"Why shouldn't it" does not answer the question, which is "what made desktop computers (and servers, to a certain degree) a unique popular product that customers routinely build out of parts".

I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).

I just realized that you might not know what a "bootcamper" is. Facebook's hiring process generally goes like this:

- you're interviewed with a random team and evaluated if you'd be a good fit for the company.

- you are hired and go through a multi-week "bootcamp" to learn FB's vocabulary, processes, and tech stack, fixing some real bugs and implementing some real (but minor) features in the process.

- upon completing the bootcamp you seek a team that is of interest to you and if interest is mutual, you join the team. If you can't find a team after X weeks, you part ways with the company.

First of all, AR/VR is a tough problem space, often for reasons not immediately obvious to common folk. Second, Facebook in my opinion is a wrong home for long-term efforts that may not bear fruit for many years, with its 6-month attention span of employee performance management and its "move fast and break things" culture (both of which clashed with the meticulous hardware-oriented Oculus culture). And finally, a significant portion of people working in AR/VR didn't believe in AR/VR as a product. Some were there for the gravy train, some were there for interesting OS work, some were there for bleeding-edge technology, but I'd say less than half would say "we're working on something that people will love and pay money for". To me it felt more like well-funded academia even and less like a startup (which it was supposed to be).

There were many, many influential software projects done in the past that are not games. Some of the people responsible worked in AR/VR and drove its vision and technical roadmaps.

Knowledge of C (XROS was written in C and during the interviews the candidate rather uncommonly wasn't given a choice of programming language) and general understanding of how a computer works at a low level. Knowing the purpose of "volatile", understanding cache lines, mapping virtual memory to physical memory, DMA, this kind of thing.

I think everyone had a degree but looking at my degree (applied math) in particular nothing that I had learned at the uni was immediately useful and I think there isn't really anything that would prevent a smart person with a GED and some history of, say, Linux kernel contributions from succeeding on a team like this. Except may be a degree is needed for H1B visa for those who need it.

Yep, and the common mantra is that "ambitious" and "v1" shall never occur together in the same sentence.