How Did Buster Benson Become a Software Engineer at Amazon?

Buster Benson says Amazon would hire liberal-arts people and train them as engineers. A coworker asked if he knew Perl. He did not. He bought a Perl book and spent a weekend cramming, copying scripts from the internet and building forms. That was enough to make him think he could do the job. He emailed an engineering team about an opening and heard nothing, so he told HR they were not answering. They let him interview even though the role was closed. He said he could learn and that he cared, and they hired him. The site he walked into was old: Perl, plus C and makefiles that generated the HTML.