> At times, I am not convinced that these companies would do much better with some kind of "sweep the street" approach to hiring, vacuuming up a huge number at

> At times, I am not convinced that these companies would do much better with some kind of "sweep the street" approach to hiring, vacuuming up a huge number at a time and taking them through some structured filtering/training process. I've even thought through how such a model would work. Haven't found anybody willing to experiment with this yet, though :) Didn't IBM and a few other big iron shops do this in the 50s/60s with secretaries? iirc, they could apply to be programmers and would get trained.