Recruiter accidently emailed me her secret internal selection guidelines 👀

I agree there's no path in the sense that no one can give you a path/road to follow to get there. So maybe a different framing is that you have to make your own path. You have dig a tunnel under the wall, or build a flying machine to airdrop yourself in. And that can feel unfair when they lower the drawbridge for every MIT grad that walks in. There are ways, and I can give you tons of examples, but these examples would be to stimulate ideas and not to give a path to follow. This is my philosophical view: Stanford and MIT generally have incredible smart people and some people are smarter than others. They are selecting for a certain type of "smart" person that our society deems will be an impactful person. Whereas community colleges let in just anyone who pays for credits. So the societal structure is setup to try to rely on top schools as vetting our the people who are "supposed to be" successful. I used a lot of quotes there because this system works kind of, but it leaves out all the people who WOULD BE deemed equally "smart" if they had opportunities when they were growing up that they didn't for various reasons. So I think our society is missing out by not leveraging bootcamp grads/career changers who WOULD BE equally impactful but can't demonstrate that yet. If the companies get enough Stanford grads, they don't have an interest in working on this problem. So right now the bootcamp grads are fixing this by paying bootcamps and career coaches etc... out of their own pocket to try to get help. If the market shifted and companies couldn't find enough people, then they would open the doors to bootcamp grads. And they would need ways to vet those people because they aren't demonstrating the potential yet - they need ways to identify who WILL be super strong. But if they need engineers so bad they have an incentive to invest in figuring it out, or in working with the bootcamps or career coaches directly to have those people pull out the right people for the right company. \----------- This is super high level, because in reality - when companies DID hire bootcamp grads, they didn't perform as well on the whole and proved there still is this "skill gap". It doesn't mean they didn't eventually do very well in the industry, just that proved the point that it takes time for those extra gaps to fill, and bootcamp grads are not just as deserving and being gatekept out of the industry.