People who make 4.0s are the exact kind of people they need-- discipline, reverence for authority, people pleasers-- people who won't rock the boat.

Wow, really? High marks is an indication of a person's servileness? It can't be that they were fascinated by what they were learning, and as a result to perform well even though they didn't care that much about getting a high GPA, or have that much discipline or deference to authority? It seems there are two options here: do well and be branded as a servile, unmotivated toady who can't learn a damn thing on their own; do poorly, and be branded as an independent spirit who just might be brilliant depending on the results of further probing and research.

From this comment and its parent, it seems that colleges are being paralleled to boot camps, where the real goal isn't to develop knowledge and/or body strength and endurance, respectively, but to develop a psychology of doing what you are told instinctively. That you learned something along the way is completely immaterial, because that has nothing to do with the average you came out with. If you are capable of any independent thought, you would've known the material before taking the class, and scored low out of sheer boredom and apathy. Doing well shows you both didn't know the material before, and you were more interested in impressing upon someone else your knowledge of the material than actually learning anything at all.

If this is the case, I did it completely wrong. I suspect, however, that this is not the case, and that people are taking the metaphor of GPA to Obedience Average way too seriously. It can mean that, but it very much depends on the institution and the student, and probably a number of other variables.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my GPA in college was rather high. I will not say how high, because then the replies to this comment will be about that instead of the larger point. I worry just mentioning this much will dilute what I am saying, but not doing so seems disingenuous.

Conversely, I have been prodded by managers, coworkers, and friends repeatedly to be more disciplined, more respectful of authority, and more interested in pleasing people. I suspect I was this way in college as well, given the similar comments friends made there. Being too deferent has never been a problem for me.

Maybe I'm one of the outliers people discount to show a nice, clean correlation between two groups; it is merely misfortune that I am then rolled up into the correlation to suggest that I am as all the evidence I've gathered so far suggests I am not.

In all honesty, I'm not totally sure how I ended up with a high GPA. Maybe the institution I went to was too easy. Maybe my curiosity for the material I was learning was motivating in the same degree as the need to please authority was in the other high performers. Maybe that I had a curiosity for the material is a mark against me; it shows I was either curious about the wrong things, or not curious enough to learn it on my own without "structure" there to force it upon me. Maybe one or both are true. Maybe I, and those I know, are completely wrong about me.

I'm not saying either of you are wrong about what Joel is looking for by taking GPA into account. I'm not saying your right either. This is just about what high marks "mean" on their own. They can have more than one cause: it could be a sign of obedience, or it could be a biproduct of some other force that had nothing to do with the marks. The other metrics being taken into account will probably clarify which case it is.

Oh, and one other thing:

Coding a one loop bubble sort in hex blindfolded while juggling eggs, playing 12 games of chess, solving a 100 x 100 sudoku, providing an alternate solution to the 4 color theorem, teleporting tonights winning Powerball numbers, and cooking dinner would be a more applicable barometer.

Please, can we ease up on the machismo when discussing what makes for a great developer. The best metaphor I can come up with is the overly muscular guy at the gym claiming to bench some obscene amount of weight, and staring down everyone else to intimidate them from benching anything at all. Yes, it may be part of the culture to be over the top like this, I've always considered it one of the more unbecoming traits; it just seems excessively primal.