American fintech company Ramp, valued at $60 billion, has taken on a 14-year-old teenager as an intern. The company's co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman said that the young developer was noticed thanks to his own project, which he created for fun and which gathered about a million views on Twitter.
According to Glyman, the boy developed a useful add-on without any external tasks or instructions — solely out of his own interest. The head of Ramp did not disclose the teenager's identity or the exact timing of his internship, but shared the company's approach to finding talent in the era of artificial intelligence, writes The New Stack.
A "Minecraft server" test instead of a resume
At Ramp they are convinced: the best indicator of an engineer's potential is the ability to create something independently. As AI gradually takes over basic tasks for beginners, the company is looking for specialists with pronounced intrinsic motivation.
Glyman notes that he looks for evidence that a candidate created something on their own initiative, rather than on the instructions of management or teachers.
The company values developers who ran 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 acknowledges that this approach has drawbacks: the company risks missing talented candidates who simply did not have the time or resources for their own pet projects.
Technical director at 28
The focus on young talent is also felt in the company's leadership. In June, the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ramp was taken by 28-year-old Rahul Sengottuvelu, who previously headed the applied AI division. Sengottuvelu joined the company in 2023 after the acquisition of his previous startup and was building AI-based products even before ChatGPT became a global trend.
Autonomy instead of staff bloat
Separately, Eric Glyman 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 leadership formulates only the end goal, leaving the choice of ways to achieve it entirely to the discretion of the specialists themselves.
Glyman is convinced that bloating the staff does not accelerate the development process, since 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 capable of making decisions, you must give them that opportunity at work," summarized Eric Glyman.
Earlier, dev.ua reported on Cisco, which tasked a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of the company's legacy code in two years. For this, he was given unlimited access to artificial intelligence tools.