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Comment by Flux159 | Hacker News Reader

I would also say that more than 1 in 6 companies don’t have the culture or resources to make college graduates successful - I’m more experienced with software engineers, but it takes significant time and effort from management and senior talent to make recent graduates set up for success. It’s less for other senior talent, but sometimes senior talent still needs significant help.

One good thing about most college graduates is that they can generally learn new things quickly, especially if they’re willing to put in some effort.

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> I would also say that more than 1 in 6 companies don’t have the culture or resources to make college graduates successful

There is a lot of truth to this, in my experience. Larger companies (F500) have formalized rotational programs for new grads which sets them up for success, but they can only take a limited amount of grads and almost no middle + small companies have anything similar.

The corporate culture of hiring new grads seemed to die in the GFC of 2008. Companies thought it would be too great a risk to hire someone with no experience, so they would have job postings for candidates with "2 to 5 years of experience." This is also why we have a perpetual talent shortage in that demographic, bc everyone wanst them and there isn't a new pipeline of young people to back fill that range.

Unfortunately my experience with recent grads is that they were significantly less likely to be willing to put in a lot effort than more senior devs.

It’s one thing to train a person. It’s another to teach them not to interrupt people or be rude. I had a recent experience with a college student who had just terrible communication skills. It was a total turn off, and the quality of the work was good. And yet I’d never choose to work with this person again.

And you've never encountered someone rude or with poor communication skills from a different generation?

I’m just speaking to my experience with this crop. Actually their communication issues I haven’t encountered in the work place otherwise. It’s about what specifically was poor, which isn’t easy or worth expressing as a comment on HN.

I’ve found places that only hire “senior” dev talent to be pretty trash culture-wise. Management only wants coders who can pump out features and does nothing to invest in any type of learning or support. Even things like documentation are deprioritized because any new dev should be able to “hit the ground running” because, hey, we only hire experienced engineers, right?

I've worked at three tech companies with that policy and various degrees of success with it. One had the best documentation and onboarding experience I've seen so far. The other two were close to what you describe.

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