Ask HN: Who are hiring junior engineers fresh out of college?

8 points by wingchen 11 years ago | 4 comments

Some of my friends fresh out of college told me that it has been hard for them to land on an ideal startup job. They do not have a lot of industry coding experiences, but all of them have a solid training from great university programs.

I did not believe it until I tried to refer them to some startup companies. 'too junior', companies said. Some of them even prefer bootcamp graduates over university cs degrees, which I have no idea why.

Why don't you hire junior engineers fresh out of college? What does it take for them to become startup-hire-able?

If you are hiring junior engineers, why then? What do you see in them?

Please also leave your email if you are hiring them. I might have some cool candidates for you.

smt88 11 years ago |

I definitely don't prefer bootcamp over CS degrees, but for my companies/projects (which are small), I never hire junior devs.

There are lots of reasons, but the main one is that they're expensive. They take a lot of time to train and guide and they tend to write terrible code.

Experience is incredibly important for writing good code, as anyone who has hired a CS graduate will tell you. No amount of theory can prepare you for the tradeoffs and sub-optimal decision-making that you do at a startup.

As an example, one of my friends is a CS grad, and he's only ever written code in C, C++, Python, and JavaScript. As a result, he absolutely loves writing Node applications. He's never written a huge Node application or tried to maintain one written by someone else, but if he did, I guarantee he'd hate Node and wish he could use something with strict typing.

So I think your questions really answer themselves. People want experience, even if they have to pay extra for it.

Your friends will have no trouble getting jobs at large companies, though, and those will be much more stable (and have better mentorship) than most startups.

wingchen 11 years ago | |

Great answer! Thanks for sharing.

So how long do you think one should stay at big companies to train their coding skills then?

Or what should they at least learn there?

smt88 11 years ago | | |

There's not really a concrete formula here, and it really depends on what you want to do.

If you want to do cutting-edge research, you're probably better off at a large company. I just read about how HippyVM couldn't compete with HHVM. One main reason is that HHVM wasn't asked to make money in the beginning. It started as just a research project, with the hope of maybe saving on costs in the future. That kind of thing is only possible when you have extra cash.

If you want to work for a startup, a reasonable goal would be to have the skills to get the startup from pre-revenue to revenue without hiring anyone else. That's generally what I do in my work. I can guarantee that the company won't have to hire anyone else until there's revenue and a fairly large number of customers.

If you want to work for a small company, just stay on the lookout for those jobs while at the large company. If you represent your skills honestly and the small company hires you, then there's no reason to overthink it beyond that.

jamesbrewer 11 years ago |

smt88 hit the nail on the head.

Startups do not have much money. Even the ones that do should aim to keep their burn rates low. That generally means paying for a few experienced, battle-hardened engineers that produce results instead of picking up the cheap, green labor right out of school.

Training junior engineers is important -- they are the future of our industry, but hiring a junior engineer at a startup is a recipe for disaster. Most startups simply can't afford such an expense and it would be irresponsible to try.