Ask HN: Fresh CS grad – are you struggling to get a tech job?

3 points by amoorthy 1 year ago | 6 comments

5 days ago, HN had a long thread on a WSJ article [1] that stated tech jobs for fresh CS grads had dried up. I'm hearing the same from my nephew at Berkeley who's a talented programmer yet is struggling to get internships even after aceing coding assessments online. I'm confused as funding for startups remains similar to 2 years ago [2] and I suspect even large tech companies know that future tech leads must be built by nurturing CS grads. What am I missing?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591765 [2] https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/state-of-startups-q2-2024-charts/

smt88 1 year ago |

Fresh CS grads are a net cost to startups for a while, probably months and maybe years. It doesn't matter how many tests they've passed. They don't have real-world skills, especially non-technical skills.

They would've been hired easily by over-funded startups in previous years, but a lot of the money is now being raised by "AI" companies that are a thin veneer over external APIs or FOSS projects, so the number of developers needed is lower.

The huge layoffs over the last few years have also made experienced staff available and less expensive.

amoorthy 1 year ago | |

I'm very curious if experienced staff is available and less expensive now. As a venture-backed startup founder myself I'm quite eager to hire such folks and don't have the money to compete with larger firms. Maybe silly question but where are such folks hanging out, besides HN? :-)

OliverGuy 1 year ago |

Graduated June last year from my CS course at a good middle of the road uni that's well know but not for CS specifically.

Got a DevOps type role February of this year.

Pay is terrible, not much above min wage (UK), but should have a 50-100% increase once I've been there a year. Happy with that pay as its an excellent environment with a excellent team and a modern tech stack (hybrid cloud, k8s, lots of new AI/big data type projects happening) and where I have a very wide scope to learn new technologies and get stuck in with interesting things.

I do wonder how a junior dev can be anything other than a net positive (maybe devops is easier, doesn't feel like it...) for a company. I've taken up very little of more senior team members time to get up to speed, but then again we have good docs... It doesn't feel like I'm a burden and I'm definitely producing lots of value for both the 'devops team' and the 'development teams' we support. Maybe my personality and abilities skew my view but is it really that hard to hire junior devs that are proactive about learning and can be left to figure it it?

amoorthy 1 year ago | |

Thanks for sharing your experience and glad to hear you've found a good job/team/product-environment!

My experience working with junior devs is that while they may be smart they haven't worked in teams and contributed to large codebases. So they may struggle to understand how a larger codebase is structured, where is the optimal place to fix an issue, how to structure their own code to be maintainable longer term etc. So code-reviews take longer, with seniors sometimes having to refactor a large amount.

I think some younger devs that contribute to open source projects do much better in this regard.

wryoak 1 year ago |

> even large tech companies know that future tech leads must be built by nurturing CS grads

Aren’t tech companies also notoriously threatened by tech debt due to their short term orientation?

amoorthy 1 year ago | |

I don't have a view into many large tech companies but I imagine some level of tech debt exists in all of them. Are you suggesting that hiring fresh grads to resolve tech debt is unwise given the complexity of doing so?