Recently there has been a lot of talk about this idea of "quiet quitting." I thought I would throw my two cents in. One important question we should answer here is; what is the purpose of work?
Its a simple question and yet there's a lot of depth to it. Most people I interact with view work as merely a necessary evil; a means to make money. I feel that this perspective is wasteful and shortsighted. Wasteful because nearly 1/3 of a person's life is spent at work, if its only for the money then what a waste of time. Shortsighted because work provides an opportunity to change the world, to make things better. This is where I have a problem with quiet quitting; what's the objective? So you are going to only do your job and nothing more? Your employer probably won't know or care about you doing that. And you won't advance your career, you won't learn new skills or become better. You won't make a difference in the world. Here's what I propose: if you don't like your job or your pay; quit and find something you do like, a place where you can not only earn a living but also make a difference.
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People used to take one look at me and think, "that guy is a nerd, he must be a straight A student." They were half right; although I never really liked the term nerd. I struggled with my grades since the 7th grade. But my opinion of the GPA system changed drastically in 2011.
In 2011 I had the opportunity to go to a career fair. By this point I had already designed, built and programmed a lot of really cool projects. Including my first video game system called JConsole, as well as a number of multisensors and an RC car with a simple see and avoid algorithm. I had also developed my own large number datatype in C++. I documented each project carefully, placing pictures and information on the back of my resume. I also had a binder that contained over 8000 lines of code that I had written for numerous projects. I wore my suit and tie to the career fair, trying to be as impressive as possible. This was just after my internship where I had researched and contributed to a paper on integrated circuit bond pads. This was the very height of my academic career and I had spent time on class projects as well as personal projects. Most companies at the career fair readily accepted my "me in 2 minutes" and took a copy of my resume. But one company took a look at my resume and said "Where's your GPA?" I said "Who cares, if you just take a look at all the..." The recruiter cut me off mid-sentence "We won't take your resume unless you have a 3.6 or higher." They wouldn't even look at it. They couldn't see past their GPA standard. That one number was more important to them than any of my accomplishments or extracurricular work. Of course now I have had a highly successful career as a software engineer, I was even successful in my first job as a firmware engineer. In my spare time I constantly work to improve my knowledge and skills and develop new technologies. What I have discovered though is that the GPA standard for employment isn't an accurate standard. Most companies that use it claim they have no other way to measure how good of an employee a student will make. That's a pretty lazy answer, basically they have so many applications they aren't interested in actual talent; they just want to screen out people so they have less work to do. They are missing out on good talent by using methods like that. There are probably other things they could look at, personal projects, papers, how students worked in other jobs. There's a lot of data that can be an indicator about how good someone will be at the job, relaying on a single data point as a gatekeeper is, as I have stated; a very lazy approach to hiring. When I was in high school and later college, I frequently heard friends, instructors and fellow students say that if I wanted to be successful I needed a good GPA. I have never been a great student but I have always worked hard. School doesn't come easy for me and my GPA reflects that. Many of my colleagues in college told me that my GPA was “below industry standards.”
For being below industry standards, that GPA sure failed to predict how well I would do in my career. I spent two years as the only firmware engineer at a company, now I am a software engineer working on industrial networking switches. In my spare time I have designed, built and programmed more than twenty electronic firmware devices. I have created my own embedded game systems and wrote the operating systems and games that run on them. I quickly learned how to use a game engine to write games for Android and Windows. During my early career search I was frequently rejected because of my GPA. One particularly potent experience I had was at a career fair. The representatives from one company didn’t even look at my resume after finding out what my GPA was. By that point I had developed some pretty interesting firmware devices on my own time; only a couple of my colleagues had similar projects (and they had lower GPAs as well). Yet I was rejected without being given a chance to demonstrate what I could do. In my opinion GPA is given far more weight than it deserves. It is an attempt to summarize a person's’ intelligence, ability to work and potential to learn in a two digit number. Obviously that is a flawed way to evaluate people. I would even go as far as to say that GPA doesn't matter to the professional world; here are a few reasons why. Employers, professors and recruiters say it doesn’t matter To be more precise they say it doesn’t matter after your first job. When you interview for your first post-college job most companies will closely scrutinize you based on your GPA. Some companies won't even talk to you unless your GPA is high enough. What happens during your first job that makes your GPA irrelevant? It comes down to proving yourself. Many companies want to know you are a good worker and the only way they believe they can know that is from ether your past work experience or your GPA. The problem is that earning a high GPA requires a different skill set than being a good employee. A student with a high GPA will not necessarily be a good employee and a student with a low GPA may not necessarily be a poor employee. GPA primarily evaluates how good you are at taking tests You studied hard for that final that’s worth ⅓ of your grade. The night before you cram as much information into your brain as you can. The pressure is on; you are placed in a room with 80-100 of your peers, you are not allowed food, water or even restroom breaks. You have no books, no internet and no help; it's all on you. It is a high stress, nerve racking environment. This is the exact opposite of a typical work environment. Employers want you to get help. Everything is open book. Companies take steps to reduce stress in their environment. It's far better to look something up and be sure it's right than to rely on your memory and risk it being wrong, but tests don’t teach that. Tests teach you that you MUST know the right answer by memory. Another problem with tests is the stress affects different people different ways. Some people do well taking tests and some people do poorly. Tests are not an accurate or even an effective way to evaluate knowledge because of how much stress they place on students. But tests make up a high percentage of college grades and those grades a large percentage the GPA. A single number can’t be used to evaluate a person’s skill set It is funny how our world works. Let's say you want to buy a car. How do you choose which car to get? Well it needs to have a rating of at least 3.2 out of 4.0, right? Wrong! There is no such single-digit ranking for cars. A car needs to meet a set of specifications that you require. For me, I want something that is cheap and easy to fix. It needs to be able to haul my family and my bicycle. When I search for a car I look at ratings but those ratings typically use multiple numbers to evaluate multiple features. The same principal applies to employers and employees. I have applied for many jobs and each job has a list of requirements; things they require. A GPA does not indicate which job requirements the student has met. A GPA reflects their ENTIRE college education. That includes hundreds of topics not relevant to their desired job. In my experience, I have used relatively little of my college education in my career. Most of the skills I use are from other work experience and on-the-job learning (which does not involve taking tests). College created a foundation; it taught me the basics of my field and how to learn it was up to me to take that foundation and build myself a usable skill set. GPA is superseded by the diploma After four or more long years of school you have finally made it to that big day; college graduation. On this day your academic institution puts their “rubber stamp” on all that hard work, certifying that you know everything you need to know to be successful in the area you got your degree in. It seems inconsistent that employers are willing to trust academia to give students an accurate GPA but not when giving them diplomas. Remember a diploma is the college or university saying “We approve this student, they know the field they studied” This should be good enough enough. Colleges have standards for student GPAs and if a student consistently falls below that standard they won't graduate. Conclusion What should you get out of this? If you are a college student I would encourage you to work as hard as you can go get a good GPA but more important than your GPA is learning the material and getting a job. If your GPA is lower, don’t give up. I graduated with a lower GPA, my first job hired me for a low salary but after a short time there I had enough experience for my next employer to ignore that GPA. Now I am making double what I made at that first job. I think that having a low GPA was a blessing for me. It made me almost obsessed with proving myself; showing that us low-GPA students can be successful. I have grown to really dislike the GPA system. I think; “Really? You colleges and universities are full of all these super-intelligent people yet you can’t come up with anything better to rank students than GPA?” If you are an employer you shouldn't even look at a student’s GPA; it is almost completely irrelevant when determining if that candidate can do the job. Look at their projects, achievements, past work experience, see how they interact with others. That’s the kind of stuff that really matters. Do you think I’m wrong? Prove it. I used mostly logical and anecdotal arguments in this work of opinion. If you have a study that shows a correlation between a good GPA and a successful career I would like to see it. |
Jonathan L ClarkSoftware Engineer Archives |