For what its worth, one of the last hardware devs we hired happened exclusively online. We were adding some biometric hardware to our current software stack and came across a small project online of someone who wrote a java library for the hardware in question.
After a series of emails, we proposed that we should pay him a few months consulting fee - to help us integrate. As a bonus of course, he could take the improvements and fold them back into his his open-source project.
Things continued like this and eventually he proved useful in other ways, so he is permanent hire now.
In this day and age, there really is no excuse for having "no experience" (in the software world at least). Moreover, who really cares about what university you went to if you can prove your immediate usefulness in other ways?
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For what its worth, one of the last hardware devs we hired happened exclusively online. We were adding some biometric hardware to our current software stack and came across a small project online of someone who wrote a java library for the hardware in question.
After a series of emails, we proposed that we should pay him a few months consulting fee - to help us integrate. As a bonus of course, he could take the improvements and fold them back into his his open-source project.
Things continued like this and eventually he proved useful in other ways, so he is permanent hire now.
In this day and age, there really is no excuse for having "no experience" (in the software world at least). Moreover, who really cares about what university you went to if you can prove your immediate usefulness in other ways?