Whoops, I should have stayed around to field replies. I should have mentioned that most programmers who look to join are grad student aspirants who want to ent

Whoops, I should have stayed around to field replies. I should have mentioned that most programmers who look to join are grad student aspirants who want to enter the institute's prestigious PhD program via that route. The alternative to that is the mainstream route which has an entrance exam and a huge amount of competition. The other thing is that this is a world-class research lab in an area attractive enough to hacker-types that the young people who apply are not too worried about the money. These are of course young folks with no dependents. You get free or cheap housing and food, and access to a wonderful library, etc. It's about as exploitative as grad school, let's just say. This of course voids any suggestion you might think I made to adopt this as a general business practice.