The best summer intern that I ever hired did not have any programming experience. He was a Berkeley student who had recently decided to change his major but hadn't started taking any programming classes.

When we interviewed him, it was clear that he was a serious student, he was very smart, and that he would work very hard if we gave him the internship. As the hiring manager, I turned him down because of the lack of programming experience.

I was overruled by our CTO. Apparently, the candidate was a family friend of the CTO and the CTO had strong confidence that he would learn programming very quickly.

The Berkeley student was given the paid internship. In an 8 week period over summer, the candidate learned ios programming, identified a problem that was impacting customers, proposed a fix, and was able to release the fix to customers. When he demonstrated the issue and his fix to the engineering team, it was clear that he had spent long hours working with the app.

My lesson from this is that the best candidate may not be the one who appears the best on paper. More important is a very smart candidate who is willing to work very hard.