

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

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.<p>I did not believe it until I tried to refer them to some startup companies. &#x27;too junior&#x27;, companies said. Some of them even prefer bootcamp graduates over university cs degrees, which I have no idea why.<p>Why don&#x27;t you hire junior engineers fresh out of college? What does it take for them to become startup-hire-able?<p>If you are hiring junior engineers, why then? What do you see in them?<p>Please also leave your email if you are hiring them. I might have some cool candidates for you.
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smt88
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.

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wingchen
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
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.

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jamesbrewer
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.

