Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Penn, Virginia, Duke, Maryland, Carnegie-Mellon, Georgia Tech, Berkeley and Stanford.
If you attend one of these schools — or are a parent of a student at one of them — keep reading.
I have been writing a lot lately about the demand for high-performance software engineers, the geeks in the top .000000001 percent who are intensively courted by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook to come work for them.
Last month, I chronicled some of the alumni from Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, describing how gifted software mavens can write their own ticket.
Then I heard about Ballston-based Applied Predictive Technologies and got another glimpse into the rarefied world of software geniuses.
Don’t let the company’s forgettable name fool you.
APT is on the hunt for software engineers to pilot its “big data” servers, which contain reams of data on retail sales and other customer transactions. Its clients include many of the top 100 U.S. retailers, the biggest restaurant chains and the largest banks: Think Subway, Wells Fargo, Walgreens and Wal-Mart.
APT trolls college campuses in search of the Michael Jordans and the Warren Buffetts of software engineering. If you get in its sights — and you may be on APT’s radar if you have a head for numbers and attend one of its “core 13 schools” listed above — get ready for a full-court press and big bucks. These kids right out of college command starting salaries of $100,000 a year.
“Our data people need to be world class . . . the very best,” said APT chief executive Anthony Bruce. “We go up against Google, Facebook, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Boston Consulting Group. We have to be competitive.”
‘It’s cool to be a nerd’
In its search for interns and full-time employees, the company targets people it identifies through contacts, job fairs, software events or from other APT employees who are expected to spend 5 percent of their time on recruitment. They take students for coffee, host invitation-only dinners and make personal phone calls to reel in the targets. APT held 90 recruiting events last year alone.
“We spot them as sophomores and begin the personal outreach,” Bruce said.
APT sponsors hackathons at the University of Pennsylvania. It does presentations in college classrooms and hosts computer competitions at the University of Virginia and Stanford. For the hot prospects, APT has invitation-only workshops to learn whether the students are APT material. The company sponsors StarCraft tournaments, one of the computer-gaming altars at which techies worship.
“It’s cool to be a nerd at APT,” Bruce said.
Recruits are wined and dined at the fanciest restaurants in Boston, San Francisco and Princeton. After a battery of interviews, the 3 percent who make the cut from the top schools are flown to Washington for even more interviews. They stay at such high-end hotels as the Monaco and are escorted on guided tours of the Newseum or the Spy Museum.
These geeks have lots of firepower. The common grade-point average for APT employees is 3.8. The average SAT score is 1560. We’re talking Mark Zuckerberg-like whiz kids. For them, calculus comes as naturally as breathing. The unemployment rate among talented software engineers is low because of the demand for their ability to write hard-to-construct algorithms used in business analytics.
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