A large part of it is ease of hiring. In 80% of cases, new grads are relatively simple to hire; you go to campus recruiting fairs, get bundles of resumes, and s

A large part of it is ease of hiring. In 80% of cases, new grads are relatively simple to hire; you go to campus recruiting fairs, get bundles of resumes, and since new grads don’t usually have specialized skills, you can do bulk filtering by things like GPA or simple coding exercises. There are a lot of negative consequences of this sort of “factory hiring” mentality (for one, you exclude huge numbers of some groups of people because everything is one size fits all), but if you contrast with hiring experienced folks, it’s way more streamlined. You don’t have to do sourcing, figure out location/geography, match up skill sets and team fit, deal with expectations around title/role, etc. A lot of people mention salary and hours worked, but I suspect the real limiting factor in hiring at fast growing companies is time and staffing to do hiring, and if all you care about is the number of people typing code, you get new grads being overrepresented