I think there’s something to this. While the big co’s do train, they also have a lot of cachet and recruit from top schools whose grads would be fairly likely t

I think there’s something to this. While the big co’s do train, they also have a lot of cachet and recruit from top schools whose grads would be fairly likely to land jobs even without the big co internships. Meanwhile, at a small company, the six-figure cost of a single engineer creates a very hard limit such that there can only be a few engineers on the team. Given that constraint it is very hard to justify allocating one of those scarce “roster spots” to a junior engineer who may not add much value to the team for a long time depending on how hard they work and how aggressively they ramp up. Paradoxically, the high salaries that engineers command make training engineers on the job much more difficult. I wonder if there is an opportunity there for something like an apprentice developer program, as a step on the ladder underneath “junior engineer,” to help more people get past that first step.