[Photo: FisherPrice / coderevkids.com]

What does Wall Street to satisfy its frantic need for computer coders?  It's often HackerRank, a web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. One of its graduates, Gregory Furlong, had an improbable odyssey to Wall Street.

For almost 5 years, Gregory Furlong worked 50-hour weeks as a shipping clerk at a Best Buy 2 miles from his childhood home in Wilmington, DE. It was a kind of employment purgatory for a computer obsessive who tinkers with motherboards in his free time. So last year, Furlong, 30, enrolled in a 3-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase in December for its 2-year technology training program.

This is Wall Street’s new tech meritocracy. While financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley, banks need to fill so many programming jobs that elite schools can’t possibly pump out enough candidates. So the industry is looking in places it never did, turning to outside firms to evaluate prospective programmers based on objective measurements, not their pedigree.

The idea is that people lacking a computer science degree - art majors, graphic designers and chemistry graduates from the University of Delaware like Furlong - can still make the leap to well-paid careers in technology. By using algorithms to spot talented coders, HackerRank and competitors with names like Codility claim they’ve essentially increased the world’s supply of developers.