[strken]

My brother is a mechanical engineer, and his org hires by bringing in graduates on a low salary, moving the competent ones to roles that make use of their competencies, and moving the incompetent ones to roles that are pretty much the same as unskilled technicians. Sometimes the boss meets a candidate at a conference or over beers and fast-tracks them. They have literally no women in the entire engineering department.

I'm not defending whiteboarding the knapsack problem so much as I'm defending the difficulty of hiring skilled workers from different walks of life. Tech isn't special, hiring is just hard, and a lot of other industries are actually worse.

[jmchuster]

The software engineer analogue of this would be consulting. You hire everyone out of college. Start them off at a salary such that they are still net positive even if they only ever stay at the lowest possible billable rate. If you get good enough to command higher rates (or the effective rate through increasing the success rate of projects), you'll keep on getting commensurate raises.