Even if you have a weak academic and employment background you can ABSOLUTELY get a dev job that won't be designed to fuck you over, like this one is.
You might have to move, you might have to get a (paying) internship (they definitely exist), and you might have to send out some cold emails to people you don't know to ask. But there's no reason you should be waiting tables.
This is cool, but to really make this game changing they'd revamp their interview process to interview all members together (or in pairs of 2-3) some people just perform better with their partner and the interview process itself should account for it (if they're assuming that's true).
I think (know) many companies actually do this informally all the time. It's fairly common to hire designers in particular this way. Stripe is smart to formally and publically announce a streamlined process. Obviously the whole point here is either everyone or no one gets an offer - honestly if I had to guess the amount of people they actually hire this way will be really small, but making it formal will increase the number of talented people they see total.
Besides the influx of tech people moving to San Francisco in the last 5-10 years (many of whom disappear in a downswing, ask anyone living in SF for 99-05), I haven't heard or seen anything that suggests the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms have at all influenced social awkwardness or atomization in CA. It's a BIG state.
Great post. I've seen feedback from hundreds and hundreds of interviews, both technical and non, and by far the most common reason for rejecting someone is they did not answer the interviewer's question directly.
Speaking in specifics is important, but more broadly, you didn't do well because you didn't actually answer the question asked. People often get tripped up in their explaination of the answer, or their theory or thinking behind it and just forget to say what they actually did.