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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

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Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#161

Post by _wldu »

iancmceachern wrote: post #89
selestify wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.

Yeah but this is less than 1/10 of 1% of the number of people that graduate every year. By the same logic you could say that everyone has trust funds, because most of the people in this small slice have them. Just because something applies to the top 0.1% of the US doesn't mean it applies to the rest of the 99.9%. This is the problem with wealth and opportunity disparity in this country. The haves think that the have…

Georgia Tech is consistently ranked a Top 10 CS program (worldwide) and their OMSCS program now accounts for 10% of all MSCS degrees issued. It costs about 6,000 to 7,000 USD total:

"OMSCS started in January 2014 with 380 students. Enrollment increased each semester (excluding summer terms). In 2019 I believed that we were very close to the peak, since we are graduating more and more students. But then, the pandemic hit and we have kept growing every semester. This spring term we just passed a new mile stone – we have over 12,000 students, 12,016 to be precise. We might be at the peak or very close to it. Apparently, OMSCS is the biggest degree program, online or not in any subject in the US and probably the world. More importantly, the degree is of the same quality of the on campus program. We have 56 courses (we started with 5); several courses now have over 1,000 students. We graduated 1,970 in 2021 for a total of 6,470 so far. We are graduating in a year well over 10% of the number of those that graduate with MS in CS in the US." - Zvi Galil

Online, Cheap and Elite: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018...

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#162

Post by vmception »

End justifies the means, to me this doesn’t cross the line, except for the potentially visa fraud part and the feeder org could just be upfront about what they’re doing.

For the us citizens into something like that it doesn’t matter to me.

Once you get in the organization and good salary figure it out, it’s the big tech that has an inefficiency screening process that isn’t good for anyone. They should be having their own bootcamps imo, train your potential employees.

Given what software engineer actually do at all levels, there is no reason to waste your life and time on a ladder unless you personally want to feel more comfortable in the role

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#164

Post by kolla »

a4isms wrote: post #7

There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times." Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others." And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engi…

When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#165

Post by quacked »

ButterWashed wrote: post #148
robbyking wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

Having just taken a job as a l Lead SRE in a large consultancy despite not being skilled or experienced enough I'm terrified that I'll struggle to move to a new org solely because of my job title. It's jarring how much of an impact it has made on me and I don't really know what to do about it. I'm aware that it's only really a problem when I move but I don't think the work and tech I'll be exposed to will help me rea…

Just rephrase the job title on your resume so it's faithful to reality but not the literal title.

At my last job, my formal title was "Systems Integration Engineer", which has a real industry definition as recognized by various engineering fellowships. Since I did very little formal Systems Integration at the job, I labelled myself as a "Cargo Logistics Engineer" on my resume. It worked fine.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#166

Post by kayodelycaon »

uncomputation wrote: post #42

This is another reason that, while I understand people’s complaints, I still believe CS interviews should include algorithmic and whiteboard tests. I know they may seem “outdated” or “irrelevant” to some, and yes, it is very unlikely that you will need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm by hand without any reference, but it is more that it shows a general competence in computing which will transfer to other, more rele…

It really depends on what kind of developer you're looking for. In the web applications I've worked on, knowledge of application architecture and experience with linux trumps anything I learned in a college course.

Based on my experience, theory problems on white boards is about as useful as dropping a CUPs automation problem on unsuspecting interviewees.

Build me a CUPs driver that drops pdf into in folder in 15 minutes or less. Without documentation.

Bonus points if you can ask if you can skip that bullshit and install and configure an existing a package.

Note: I'm a senior developer with at least a decade of experience. I don't just slap two libraries together. If you want to have fun, dig into how macOS sandboxes CUPs. My bash scripts were not happy.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#167

Post by zuhayeer »

a4isms wrote: post #7

There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times." Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others." And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engi…

We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi

We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#168

Post by imwillofficial »

selestify wrote: post #64
gambiting wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how HN sometimes behaves as if the entire world is one or two small corners of the US.

If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.

It is objectively rare by every use of the word. Your doubling down is embarrassing.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#169

Post by osrec »

AmericanBlarney wrote: post #151

When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no…

Large outsourcing companies are not really hired for talent (at least not from what I saw in the investment banking world).

They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay).

If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#170

Post by trentnix »

distrill wrote: post #156
heyitsanewacco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner! I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels. Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change. Never take a job for a company where you are not…

> Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) why?

Maybe he bought a house in the neighborhood. Maybe he really likes writing COBOL. Maybe his spouse works there as well. Maybe he is simply extremely risk averse.

There are a number of good reasons somebody might decide to stay put, even if it might be more lucrative or exciting elsewhere.

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