We have a service tech here who has been prototyping a pretty slick Android app that will be integrated into engineering. From my brief experience working with

We have a service tech here who has been prototyping a pretty slick Android app that will be integrated into engineering. From my brief experience working with him, my estimation is he has a natural talent for this stuff that eclipses even the majority of our senior engineering staff. In his spare time he does robotics competitions. Had another guy like that I worked with 6-7 years ago. No degree, learned everything on the job, then got a CS degree from night school over a couple years so he could be promoted to an actual engineer. Left after his first review, got a job as a sr. engineer at another startup, then was promoted to a director before he turned 30, leading a team of 12. The best engineer I ever worked with. Now my experience is quite different from a good deal of folks on HN, but I went to a decent school (UCSD) and worked at 4 startups and 1 bigco here in San Diego, in agreggate about 100 engineers over the years.