To the OP, this is a great post, I endorse it as a tech lead / senior dev myself.
Your experience is not unusual, it seems that many tech companies are terrible at onboarding not only juniors but devs in general. It seems almost like a systemic problem to be honest. Many companies are good at this but too many aren't.
I think one thing that might help is more industry focus in CS degrees. CS is great but a "year in industry" and vocational training would be welcome for many as part of their training. Data structures and so on are great but until you've worked with the plethora of tools and processes you will encounter on day one in the industry, being thrown in at the deepend will be baffling and overwhelming. CS degrees and most day to day work as a dev are very different. A practical heads up on things like cloud infra, monitoring tools and CI/CD pipelines (to name just a few things) would be good.
I don't see how would "year in industry" make the very same companies better at on onboarding. There would be exact same issues, except students would be more powerless and more likely to be taken advantage of.
Year in industry means students spending a year in industry as part of their degree. We do it and it works well. You need a company culture that supports it though. This is normal practice in several other professions.
The point isn't to make companies better at onboarding, it's to stop juniors entering their first job feeling completely at sea.
Your experience is not unusual, it seems that many tech companies are terrible at onboarding not only juniors but devs in general. It seems almost like a systemic problem to be honest. Many companies are good at this but too many aren't.
I think one thing that might help is more industry focus in CS degrees. CS is great but a "year in industry" and vocational training would be welcome for many as part of their training. Data structures and so on are great but until you've worked with the plethora of tools and processes you will encounter on day one in the industry, being thrown in at the deepend will be baffling and overwhelming. CS degrees and most day to day work as a dev are very different. A practical heads up on things like cloud infra, monitoring tools and CI/CD pipelines (to name just a few things) would be good.