> At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do

> At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. That does make sense and I think that would be super cool if companies could do that today. I admit I don't know much about the history but isn't building software today more complicated though not necessarily harder than it was before? My impression is that before we would just build programs that ran on computers. So in that sense, if you knew how to program and had a compiler to use, that was sufficient to do what companies wanted to do. However, now we have people building other things like services, which is requires additional complexity and tooling on top of what was previously necessary. The point I'm trying to make is that I suspect nowadays there's more prerequisite knowledge for most jobs than before. > But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. That's a really good point. I imagine even if it takes a very long time to train people, with a billion dollars you have the time to do that.. The optimistic side of me wants to say it's because handling the logistics for that would be a nightmare and it's really outside of our core expertise. The realistic side of me thinks that it probably is too expensive to give the same benefits to those employees that we give to current full time employees. The pessimistic side of me also thinks that there's a certain level of prestige associated with working at Google that has been, at least to some level, successfully marketed both inwards and outwards, and hiring people who don't meet whatever "bar" would undermine that. > Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job. Thanks!