Trying any other way is a lottery - and if you didn’t go to MIT/Stanford/CalTech/Harvard then your odds are pretty bad.
The other way is already working at a famous company and having another famous company send you a recruitment email via linked in, but that typically requires you to have done the referral way first.
They don't really care where you went or even if you have a degree, but there are so many people applying through the front door that that ends up being a filter everyone uses. There are obviously excellent people outside of that, but it's harder to find them through the noise.
This is another reason I think Lamda School is great - they're actually attacking this problem too: http://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
Many of the FAANGs have pushed for diversity in hiring. I don't have a problem with that. I think an ideal workplace would hire people regardless of their circumstances of birth and lived experience as long as they are qualified to do the job and they, in fact, do a good job there. That's actually the crux of my problem.
When companies have pushed to remove names, genders, and races from resumes before the hiring process because they find that people are treated differently in hiring due to unconscious bias in that process then it smacks of hypocrisy to then blanket filter incoming resumes unless you went to a short list of approved schools or have a buddy on the inside juicing your chances. That sounds like the complete opposite of trying to be diverse in recruitment. I don't think that Lambda School is that great of a response to this - it just adds one more "acceptable" school to the list.
In fact, to a cynic, it sounds like virtue signalling of the highest order to please both Wall Street and the public.
Currently highly selective schools and other famous companies are the easiest filter. Then they don’t want to have unconscious bias from that point on - I don’t think it’s virtue signaling, it’s more just pragmatism.
The reason I think Lambda School is cool is that they're actually focused on the first piece of this, scaling up to give opportunity to capable people the current system ignores and eventually leveraging their reputation to get people interviews. Right now it’s extremely unlikely to get accepted into MIT or Stanford, but Lambda School is incentivized to not do this - if you’re capable of the work they want to be able to scale to admit you.
I was also not hired by referral, but got lucky they liked my resume in some resume book at RPI.
For the places I applied online my interview response rate from companies was poor (or an instant rejection).
Just as a single data point, the last clause here isn't true in my experience. I worked at Google for a few years some years ago, and I get a regular flow of recruiter spam from all the big companies for Bay Area roles, and have never had any friction turning them into interviews.
I wasn’t clear, but I meant in order to already be working at a famous company you probably already had to figure out the referral piece at least once.
It's one of the main benefits of living in the bay area, you build out a network of friends working at different companies which adds a layer of job security and ability to interview more easily at interesting places.