I also went to a good but unknown school and was recruited by Amazon and Google. As far as I can tell it was purely due to applicable work experience (which I got working in companies you never heard of).

No one is arguing that once you have your first job, what college you went to matters. If you can get that first job, then only experience matters.

Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.

That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.

But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?

No clue, but these recent grads can instead get a job at a less prestigious company & apply to the lucrative ones after they have a few years' xp.

Here in Berlin it seems the market for developers is as strong as ever, regardless of Corona.