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0 pointsWalterBright7y ago0 comments

I'd miss out on some, sure. But I doubt a heck of a lot. In my experience the list of crackerjack engineers who drifted through college is rather short.

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.

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hn_throwaway_997y ago

> You're always playing the odds, and hiring a bad candidate can be very expensive.

Whenever I see one of these numerous HN articles about interviewing and hiring ("stupid whiteboard problems!", "stupid GPA snobbery!", "stupid brain teasers!") I feel that people really miss this point. With software I have definitely come to the position that I'd rather potentially miss out on a great dev than hire a sub-par one. In fact, the absolute worst hires to make IMO are mediocre-to-poor hires, as downright bad hires are relatively easy to fire, while mediocre hires (i.e. "well, he can usually do the work, it just takes twice as long") are much more difficult to get rid of and at the very least take a much longer, drawn-out process.

Thus, when I'm playing the probabiliy game for hiring, I fully understand I may miss out on some candidates that may be great but have big black marks on their resumes or interviews, but at the end of the day I'm going to look for qualities that are correlated with success.

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