u/Ma1eficent wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Obviously a person is going to be intelligent if they get into an ivy. But that's a person who could have excelled without the classes. And obviously paying for a bootcamp is not going to have the same sort of filtering, so that data isn't incorrect but it is incomplete. And no o
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I mean I don't disagree with the rationale for that arguments but I'm just asking for the data!
I helped grow Meta from 200 engineers to about 10K engineers and it was about the 3K mark that without a consistent and data based hiring process you start getting variance.
Apple is a company that has the complete opposite and has made it work - each small team has complete autonomy over their hiring process (after recs are approved), and each team hires for whatever they want. So like if one engineer insists open source is important, that team might not hire open source people.
If your brand is really strong that approach can work too, other companies that have that process have a lot of complains for opaque and unfair interviews that rely on subjectivity of the interviewers.
RE: Internships - it can be different things for different companies, not all are the same.
Amazon is actually a bit more open minded to people without degrees in general, it's one of the places where historically people with no experience have been able to get into the L4 entry level pipelines.
From talking to people, they fire faster than Meta (despite all the headlines) so Amazon is more willing to take an L4 who seems smart and ambitious and PIP them within a year if they don't perform.
Which has pros and cons - there is certainly a huge amount of untapped non-traditional talent and we probably agree on that.
The unsolved problem is **how to systematically find them.**
I also agree that significant contributions to large open source projects is a good signal - those projects are run more rigid than companies because they need strict contribution cultures for randos across the world to be able to contribute - but it's a surprisingly small number of people to start with and even smaller who live near a FAANG office and want to work there - so it's not a large enough supply.
If the response is say - how about we mentor people to work on big projects like Firefox - well Launch School is doing that! And it's also not trivial - instead of a having a senior engineer contributing directly to Firefox, you have to pay that person to mentor people and train them how to do it as well.
Ultimately, if I was extremely ambitious and smart, I would probably get there on my own on a big open source project and might be one of the handful of people that self teach to a FAANG that way.