[webmaven]

The fruit company (and really all of AFGAM and much of the rest of the industry) is biased toward hiring recent grads or folks who have a clear record of steadily increasing responsibility, which disadvantages those who have followed a more... eclectic path, as well as those who have had major dislocations of some sort derail their career.

And almost by definition, "those 30 guys" building and maintaining a library with their volunteer labor in some "field" (that didn't exist as such until relatively recently) mostly won't have standard-looking career paths.

Sometimes there is a critical mass of those folks concentrated in a company, prompting an acquihire.

[santaclaus]

They seem more likely than others -- see the recent Homebrew author grousing about getting rejected by Google, only to land at Apple, for instance.

[flyovercow]

He left apple. He didn't fit in. There's an interview about it on a podcast

[kapv89]

link please!

[flyovercow]

Podcast is called The Changelog, the episode is abiut the guy who runs Homebrew project