Is there any alternative to college? College is, for better or worse, one of the stops one has to make on the way to many cognitively rewarding professions.
I expect that my children will run the college gauntlet, but your question reminded me of this recent article.
Wall Street’s Frantic Push to Hire Coders Hugh Son
Bloomberg
October 28, 2016
For almost five years, Gregory Furlong worked 50-hour weeks as a shipping clerk at a Best Buy two miles from his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a kind of employment purgatory for a computer obsessive who tinkers with motherboards in his free time.
So last year, Furlong, 30, enrolled in a three-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank, a web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in December for its two-year technology training program.
This is Wall Street’s new tech meritocracy. Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley. But that system tends to overlook good programmers from other schools or gifted dropouts, according to recruiters. And besides, banks need to fill so many programming jobs that elite schools can’t possibly pump out enough candidates.
So the industry is looking in places it never did, turning to outside firms to evaluate prospective programmers based on objective measurements, not their pedigree. The idea is that people lacking a computer science degree -- art majors, graphic designers and chemistry graduates from the University of Delaware like Furlong -- can still make the leap to well-paid careers in technology. By using algorithms to spot talented coders, HackerRank and competitors with names like Codility claim they’ve essentially increased the world’s supply of developers.
