Microsoft

I think now that MS has real competition, it has sharpened its focus, has become more open-minded, and has broadened its willingness to consider new opportunities, risks, and models—even open source, which was blasphemous back in the days of Mr. Ballmer.

Glad to see Satya in charge (and Ballmer long gone). It's a good time to consider MS!

Many things pop up when you've been somewhere for decades, but one thing that I like to mention here is this HR policy, where even if you have years of industry experience, or even if you are technically qualified, you are treated as a college hire no matter if a hiring team might find you fully qualified or not.

Basically, hiring teams don't really get to see you in order to evaluate your qualification unless they have a req for a college hire. This means that you, as a candidate, have fewer opportunities since you are pushed into a smaller set of job openings (and auto-rejected from the industry-hire category). You, as a hiring team, are being excluded from considering candidates who are technically qualified.

This seems insane; policy trumps qualification!

It was like this when I joined back at the end of the last century. It's crazy that such an irrational policy is still the HR mantra.

I can whine about stack ranking and such, but many people have done so in the past, so I'll let it go.

Assuming you want to hire qualified candidates, then demand HR to stop filtering your evaluation of candidates based on them being fresh out of college (mind you, even for 1 year after graduation). You should use data-driven policies, not leftover policies from decades ago.