There's a way to make this work, that a lot of tech companies already do with not-yet-technical freshman and sophomores in college: give a large funnel of peopl

There's a way to make this work, that a lot of tech companies already do with not-yet-technical freshman and sophomores in college: give a large funnel of people an actual training course a few months long. Give the best of this large funnel return internships. Again, give them some amount of training but this time more real-world experience. Those that actually helped the business, give full time offers to. There's no inherent reason this model can't work with untrained, not-yet-technical non-interns. You just need to set up explicit expectations: this is a temp job (3-6 months long). The top 30% of people will be given a 3-6 month extension, during which they'll do real coding work alongside current engineers. The top ~30% of those to be given full time offers, at a "new grad" level, based on whether, by the end of the last month, they were operating at a "new grad engineer" level.