Ramp, a US fintech company valued at $60 billion, has hired a 14-year-old as an intern. The company's co-founder and CEO, Eric Gleyman, said the young developer was spotted thanks to his own project, which he created for fun and which has garnered nearly a million views on Twitter.
Ramp, a US fintech company valued at $60 billion, has hired a 14-year-old as an intern. The company's co-founder and CEO, Eric Gleyman, said the young developer was spotted thanks to his own project, which he created for fun and which has garnered nearly a million views on Twitter.
According to Gleiman, the guy developed a useful addition without any external tasks or instructions - purely out of his own interest. The head of Ramp did not reveal the identity of the teenager and the exact time of his internship, but shared the company's approach to finding talent in the era of artificial intelligence, writes The New Stack.
At Ramp, we believe that the best indicator of an engineer’s potential is their ability to create something on their own. As AI gradually takes over basic tasks for beginners, the company is looking for specialists with strong intrinsic motivation.
Gleiman notes that he looks for evidence that the candidate created something on his own initiative, rather than at the direction of management or faculty.
The company values developers who launched their own Minecraft servers while still in school, as this provides practical programming experience long before entering the job market.
At the same time, Ramp's CEO admits that this approach has its drawbacks: the company risks missing out on talented candidates who simply didn't have the time or resources for their own pet projects.
The focus on young talent is also evident in the company’s leadership. In June, 28-year-old Rahul Sengottuvelu, who previously led the applied AI division, took over as Ramp’s CTO. Sengottuvelu joined the company in 2023 after the acquisition of his previous startup and was building AI-based products before ChatGPT became a global trend.
Separately, Eric Gleyman focused on the internal structure of Ramp's engineering teams. According to him, developers work in small groups of 5–6 people. The company's management formulates only the ultimate goal, leaving the choice of ways to achieve it entirely to the specialists themselves.
Gleiman is convinced that bloat of staff does not speed up the development process, because large teams only create unnecessary bureaucracy and require too many approvals.
“Why hire someone who can surprise you with their creativity and then tell them, ‘Don’t invent your own recipes’? If you hire people who are capable of making decisions, you should give them that opportunity at work,” Eric Gleiman concluded.
Previously, dev.ua reported on Cisco, which tasked a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of the company's outdated code in two years . To do this, he was given unlimited access to artificial intelligence tools.
