Inverse Economies of Scale

I like to think of myself as an extremist.

Today, I called Continuum, a design consulting company of about 100 people. I was planning on talking about how they used and perceived grades (ie transcripts) and GPAs. My conversation was cut extremely short; they didn't use GPAs at all. I thought I was an extremist. Not this time I guess. I might not like grading, but it's damned pragmatic. Anyhow, they must make decisions somehow right?

-Recomendations? No, not really. They like to establish good relationships and hope that profs and such will be all like "this kid's worth looking at." I was kind of confused by now. I don't like grading, but I think you do need something...this seemed like a long-shot, but I hadn't explicitly asked, so:
-Full Transcript? Absolutely not. Never in my interviewees experience (close to a decade). Sometimes GPAs were brought up out of curiosity, but transcripts? No. I am now racking my brain. Surely they have some way of judging, right? It can't just be: "Oh. You're from MIT. Welcome." I probed more until I finally got a reasonable picture.

Here's the big deals for them:
-Work experience: Have you done internships? With whom?
-Recommendation: I think this was unfairly downplayed. I'd go ahead and guess this is a big deal for them in hiring recent grads. She never said so, but this is something you can use when objective evidence is lacking and grades aren't being looked at.
-Portfolio: It took forever for my interviewee to mention this. Why? I don't know. In the end though, I think this is what made everything reasonable. If you want a technical job, show us your technical skill. Period. No fuss. Beautiful.

I guess smaller companies can afford the luxury of actually looking through candidates' work. Also, probably the luxury of having your candidates partially pre-screened because you are small and word of mouth recommending is a major form of recruitment. They avoid GPAs and transcripts because they can. Economies of scale are great for quantity; inverse economies of scale are great for quality. Sweet.

This doesn't mean that an alternative grading system is feasible; however, it does seem to imply that the portfolio idea that completely faded away might have some real value to it. Maybe I'll start keeping mine up to date? I hear our folders are still online anyhow.

In other news, I managed to run over 500 processes at once today. I was going to play some music, "The 500 Greatest Rock and Roll Songs of All Time," so I went to the folder and pressed CTRL+A. Then, when I was going to go to "Play in Winamp" I saw an option to "Add to Winamp's Bookmark List." Bad call Boris. Bad call. It was pretty neat to see them start going away in the task manager though.

Also neat, Continuum had a hand in designing Newton Peripherals' MoGo Mouse. It's a mouse. It fits in your PC card slot. If anyone has an extra lump of cash they'd like to spend on equipping their favorite Boris with a PC-Card slot mouse, I would be likely to reward them with hugs... please?