Does Your GPA Really Matter for Software Engineers?

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Hey folks, it's Monday morning. Just heading to the office. I'm going to go to a question that came in from a resume review and this individual was asking about uh cumulative GPA on their resumes. So, I figured I'd talk about that. Um that's actually from my main channel, Dev Leader. So, this is just a reminder for folks that if you want questions answered, leave them below in the comments or you can message me on social media. Dev Leader is my main social media handle. You can find me is Nick Cosantino on LinkedIn as well. But like I said, this is from a resume review. It'll be going up on my main channel. So, um this will be a quicker video and then I'll probably film another one on the drive here as well. Um but I'm going to share like cuz I've talked about this in previous videos like my perspective on GPA and stuff for RS.

Um, but then also like probably what this person actually cares about because um the framing for this was that they said I'm including it and I have questions about it because some of the jobs I'm applying to do require that I have it listed. So, um, my opinion on GPA and stuff is going to be kind of at odds with this, but couple things I wanted to touch on. Uh the first is that um depending on what your schooling and stuff is like. So say you've gone because a bunch of people that submit resumes and talk to me about careers and stuff uh they've it's not always like a traditional path. Uh sometimes it's like they're career switchers or they've gone back to school because they want to go uh do computer science or software engineering or something. Um if you have multiple degree programs or something like that, you've gone to school multiple uh for like multiple uh diplomas, degrees, whatever it happens to be like truly for for different majors.

Um my understanding is that a cumulative GPA you would have separate ones for your education. So, um I think the person was asking about this primarily because they had uh at some point in time their GPA was really low. Like they kind of like were giving up on school. They're like screw it. And then eventually they went back and did a lot better. Um when I was reading through this the first time, I wasn't sure if they meant they went for some program and they were kind of like whatever, I'm going to bail on this. and then later they went for a different program entirely. So, I wanted to go look this up. My understanding though was that you would have two cumulative GPA like one for each of your um sort of uh passes through college or university if they were different programs.

So that means in my opinion if you were like I really bombed uh whatever um I went for to be an econ major and then I you know didn't like it and went back to school later for for computer science. I would just like not include the econ part or you know the first pass if it was really terrible especially if it's not going to be relevant like just don't include it. Um you can talk about your cumulative GPA for the education that's relevant. Now, that's not actually what happened in this person's case, though. So, I'm glad I was kind of reading through it a couple of times, and maybe I still misunderstood, but my final understanding is that they didn't go take another program. They went back for the same thing to finish it. So, that means the first couple of years they had a really crappy GPA and then later on like basically they were recovering their GPA the entire time.

Um so unfortunately my understanding for this is that you do need to include the whole thing. Um it's still the first sorry not the first it's still the uh sort of the only program that this person had gone through in this case and because it's the only one all parts of it whether it was the first attempt or later on coming back to finish it that's still the like all of it needs to go into the cumulative. Okay. So, couple couple different angles there. One is that you would have separate cumulative GPA if you went for different uh programs. But if you're going back for the same thing to finish it and now you're doing better, the cumulative part should include your, you know, your first years or however long when you maybe weren't doing so well. Um, okay. So, that's the first part. And like I said, probably the part that this person really cares about, especially if they're applying to places that are listing out that they require a GPA.

Now, um I'm not a big fan of GPA and uh I've talked about this in other videos, even like uh the prestige of schools and stuff like that. Like I just don't care. Um, I've spent very little time actually looking at that and I I don't know if I I can't like directly quote myself because I I'm driving and not literally watching a video where I've said it, but um the idea behind my my thought process on this stuff is that really for interns, it's probably the only time I'll look at like or pay attention to school and grades. And it's not even for probably the reasons that come to mind for you. Like I look at the school because when when I was working at a startup and we had sort of like pipelines of students coming from different schools, I just wanted to understand which pipelines were working well and which ones weren't right.

So if it was like hey uh for context I worked in uh the city of Waterlue back in Ontario and there's a bit of a tech hub between Kitchener Waterlue there's a couple of universities a couple of colleges and it's and it's a tech hub so because we had a bunch of schools there it was helpful to understand like hey like is this only coming from the University of Wateroo are we getting everyone coming from Konesoga College why don't we have anyone coming from Wilfred Laurier university because they do have like computer science. Uh I had a roommate that was going to Laurier for computer science and business as a as a double degree. So like why don't we have people applying from there? Do we have to invest more in the pipeline there? So like that's really the only reason I would look. And then for grades um honestly it was not like a make or break thing.

It was more to understand um if we have for like context if we have small teams. So I managed a couple of small teams uh for the majority of time that I was there. And if we have small teams and we have to take on someone who is uh very very junior, right? Like uh they haven't even hit like some of their programming classes in school and looking at their resume where like you know they're not like actively kind of building stuff. It's not that they're going to be terrible or something like that. We understand that they're interns, but I need to understand if my team's going to be able to accommodate that, that's all. And if not, then maybe we have another team that has more people on it. Uh, and based on their deliverables that are coming up, they might be able to sustain that a lot more reasonably, right?

So, it's not to say absolutely not or whatever. Like, they're interns. Obviously, it's going to be learning. Um, and that's in my opinion that should be the focus, right, for having interns on, give them a good experience, help them learn, and uh, you know, hopefully they can do a kick-ass job and they come back. But if we can't if we can't sustain having uh, someone on who who literally needs to be taught how to program like from scratch, then like it's not going to be a good experience for that intern or for a team I might have. and that could change over time, right? So, we might be in a spot where we're like, "Hey, we actually can accommodate that on our team. So, let's go ahead and do that." So, it's just for context, right? Um, so that's the only time I really look at grades.

Otherwise, I just don't give a Um, as someone like for me, when I was in university, my first years at university, my marks were terrible. I went from having like 95% averages in everything in high school to like 50s in my first year of university. And it's not like I just instantly got stupid. It's just that how things were presented to me and how I had to approach learning was very very different. Started very poorly academically in the beginning and every year after that, every semester, my average was going up and up and up. So, I kind of look at things in a similar way when it comes to to GPA. Like, I don't think that a GPA is reflective of how someone's going to perform on the job. Could there be a correlation? Perhaps. I'm not saying there isn't, but uh I don't want that to be like the deciding factor.

One might argue if we had two candidates that looked the exact same in every single way and one of them happened to have a higher GPA, like sure, maybe that is a tiebreaker. I don't know, but like it's just not not something that I actually care about. So, um I think that's really all I wanted to say about this one. We'll keep it pretty short. Um but yeah, cumulative GPA, something to keep in mind. Uh, I don't I don't know of many employers that are like requiring that, but I'm not actively looking. So, maybe that's becoming more common. I'm not sure. Something to pay attention to. So, hope that helps and I will go do the next video. Take care.