Wall Street’s Frantic Push to Hire Coders

For almost five years, Gregory Furlong worked 50-hour weeks as a shipping clerk at a Best Buy two miles from his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware. 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 three-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank, a web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in December for its two-year technology training program.