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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

blog.kuperate.com

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

#311

Post by Too »

valbaca wrote: post #218
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.

This is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager. She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!" I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to th…

Haha. “CTO in small startup” can easily mean 3 friends got together and tried to make an app in moms basement, while giving each other fancy roles.

Never look at titles alone. Their scope vary wildly across companies. Even in big corporations they can be used by friends patting each other on the back or to make employees feel important as an alternative to giving an actual raise.

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

#312

Post by kthejoker2 »

A thing that will never cease to irk me is the flattening of titles in tech.

Seeing people with similar titles to my own who I wouldn't trust with my toaster much less my MLOps pipelines is infuriating, because it just dilutes the signals to recruiters, employers, prospective clients.

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

#313

Post by tarsinge »

Too wrote: post #311
valbaca wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager. She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!" I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to th…

Haha. “CTO in small startup” can easily mean 3 friends got together and tried to make an app in moms basement, while giving each other fancy roles. Never look at titles alone. Their scope vary wildly across companies. Even in big corporations they can be used by friends patting each other on the back or to make employees feel important as an alternative to giving an actual raise.

I understand the problem of ridiculously inflated titles (like “VP Alliance and Strategic Partnerships World…” for the first employee doing sales) but on the other hand I don’t really see an alternative for CEO and CTO, what would be more appropriate titles for co founders for small startups?

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

#314

Post by vp8989 »

austincheney wrote: post #44
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…

Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.

It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior".

This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder".

It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.

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

#315

Post by hungryforcodes »

gambiting wrote: post #201
hungryforcodes wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Even if we take MIT which seems to graduate AT MOST 10,000 students each year -- times 10 (10x)-- it's only 100,000 graduates. The 1 million comes from where?

They did reply earlier that they meant all people in US but later deleted the comment.

Ah, yeah I didn't see that :)

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

#316

Post by Tijdreiziger »

tragictrash wrote: post #275
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a planetary scale, I wouldn't actually consider that 'pretty fucking big'. For comparison (metro areas, figures from Wikipedia): San Francisco: 4.7 million Berlin: 6.1 million London: 14.3 million NYC: 20.1 million Shenzhen: 23.3 million Tokyo: 37.5 million

I never realized how big Tokyo is. Wow.

In fairness, it was a bit unfair to include that one, as Tokyo is the biggest city in the world!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities#List

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

#317

Post by mrexroad »

_wldu wrote: post #161
iancmceachern wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Paging George P. Burdell…

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

#318

Post by mrexroad »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #216
gambiting wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do Yes, and globally that's still nothing. You are talking about the elite of the elite, chosen ones among the chosen ones. In other 1st world countries, and even in majority of USA no, recent graduates are not paid quarter of a million dollars. There's a select, very exclusive, very limited group of people who do. But like others have pointe…

I wasn't aware that "elite of the elite" included many public schools that aren't even that difficult to get into. If you're a California resident UCSD, UCI, UCB, UCLA, UCSB are all accessible schools that give you a very solid shot at a FAANG job out of college. If you're a Michigan resident, same goes for UMich. Illinois, UIUC. Georgia, Georgia Tech. Texas, any number of great state schools. These schools are not t…

Fwiw, while Ga Tech is not that difficult to get in to, their undergrad CS program is that difficult to graduate from.

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

#319

Post by mrexroad »

lkrubner wrote: post #243

I remember when I was in high school, I had some friends who studied karate, and they were like, "I finally made it to black belt." Meaning, they were a master now. They were 16 years old, and had maybe 3 years experience. In Taiwan, in the 1890s... uh, they would not be regarded as black belt. Even then it was clear that there was a lot of "belt inflation" happening. The karate schools like the children to feel like…

Fwiw, black belt was basically when you actually started learning. Everything up until then was really just gaining what you needed in order to actually start learning. IIRC the “black” represented the dirt (effort) accumulated over time.

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

#320

Post by R0b0t1 »

nwiswell wrote: post #299
R0b0t1 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks great on paper but the people you really need to reach don't have undergrad done. Is this one of those rare masters one can complete with no undergrad done?

> Is this one of those rare masters one can complete with no undergrad done? No. OMSCS is practically open door compared to other elite CS programs, but an undergrad degree is a strict requirement. It's graduate school. In fact I don't believe there are any such Master's programs, or at least not accredited ones in the US.

The only example I was aware of was (a now defunct?) masters program by I want to say Oxford, but I haven't been able to turn it up recently.

In any case -- until you have complete undergrad for $5-7k and doable part time, no, these jobs aren't accessible.

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