Consider that the benefits package is usually worth something like 40% of salary. So for a $150K salary, you've got $210K invested in the person, plus whatever it costs to provide office space, support, etc.
If he doesn't work out, you've lost a big chunk of change. Worse, you've lost the time and what a better hire might have produced.
It's an investment any way you look at it.
Sometimes people get carried in the college atmosphere and study enough to pass. Still, I doubt they'd hold geography or painting against you. Maybe Google has an unwritten gpa minimum, unless the candidate is a genius.
"Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found."
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013...
> The recruiting started off as informal, but it ultimately became very, very structured. We were famously focused on the school you went to and your GPA and not your experience.
[1] https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/eric-schmidt-tyl...
FWIW, an anecdote from my experience: Of all the companies I’ve ever applied to, Google is the only one that required unofficial course transcripts and GPA.
P.S. Starting a comment with “Ummm?” doesn’t really add much value to the discussion.
Lots of classes were curved to a B or B-. With a setup like that, it's not possible for everyone to have 3.5+ GPAs...
I don't know anywhere this is considered "ok". At my school my GPA was considered just "Ok" at 3.9+.
A verbal agreement from an honest businessperson can be as good as gold. And when someone reneges on a verbal agreement it's generally a clue that they wouldn't be great to work with.
But this is surprising from Google. Most likely a one-off mistake
I agree with you there, but I would never trust my ability to judge whether a businessperson is honest enough to take that leap of faith. Also, Google is notorious for making unforced errors in their hiring process.
https://www.tonybeshara.com/tips/accepting-an-offer-new-empl...
The coding challenges and whiteboard interviews are ridiculous enough as is. It makes me sad to see such a lack of courtesy, though. If the GPA was going to be the barrier they should have just rejected the candidate outright from the beginning and not wasted their time.
The roles I hire for aren't typically cutting edge research etc, there much more mundane development, integration, operations and so on - highly academic people might not truly understand the role, and I want to make sure there's a good fit in terms of expectations.
What I'm getting at is, don't let a list of, or absence of, qualifications bother you - instead match people as best you can to the roles you have. Sometimes, you're going to mess up. It happens. I know I've lost good candidates because I didn't think they would be a fit and it turned out - they were.
>[I] was asked to write a statement justifying my lower than usual gpa (2.6) and a week later i was informed that the offer committee was unable to give me an offer.
What if it wasn't the gpa that turned them off, but the statement he wrote? I'm imagining something along the lines of "Well my GPA was bad because my professors weren't very good and I also partied too hard, but I've come to know better now.". It sounds like they really wanted to give him a chance, but he blew that statement.
> "I have rarely gotten Cs actually for some reason, especially not my major classes. Either way, i don't see how this disqualifies me from the job as it was not in the job description to have a high GPA, and I passed my interviews reasonably well."
Of course it's possible that the OP isn't telling the complete truth, but he's been a regular poster in that sub throughout the process so I doubt he's making much up. Also, if it really is based on your explanation that's just encouraging dishonesty and is a shitty hiring metric. If you're going to hire on something as arbitrary as GPA then the reason behind the number shouldn't be a factor. "We're sorry, we only accept candidates with low GPA if both parents died, but as only one of yours did during your undergrad we can't move on with your app."
The statement (or just asking for it) gives the company a written proof to explain why this candidate is being rejected and allows them to defend their decision in a potential discrimination lawsuit.
> Repost from yesterday's daily chat thread.
> Hi guys, kinda a big issue rnow.
> Got matched with a host for SWE Internship with Big G this summer. Had the match interview and it was a match, recruiter told me last monday that i should receive my offer within 2 days.
> Didn't hear anything until yesterday, when she emailed me asking me to write a statement justifying my lower than usual GPA. (2.6)
> I am pretty nervous about this. I turned down two jobs this summer because I thought I had already been matched. I can't find much online abotu this situation. What happens now?
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a13waz/b...
This isn't for a job, this is for an internship. These are different things and internships are clearly scholastically linked.
1. Candidate interviews and gets to the final rung of the ladder.
2. Name of candidate gets input into Google's "Final Rung" algorithm.
3. The "Final Rung" algorithm cross checks the candidate's name against all of that candidate's data from the Googleverse.
4. What the algorithm checks for is a black box to the hiring team. Only "1" or "0" is output.
5. Google then either accepts the candidate or goes back through the application looking for "clues" for why the algo output a "0".
What is the argument for Google not doing what I just described above?
Main difference in my case is no verbal offer. My recruiter made it clear that the team wanted to hire me, but that I had to be approved by "final hiring committee" as the last step.
For this Reddit poster, it seems like the recruiter really messed up / broke protocol by making a verbal offer. (That, or the protocol has changed; my experience was 7 years ago).
In general, no one that I interacted with is someone who I would have wanted to work with.
Recruiter should not have given verbal offer before there was actually a contract sent though, that is a really bad look.
Don't be evil is definitely dead and buried at google
This was about 15 years ago, and I had joined a startup while I was in college. I had started off with a 3.7 GPA my first 2 years, but eventually work became more important to me than school, so I did everything I could to just get a diploma as quickly as I could. I took a bunch of classes pass/fail, got my advisor to help push forward credit for "independent studies," and eked by with some Cs. (I graduated a 4 year program in 3 years.)
Despite the GPA slip, the Ivy League school I went to was quite happy with my story and sent a reporter out to interview me for the graduation edition of the paper calling me "one of their best and brightest" -- I was grouped in with about 10 other students in a class of 4k+. They cited the fact that I paid my own way through school by working for a startup as something they felt was impressive.
Fast forward a year. We sold the company, and I applied for a job at Google. Did a few rounds, they went well, and people liked my story about working while in school. I got flown out for interviews, they well -- got through the questions about how many ping-pong balls would fit in an oil tanker, how to divide loot on a pirate ship, and how many times a day do clock hands overlap... And I got a verbal offer! The job was a little entry-level for me, but I was pretty happy. I told the other places I was applying to that I was going to Google.
Then I got a random call from someone who said, "Hey can you send us your official transcript?" Since they had my unofficial transcript, and I had already gotten the verbal offer, I didn't see what the harm was... figured it was just a formality -- mostly because they said it was just a formality and not to worry about it.
Anyway a week later I get an email, "We're sorry but we are passing on you... blah blah." I called the guy who gave me the verbal offer... and was told, "We can't hire anyone who has a sub-3.0 GPA." I had a 2.9 GPA.
So 15 years+ later, I'm still a bit bitter about that. Look, companies can hire whomever they want, but as I get older I see very clearly that GPA is just a conformity metric. It doesn't tell you how smart someone is, or how talented or driven they are. A high GPA just tells you that someone knows how to submit to authority, and put academics ahead of networking. (And a good school typically just means a kid had wealthy parents.)
I think I'm doing OK without Google, but yeah... sucks that in a place that prides itself on being amazingly intelligent that they still have red-tape around what metrics can be used to define intelligence. Bezos said it well, paraphrased: smart minds are flexible minds. Shame Google is still being rigid on this sort of methodology.
* There's one clear sign Jeff Bezos looks for to gauge how smart people are | Business Insider || https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-sign-of-intell...
