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?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591765
[2] https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/state-of-startups-q2-2024-charts/
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.<p>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.<p>The huge layoffs over the last few years have also made experienced staff available and less expensive.
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.<p>Got a DevOps type role February of this year.<p>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.<p>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?
> even large tech companies know that future tech leads must be built by nurturing CS grads<p>Aren’t tech companies also notoriously threatened by tech debt due to their short term orientation?