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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives.

Does nobody work in high school or college anymore?

It's not clear what he means by apply. I assume he means that they only ever applied for one or two jobs without having been recruited/having a connection to the company already. Of course in another sense, everyone applies for every job they've ever had, because there's always some sort of approval process for hiring.

I don't think he means that top 1% only ever worked at one or two companies because that's certainly not true (that or he and I have very different ideas about what kind of people the top 1% are).

I would suspect Joel is discounting the summer work that young people do. i.e. he probably means: *They only ever applied for one or two [programming] jobs in their lives."

scholarships are pretty plentiful, if you're willing to do the application hustle.

If you are a member of a minority or have notable merit achievements.

I'm not sure why this would get downvoted. As a middle class white male in my major I was ineligible for a great many scholarships at my state university, and I was ineligible for most of the remaining ones because I had attended a concurrent high school and college program that did not publish class rank or inflate GPAs well beyond 4.0 as is common practice in normal high schools. As a result I could not get scholarships that required "(X on SAT or Y on ACT) and (Z GPA in high school or W percentile in high school) and *," in spite of my 800/710 SAT and 3.8+ GPA at the concurrent high school and college program.

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