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I wasn’t the best EE/CS undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.I graduated from a high school in Texas, and in the late 90’s/early 00’s my school didn’t have anything that resembled a proper computer science curriculum. When I entered my first computer science class at Berkeley in freshmen year, I was dismayed to learn that more than half the kids there grew up in Cupertino and Palo Alto and already had a pretty decent coding background.At that moment, I had the sinking feeling that I would never catch up to these guys. The head-start that they had on me felt unclose-able to 18-year-old me, and subconsciously I believed that I’d never be anywhere near a top-tier engineer in my life, especially compared to them.(I vividly recall reading the instructions for my first lab, and thinking: “What is Emacs, and why doesn’t my screen have a mouse cursor?”. Going to my first CS class at UC Berkeley was intimidating enough—not even knowing how to open a text editor before I even type my first line of code in school was confidence-shattering.)I graduated from undergrad in 2009, during the most difficult job-hunting period in the United States since the 80’s. Some my “smart” colleagues got job offers from Google and Microsoft straight out of college (Microsoft was more appealing to work for back then), and I figured that made sense: they are smart. Meanwhile, I failed interview after interview, and barely got a job offer at a small startup that no one had ever heard of before, which paid a good ~$30K/year less than what a lot of my peers were offered. I figured that I was lucky to get a job at all.In that first job, I was a full-stack web application developer working on a .NET application. Almost all of the features that I worked on there were superficial and involved little technical depth. During the whole 3.5 years that I was there, I worried about how I wasn’t gaining any strong technical experience and that I wasn’t improving my skillset to anything that “hardcore” engineers do. I worried that while I was working on a Javascript widget to improve conversion rates in our funnel, my peers from Berkeley were doing mind-blowing work in distributed systems or inventing more efficient network protocols and gaining invaluable experience. I lost a lot of sleep over that type of FOMO in my early 20’s.I decided one day that I didn’t want to work on technically shallow web applications anymore and I started interviewing for other jobs. By then, unbeknownst to me, I had become a strong programmer (in the actual craft of programming, but not in any specific fields of engineering) and a strong communicator (through 3.5 years of incessant arguments that I had with product managers), and I found that I did very well in interviews.I got a job offer with the first company I interviewed for—Box. I had never heard of Box before, and was just interviewing with them because I got a spam-recruiting LinkedIn message from Box and I wanted to practice interviewing before I interviewed at Google. However, after meeting my potential future manager at Box and seeing how generous their offer was, I accepted it immediately and cancelled my interviews with Google and Facebook.My 5.5 years at Box was fantastic. I learned a ton. Met a bunch of fantastic people (both personally and professionally). Made a lot of money ($$IPO$$). But I still had a nagging insecurity deep in my mind, that I wasn’t as good of an engineer as my peers from Berkeley who got a job offer from Google at the age of 22.All of my accomplishments seemed to only milden that insecurity that I still held. It didn’t matter that I got promoted to Staff engineer. It didn’t matter that I was a millionaire in my 20’s. It didn’t matter that I gave multiple external tech talks. It didn’t matter that my peers respected my opinion on technical matters and that my mentees looked up to me. Every time I saw an unmarked Van Hool bus take the Shoreline exit on the 101, I wondered if I’d ever sit on that bus myself.The entire narrative I’ve written above so far is just to demonstrate what my expectations were about Google, before I joined Google.I’m reading over it now and it sounds pretty sad and pathetic, but it’s honest.It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again: Google is just a company. Others told me the same thing before I joined Google, but I didn’t quite believe them and I needed to find out for myself.Do you know what separates a Google engineer, from any other engineer? Being able to solve the first 175 questions of LeetCode in a timely manner. That’s it. If you can do that, you can get a job offer as at least an L4 software engineer at Google (and at any other big tech company in the bay for that matter). I’ve already written a fairly lengthy post about this (Taejun TJ Lee's answer to How do I prepare for interviewing with Google, Facebook, or Amazon while having a full time job as a software engineer?).I don’t want to mitigate the brilliance of some individuals at Google; Google has something like 50K engineers, and a small number of them have done great things in their careers that only dozens or hundreds of other engineers in the entire world have accomplished. But almost all of the engineers who work at Google are not them.I also don’t want to downplay how much of a great place Google is to work at. It’s great. But then again, so are many other companies.

The cost of entry is extremely high. Besides having a decades-long headstart, Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA all have thousands of engineers constantly doing research and development.The only way to enter into a market like this is by establishing yourself as a dominant player in a small niche by doing it very well, then trying to expand that once you have the money, knowledge, and market share.ARM is an example. ARM did some PC stuff back in the 1980s and early 1990s, but they really only rose to prominence when they refocused on microcontrollers and embedded systems. They are now THE 32-bit embedded processor everyone is using. They have a large portfolio covering everything from Cortex-M processors for microcontrollers (microwaves, washing machines, etc), to Cortex-R processors for real time applications (mostly automotive), to Cortex-A processors for high performance embedded applications like phones and tablets. They now have almost 100% market share in all those segments, which is huge. Intel has been trying to compete with them for a decade, and has given up for the most part.The only reason they haven’t been successful in the desktop space is because the desktop space is still largely dominated by closed-source programs, so if you change your processor instruction set architecture, you won’t be able to run any of the old programs anymore, and have to convince all your vendors to supply you with ARM versions with those programs. Intel’s x86 ISA (cross-licensed with AMD) had a head start, and now we have a chicken-and-egg problem - programmers don’t program for ARM processors because no one is using them on desktops, and no one is using them on desktops because there are no programs available.Now they are looking into breaking into the server market by partnering with Microsoft and Qualcomm. It would be very interesting how that turns out.On servers it’s a different story. Servers are much more concerned with power efficiency, and ARM is very strong in that. Servers also usually run open source software, which can easily be ported to ARM (many just require a recompilation). Most servers run Linux, and Linux already supports ARM very well (since Linux is also used in many embedded systems). The few closed source programs used on servers would need to be ported, but Microsoft makes most of them, and they have already committed to supporting ARM.If ARM gets both the low end (tablets and below) and high end (servers), Intel will be in serious trouble. The PC and laptops market would be all it’s left with, and that market is shrinking.

“We need you to lead our intern program this summer.”“Do we have an intern program?”“Nope, but you’ll come up with something.”My first opportunity as a manager was hiring several interns and developing a program to teach them to sell. I was 24 years old and this was my first time interviewing and selecting talent.I visited two major universities after posting a job description and pre-selecting candidates for interview panels. With no prior experience in hiring and only a few open positions, I set about limiting applications to those I would meet in person. My company was Fortune 10 and put a heavy emphasis on GPA. Our brand name was strong and we felt like we could recruit the best of the best.I knew this because of how much grief I took for my weak 2.95 overall GPA when I interviewed three years prior. Every interviewer dug into why my grades weren’t higher, so much that I was surprised when they actually made me an offer.After two days of interviews, I only filled 3 of the 4 slots. Most of the candidates I met with were rigid and limited in extracurricular activities. With this group, the higher the GPA, the harder it was to keep the conversation going. I came across plenty of intelligent people but struggled to see them interacting with customers.After the last day of panel interviews, we had an information session open to all students. We bought some pizzas and managers were available to talk about the company to anyone interested in attending.A young man approached me at this session. He hadn’t been selected for an interview but was very interested in our company. He gave me his resume and I realized quickly why I hadn’t met him. He had a 3.0 GPA in Management and we were looking for 3.5 or higher with an Engineering degree.Yes, it seems ridiculous looking back that we wanted a 3.5 for a sales internship. To understand, picture Google advertising for a sales and marketing internship today. They will receive thousands of resumes and can pick the very best. Kids will apply because Google on your resume nearly guarantees that you land a full time position out of college.I worked for GE twenty years ago, at a time when GE made magazine covers for Most Admired Company and our CEO, Jack Welch, had just been named CEO of the Century by Fortune. In other words, it was easy to find high GPA candidates who wanted GE on their resume and they didn’t care what the assignment was.Back to this young man, I tried to let him down nicely and told him the requirements for the position and he handled it like a champ. He smiled, said he understood and then asked politely if he could ask me a few questions. Sure, I thought. The pizza is paid for and my flight isn’t until tomorrow.“This is a sales internship, correct?”“Yes, it is.”“What will you expect of an intern?”“Well, you would be prospecting from a list of potential targets. You role is to set up appointments for our seasoned sales reps by cold calling.”“Got it. Do the other candidates you’ve selected have experience cold calling?”“Uh, not that I can recall. No.”“Can I tell you about my background?”He went on to tell me about his first job which was selling door to door. He told me about how humbling the experience was at first and how he hit 200 houses every day, rain or shine. He walked me through the importance of a good opening, how to lead with a smile and a question, how he overcome objections and the importance of mindset when you’re having a bad day.He further explained how he did this job while putting himself through college. In fact, he had several jobs while taking classes which made it challenging to spend as much time studying as some other kids.He then told me about his fraternity and the roles he held, including two semesters as President. He explained how his fraternity had built his social skills and what he learned about leadership from running a house filled with 50 guys.Oh, by the way, he was a collegiate athlete which was also a significant time constraint.“OK, you win. Want a job?”He accepted and all four started on the same day. Three of the four had an average of 3.8 GPA and our door to door salesman brought the average down a few points.You can probably guess who came out on top.From day one, my boy with the average GPA ran circles around the more accomplished students. Yes, he had specific experience that gave him a head start but he had something much more important. Mindset.When a customer said no to him, he moved on. He didn’t let rejection define him as he was accustomed to failures. He looked at these small failures as opportunities to learn and tweak his pitch with the next phone call.His peers saw it much differently. They were so accustomed to winning that the daily parade of rejection was debilitating. They took every rejection personally and it was apparent in the volume of calls they made. On a daily basis, our fraternity President was making twice the number of outbound calls.The others were so paralyzed by potential rejection that they took way too much time preparing for their phone calls and then second guessing themselves after every call. Rather than playing the numbers game and grinding, they deliberately slowed the process so as not hear “no” as often in a day. In psychological terms, this is called self-handicapping and is a coping mechanism to avoid damage to self esteem.Of the four interns, we only made one permanent offer and he had the lowest GPA in the group.Does this mean I never hired a candidate with a high GPA? Absolutely not. One of the best hires I ever made was to an honors student from Georgia Tech just a few B’s away from a 4.0. He also held high level roles in several organizations and played competitive basketball. But, even this young man struggled out of the gate, especially with failure and not having a definitive path to achieving results.I’ve seen many hires with a strong GPA struggle with the many indirect paths to success in a career. They are used to following instructions, completing their assignments, putting in the work and getting a perfect grade. In business, there is no one prescribed way of getting results.College professors are interested in the path you take to a result as well as the result. In business, there is only the result. Most managers are indifferent on your path. Some kids with perfect grades struggle when you won’t give them a prescribed plan to achieve that result. They chafe at the lack of direction, which is a hallmark in business. No one is going to hold your hand.I like hiring people who have failed a little in their life and are not paralyzed by it. I especially like people who are not afraid to admit a) That they failed, b)Why they failed and c) What they learned from it.If your grades aren’t the greatest, own it. Explain why it happened. Did you have a miserable semester where you didn’t apply yourself? Own it. Then tell me how that humbling experience forced you into better habits and what you learned that will make you a better asset to my company.The last thing I will say about grades is that two years after graduation, no one will give a damn. You probably won’t ever get asked about your GPA once you’ve had some real life experience and opportunity to prove what you can do for a business. Businesses are much more interested in your ability to generate tangible results than grades on an exam.Once you start your first job, no one will care about your GPA. You will be measured against every other person in your role, whether they went to college or not. You will be measured on results. If you had a high GPA, brace yourself for failure. Actually, embrace failure. Welcome failure as an opportunity to learn. Boast about your failures, make fun of yourself a little. This will drive you to try harder and skip the self-handicapping behavior holding you back.Get that first job, kick butt and you’ll be done talking about grades for the rest of your career. Unless, you decide to write an answer on Quora like me.Good luck out there.