"… 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." …
No offense to Furlong, but JPMorgan is going to get quality in accordance with the “objective measures” they use and how they actually relate to the job. HackerrRank does not relate much and can be gamed very easily:
The idea that you can become an expert in development or CS, enough so to be an asset to Wall Street, in a mere few months and be measured objectively is a bit silly. HackerRank focuses almost completely on algorithms, and you need to know a lot more to deal with the intricacies of high frequency trading and other automation, where memory management, systems, and network knowledge become a lot more relevant, of which little to none will be cover in most “bootcamps”, and little to none will be needed for HackerRank, even if you don’t cheat your way to the top.
The only thing this tells me is that the financial industry is really struggling to recruit properly - there are plenty of better trained CS majors out there, just not at the same schools they are targeting for business with “name brand prestige”. The fact that they are hiring from bootcamps over these schools says a lot about how little they know about the tech industry, which they will want to be in tune with to have better success.
So you overlook two categories, and you opt for the ones that are going to be much more unverifiable and hit or miss rather than looking at the other schools, who produce much more similar graduates in CS… Yes, that makes sense. Not to mention that a target name school for business doesn’t mean that it’s as good for CS, and vice versa.
There are a lot of people out there that are great with CS and don’t have a degree, but few to none of those are coming from bootcamps and their abilities are not able to be represented on HackerRank.
At the same time people from the best school are trying to get into startup. According to a lab director quote from his conversation with one of the interns from Stanford “I wont even work in google even if you guys pay me 1 million a year”. All they need is one good idea and the company will be acquire by any enterprise. A group of five graduate from Berkeley design a special database for retrieving data in more efficient way and their supervisor report it to the director and they decide to pay 61 million to acquire it, the whole process took less than a week even the product is incomplete. So I’m not surprised that they cant hire them, and the way that they do hiring is not fit for programmers
I worked on Wall Street in the 90s and my degree was in CS from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. We had programmers from all kinds of schools. The idea that Wall Street only cared about programmers from prestigious schools isn’t valid.