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This article neglects to understand the massive college-hire pipelines that top companies set up. It's not that companies aren't hiring junior developers, it's

• deleted 5y ago
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• nostrebored 5y ago
  I made this mistake. I did undergrad research instead of internships in school and was sure I wanted to do a PhD -- until my final semester. I ultimately wound up having to do a much worse internship than I would've gotten partnered with my school. It took me nearly three months to find it. Big mistake that I recommend anyone in University reading this right now to avoid. Diversify your experiences!
• bluefirebrand 5y ago
  I basically did that out of a small university with no internship experience or strong university/personal connections, in 2013. It was definitely a struggle at start and I've had to struggle through some really crappy roles, but I'm doing pretty solid now. Making almost double now than I was when I started out, I'm a team lead now and very happy with the company I am with now.
• arnvald 5y ago
  Hi, author here, that's a very fair point that I didn't consider. It totally makes sense that the number of available jobs looks smaller than it is, because some of them are never really advertised in public. Thanks for sharing that!
  • joe-collins 5y ago
    That does suggest that the doom-and-gloom predictions are wrong, but I'd hesitate to call those jobs "available" when they only exist for a tiny slice of the job-seekers.
• taurath 5y ago
  It’s absolutely true, and interviews at most companies are set up like “did you take an algorithms course”, with questions like “develop a path finding algorithm (a*)” for web frontend work. I am self taught and got “lucky” finding a small company paying peanuts that had a lot for me to do. I interviewed multiple people with several yoe and degrees and found they couldn’t do very simple things that anyone who’d built any frontend could have done. That was over 8 years ago now and I’ve moved on to much bigger companies and much more responsibility. But I tell my friends nowadays you have to get very lucky to find any company that will hire you based on ability to code rather than ability to pass a theory heavy interview.
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  • ummonk 5y ago
    The credentials are a much bigger barrier than the interview format. You can easily self-teach the algorithms / data structures theory.
    • taurath 5y ago
      Not that easily, especially when there are things that are rarely used in actual development that CS courses force you to memorize - it’s hard to know what is important and what is not. Code interview prep books being 400+ pages kind of show this.
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. One of the things we had going for us as an industry is that our interviews might be BS but at least anyone had a shot. You didn’t have to go to Harvard. Now that’s ending.
• KittenInABox 5y ago
  This especially sucks because the CS Academia track is much less diverse than outside of it: Coding bootcamps, self-taught, etc. have all the diverse candidates companies claim they're looking for and I can guarantee those folks are hungrier and want it more than most college grads.
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  • amusedcyclist 5y ago
    Yeah but to be a good programmer, it helps a lot to have a real CS education. "Hunger" and "wanting it more" is no substitute for understanding CS fundamentals
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• jimmaswell 5y ago
  For new grads in recent times, TCS and the like can be a great career starter if you can settle for the job not being glamorous, having to move where they put you, and high variability in career development depending on what you get put on (possibly paid to do nothing at all for stretches of time, which are on you to do something productive with or not). Good beginning pay for a fresh grad and high job security. Not even sure how relevant having to move is anymore with so much more being remote.
• manachar 5y ago
  What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping? It crops up over and over. If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above. There's nothing inherently within most software development that makes it out of reach of being treated like a technical skill like electricians, carpentry, or plumbing. Personally, I suspect it's more to do with "cultural fit" issues than skill issues. College is a great filter to find people who self-select and are trained to fit into the global corporate world. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is concentrating wealth into the hands of people whom already have significant wealth and advantages. Efforts to counteract this (like the GI Bill, and college loans) have tended to have additional expensive barriers to weed out people deemed a "bad fit". For example, requiring more advanced degrees or hard to get internships (that may even be unpaid!).
  • curiousllama 5y ago
    Gatekeeping effectively boils down to using a heuristic to make a decision (good or bad). Once a heuristic is known, people who want $thing will optimize for $arbitrary_heuristic. Those with more resources will use them to optimize better. Toss in natural human network effects (eg, giving a friend advice), and those with resources will tend to dominate. You need active countervailing forces to avoid that natural tendency.
  • epicureanideal 5y ago
    I recommend a book that discusses this topic in detail: Pedigree. Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and wealth affect hiring.
  • theamk 5y ago
    I don’t see an “upper-middle class” filter in this particular case though. The company college hiring pipelines are often not limited to Ivy League or “top 10” universities. For example my company was looking fOr summer interns, and any college would work. We’ve had an intern on our team from college which was ranked around #80... gave him full time offer btw.
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• vanilla_nut 5y ago
  I can't believe that the biggest (and supposedly "best") tech companies recruit from only a small selection of schools, and completely ignore 99% of applications from other schools. I used to think it was a total waste of talent, but the more experience I get in industry, the more I realize that it's probably for the best that so many of us are forgotten by the big companies. It gives me hope that we can escape the Google/Facebook duopoly that we live in now.
  • ummonk 5y ago
    Most of the well funded fast growth startups that could meaningfully challenge big tech are actually even more picky about pedigree for entry level hires.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      Perhaps that's why they fail? They are trying to play by the same rules, on the same field, with the same types of people. A well-funded, fast-growth startup that hired from a pool of people who don't think and believe the same things as the big-tech hires might do better at addressing the problems that plague big tech.
  • Jach 5y ago
    Part of it is just incredible laziness. One year my team was late in selecting intern resumes to interview for joining our team the next summer, and getting later because prospects who were contacted had already accepted internships elsewhere. When I was asked to help out selecting resumes to contact, they were all stored in a google drive folder with subfolders for each school. I asked for a list of who had already been contacted so I don't submit duplicates, and learned that the former guy doing it had just gone into the UC Berkeley folder and was picking files from there. One, no wonder they were taken, but two, come on... I downloaded everything into a flat local folder, and reviewed resumes by a mix of random selection with shuf and pdfgrep'ing some keywords I thought might be unique.
  • microtherion 5y ago
    > tech companies recruit from only a small selection of schools I don't really think it's true. At least a few years ago, I saw statistics that one of the highest represented universities at Apple was San Jose State — simply due to being large and local. I recently had the opportunity to interview 3 fresh college graduates for Apple jobs, so out of curiosity, I looked up their colleges to see what kind of filters the recruiters are applying (I thought all 3 were well qualified). 2 of the 3 went to universities ranked between 10-20 in Computer Science in the US, the 3rd went to a college that is not ranked in any discipline in the US News rankings. So I highly doubt that the filtering is as narrow as is claimed. Unpredictable and not particularly accurate, I'll easily believe.
• theptip 5y ago
  Yep, this is the “credential” that you buy when you go to college. You also buy knowledge but the credential is nontrivial. Boot camps seem to be another path for non-credentialed people to get on the first rung of the ladder. They typically do a similar kind of “hiring funnel” as a college would with big companies.
• mettamage 5y ago
  I didn’t know this was the case, took a vacation/sabbatical for a year and suddenly couldn’t apply to FAANG anymore because I missed the “graduation cycle”. I feel so stupid, if I had known then I would have never taken a sabbatical. In the years that followed I went almost into a depression because of it. Because I worked so hard (obtaining multiple masters) to try to get a shot and never got one. In retrospect, I feel my approach to FAANG was a much riskier endeavor than I realized. And then it got complicated. People on HN offered to refer me. It never fully worked out. Here is why: * Sometimes I screwed it up by not strongly chasing after it * I wasn’t a recent enough grad anymore, I needed to interview for E4 * One time an acquaintance of mine offered to give a referral and then ultimately didn’t but before he didn’t, I declined a referral from a HN’er to the same company because of it I am working at an okay company, but I feel stuck. I want to work with people that want to treat the company they work for as if it is their own. I want fellow colleagues to be entrepreneurial. I am missing that.
  • legostormtroopr 5y ago
    You should really talk to someone about this, because you attitude of “I missed out on an internship, so my life is ruined” isn’t healthy. People at FAANGs don’t “own the company by any means any more. And the fact that you have a job (and probably a good job in software) shows how privileged US developers can be. Having an office job, in a growth industry, in an in-demand field, in a country with lots of opportunities is a huge privilege that most don’t have have. Sure you don’t work at an ad-tech FAANG company earning obscene rates, but it’s not the end of the world.
    • mettamage 5y ago
      I am Dutch, average wage is 40K to 50K in euro’s. Definitely not the end of the world but the US has a lot more growth opportunities.
  • mavelikara 5y ago
    > I want fellow colleagues to be entrepreneurial How entrepreneurial is someone who will work only in companies created 20+ years ago, enjoying the comforts of a monopolistic market position created off of the work of other engineers? Some people go work at a big company, some others go work a company big.
• georgeburdell 5y ago
  It's even more nuanced than you describe. Even within the hiring funnel, which school you go to often determines where you end up in the company. I will take my old employer (Intel) as an example. MIT, Stanford, etc. had a monopoly on "integration" engineers, which were the high visibility/high impact roles that coordinated all of the wafer fabrication steps among the engineers in process, yield, metrology, etc. The rank-and-file process, data analysis, etc. engineers were pulled from the next tier of schools. Finally, metrology, reliability, and QA came from all over, usually 2nd or 3rd rung state schools.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  FWIW, I’ve worked with some very talented college students from lesser-known universities who were able to land FAANG jobs at graduation. They weren’t directly recruited, but their applications were still taken seriously, at least at the time (few years back) A parallel problem I’m seeing is that much of the internet advice for juniors is written as if the world revolves around FAANG companies. A lot of the local college students I’ve mentored slate convinced that a reasonable starting compensation is $200K for 1st year CS graduates at every company and that they’re going to get it by playing a game where they interview at 5 different companies simultaneously and make them bid against each other. It’s a shock when they enter the job market and realize companies aren’t in a rush to pay them Google-level salaries for basic webdev or app development work. It’s bad enough that when I start talking to new mentees I can almost guess which internet communities and even blog posts they’ve been using to gather their view of CS jobs.
  • jackson1442 5y ago
    > FWIW, I’ve worked with some very talented college students from lesser-known universities who were able to land FAANG jobs at graduation. They weren’t directly recruited, but their applications were still taken seriously, at least at the time Can confirm. I come from an average state school and landed a FAANG internship for next summer. I always try to get my foot in the door early so there’s still undeniably plenty of spots left because if it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, they’re probably picking the Stanford student over the other student.
  • _fat_santa 5y ago
    > A parallel problem I’m seeing is that much of the internet advice for juniors is written as if the world revolves around FAANG companies. I see this sentiment on Reddit so much that at times I wonder how much of "everyone is rejecting juniors" can be attributed to juniors applying to only FAANG's and getting rejected. Regarding the unreasonable salary expectations, I think that's just case of students seeing insane salaries in the Bay Area and thinking that it's reflective of the entire industry rather than a response to the insane cost of living in the bay area. A new-grad making $200k per year sounds insane on paper, until you realize that a studio apartment near the office is going to run you $4k/month
• octorian 5y ago
  > It's not that companies aren't hiring junior developers, it's that they _only_ hire from their college recruiting pipeline for their entry level roles. As someone who graduated shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, I'm extremely bitter about this behavior. I basically got screwed out of that pipeline by economic circumstance, then was far enough removed to no longer qualify for it once things recovered. (And that pipeline isn't just the hiring of new grads, but also the system of internship and co-op opportunities that lead to such hiring.)
• bsanr 5y ago
  Somewhere, from across the bay, blows a wind, and on it wafts the faintest whisper, an echo of an echo, which seems to say, if you listen closely, closely, Institutional racism~ ...Jokes aside - and not to make anyone feel guilty, or to be divisive, but to point out a natural consequence of the above described dynamic - I went to an HBCU. Companies did not visit campus with the frequency that I came to understand they did PWIs of similar cultural or academic standing. I imagine that if companies don't visit your school, you're not on the shortlist for, er, "meritocratic" recruitment preferences.
• secondaryacct 5y ago
  But coming from a small uni in Normandy, France, it's also possible not to go to a "top" internship, shit that up and be let go with a kick in the ass. You can go to a small do-it-all no-money startup for a few years, suffer your ass through it, climb up a few more job and end up exactly at the same place with a very good story and a lot of experience from doing more with less that top companies can appreciate, and actually be the one bossing the silver spoons into work. It's a fallacy to think people are disadvantaged by not going straight to the top with no real world experience.
• bumblebritches5 5y ago
  > Tell you what, I would not want to be a brand new developer without university connections trying to get a role right now. If you start looking without top internships and a degree from a school with connections it seems like it'll be rough. Self taught, can confirm.
• ecf 5y ago
  This is something I’ve been experiencing in my quest to switch from IT to SWE. Entry level jobs are for new grads, and absolutely nobody cares about personal projects or professional experience that doesn’t have “software engineer” in the job title.
• feketegy 5y ago
  Realities and realities. In most EU countries, companies would hire even garbage men if they prove they can code a little bit, because of such high demand for programmers. Most companies I know like to hire junior devs and form them to their company culture rather than to deal with the "baggage" of senior devs with 15 - 20 years of experience. More and more senior devs complain that they are essentially "unhireable" because of their experience and age.
• sershe 5y ago
  How does hiring immigrants fit into this pipeline? Every team I've worked was majority immigrant (myself included ;), from entry level all the way to a few layers up the management chain. Most didn't go to any US schools.