My skills in just about every area of my life took Herculean leaps from age 16-22. If a 16 year old writes a book, even a bad one, they’re likely already ahead of their peer group. The guy had a startup, went to Harvard and is likely a hard worker. Taking a badly written book a kid wrote at 16 and extrapolating that into, he must be an awful coder at 22 that couldn't possibly provide a team value, is silliness. Entertaining snark but more noise than signal.
so revise the fucking book If he'd learned how to code in the six years since he'd be embarrassed by his code. Counterpoint: this is the only evidence we have of any of the kid's skills but apparently he gets to push updates at Treasury. If you were on a plane that suddenly got a new captain, and the only information you knew about him was that he crashed another plane six years ago, you would rightly feel concerned. I'm really curious how you see this as different.
It’s the only information you know about him. It’s certainly not the only information his hiring manager knows about him. This article is dumb.
There’s a reason it opens doors. It’s hard as fuck to get into. Acting like it isn’t is also disingenuous. Personally, as someone that has been in the position to hire it would def help get you in front of me. From there though, it’s all about what you are capable of.
expensive AF to get into FTFY A Harvard admissions board member, speaking under condition of anonymity, told Jeff Selingo in Who Gets In And Why that Harvard's admissions system wasn't designed to build elites, it was designed to ensure only elites would apply.