u/Still-Mango8469 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think you’re spot on I’m all for the democratisation of opportunity and for meritocracy, that’s one of the great things about programming as not everybody has the opportunity to go to university. But at the end of the day however, in this cold world, it comes down to hiring
u/michaelnovati replied ·
+1. "Hiring risk" is the key term here. At big companies, as an employee, HR sees you as a resume and stack of performance reviews... and they run their numbers on which traits correlate to performance.
On average, Stanford, CMU, MIT, Berkeley CS grads perform better, so the company recruits more of them.
I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg with about 10 other top performers and I asked everyone to share their stories of how they got there. Almost everyone has an interesting non-traditional pathway. One was Fidji, the CEO of Instacart, and OpenAI board member, who grew up in rural France and worked her way up the ladder over many years.
All of these people remember very well where they came from and that's what I love about Silicon Valley.
So hiring risk for HR is why we have the system we have, but people with non traditional backgrounds can earn their seat at the table through years of shed work and relentless drive.
Going to a bootcamp for 12 weeks doesn't give you a seat at the table and you don't deserve it.