The CTO who hired me, a college dropout and former construction worker, to my first startup. It was a menial data entry job but he took a chance when he let me

The CTO who hired me, a college dropout and former construction worker, to my first startup. It was a menial data entry job but he took a chance when he let me start coding 2 months later, and lead the web team to the launch a year after that. By then I had the chance to pay it forward by mentoring employees with design and liberal arts background to become decent web devs. Coding for the web isn't really that hard to learn if you're motivated, which is why it pains me to see the bullshit "our hiring process" posts. As a child in Israel, I'd hear about the American ideals of giving someone a chance and taking a risk. Many years later, when I lived in NYC, I was disappointed to find employers so risk averse they can barely make a decision on hiring a junior PHP coder without an Ivy League degree, 4 references and a 6 hour interview process. I had enough experience for degrees not to matter, but I feel for kids in the US who are now where I was when I started out.