Wall Street looks beyond elite college degrees for coders

New York

FOR almost five years, Gregory Furlong worked 50-hour weeks as a shipping clerk at a Best Buy two miles (3.2km) from his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a kind of employment purgatory for a computer obsessive who tinkers with motherboards in his free time.

So last year, Mr Furlong, 30, enrolled in a three-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank, a Web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Mr Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase in December for its two-year technology training programme.

This is Wall Street's new tech meritocracy. Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley. But that system tends to overlook good programmers from other schools or gifted dropouts, according to recruiters. And besides, banks …