People who have done well at math competitions (USAMO, IMO, PUTNAM), competition programming (ACM, USACO, codejam, topcoder), science fairs (ISEF, STS), or capture the flag (DEFCON, secuinside, GITS). Those competitions don't just select for ability, they also select for quickness. We are in a very competitive space.

People who have contributed value to open source projects. Show us your github. Got stars? Code is never measured in quantity, but rather quality. We value those who can do more with less code; software engineering doesn't have an external selection pressure for low part count and cost like EE and ME, but you pay massive costs down the line in debugging and upkeep.

People who can design good APIs and source layouts on the first try. This is crucial to working in teams and scaling. Before you do work, you should be able to explain to a contractor what you want done. ME has a great divide between design and machining that software lacks; we want to try to fix that.