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BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

byot.app

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Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#11
This seems like pretty bad solution to a pretty straightforward problem. Imagine the weird cliques you'd import into your company culture while dealing with essentially a mini-union of entitled kids from the world's most overrated undergrad programs.

I've worked with folks from these schools and juxtaposed with state school grads, there isn't anything special about them that makes them more desirable when it comes to actually working on a business problem that involves software.

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#13
Interesting that they're doing this for new grads.

I've thought about whether you could have a site like this for experienced teams.

Lots of people stay at employers that suck, because they like their teammates and don't want to let them down. I think it would be a game changer if experienced teams could jump ship in one go. It would certainly benefit the new employer as the cost of hiring would be less, and the time to getting productive would be less. From the employees side, a company that's in the market for an entire team is an attractive prospect, since it's likely to be in a growth phase and well funded

Informally, it's not that rare for a complete team to leave a company and all, or mostly, end up at the same new employer. But formally lots of people have non-solicitation clauses and it may also be some kind of tort to invite people to violate them. But I do wonder how easy or hard such a site would be to legally defend.

That would be the kind of 'disruptive innovation' I could get behind: changing the balance of power and making people's lives better.

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#14
post #13

Interesting that they're doing this for new grads. I've thought about whether you could have a site like this for experienced teams. Lots of people stay at employers that suck, because they like their teammates and don't want to let them down. I think it would be a game changer if experienced teams could jump ship in one go. It would certainly benefit the new employer as the cost of hiring would be less, and the time…

Both of my tech jobs specifically have had non-solicitation clauses to prevent me from doing this type of thing. They both have 1 year lock outs on convincing my friends to quit their jobs

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#15
One particular use case I'd like to bring up (that you did mention!) are couples as well as grad students. I met my husband in graduate school for our masters, but when we were looking for jobs, it was extremely difficult to find companies that accepted us both even though we applied for the same positions. Like, I would get into one company, but my SO would get rejected. Eventually, we settled for different companies in the same city, but it was SUCH A PAIN and stressful. The other alternative we looked at was just both working remotely. So, I would have loved something like this so we could've just applied together!

Also, I also agree that one-application should work. There's no reason that it's necessary to do so many interviews. Questions were pretty much the same and they weren't relevant to the job at hand, so why ask them? To assess my skill? Then, a single central application would do.

Still, I would like this for non-grads as well. So my husband and I can use it lest we do this entire thing again. Also agree that knowing someone intimate increases retention. I really dislike the company I work at, but it pays well and my family is here!

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, that is one of the primary concerns on the employer side we've heard. It is easier to hire new grads for sure. Our solution to that is to offer highly desirable engineers. Our founding group is a set of high school friends, currently all juniors at Caltech, CMU, and MIT. In our first batch, we have numerous groups with high Putnam scores, high ranking competitive programmers, and 2+ FAANG internships. There w…

It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive. Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10: the ones which get far more recruiter reachouts than students. The other thing that could be a sell is retention. Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult. If you’d have data or proof that this approach significantly increases retention and…

> Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult.

surely it's not that difficult:

the value to an employer of a, er, "lightly-used second hand" grad with +1-2 years of real world engineering experience is dramatically higher than that of a completely green new grad. if an employer takes the initiative to award market-rate anchored raises commensurate with the value a junior engineer with 1-2 years of experience can produce, wouldn't that solve most of the problem?

(or do junior engineers often switch jobs for reasons entirely unrelated to employers not offering market-rate salary progression? )

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its a cool idea, but unless this is aimed at large tech companies (which maybe it is, I can't tell), I can't see the value here. I know you are from highly sought after school but to be honest the working industry of software engineering is very little like your college experience. You are not going to be hired as new grads to be writing proofs using turing machines. You are going to be thrown into the grinde…

Thank you for the advice. Addressing the first part, yes, we are aiming at large tech companies. This is mostly because we need companies that actually need to hire large numbers of people since groups of 4 > individuals. Of couse we thought about addressing senior engineers as well, much like Stripe's original hiring program, but we determined that there were too many problems regarding that for now.

There might be a potential market in HFT/trading firms (market makers). They're struggling to recruit right now (industry is doing very well, so high headcount growth) and they're usually pretty small so joining w/ friends means working in closer proximity than you might get in big tech.

Their small class size and heavy new-grad hiring also means that they're usually more flexible with recruiting and some would probably welcome a new pipeline for talented new grads like this.

Re: BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads

#19
post #11

This seems like pretty bad solution to a pretty straightforward problem. Imagine the weird cliques you'd import into your company culture while dealing with essentially a mini-union of entitled kids from the world's most overrated undergrad programs. I've worked with folks from these schools and juxtaposed with state school grads, there isn't anything special about them that makes them more desirable when it comes to…

Yeah, this is probably going to bring in overconfident, unmanageable cliques far more often than great cohesive teams that aren’t looking to strike out on their own. I say this as someone who graduated from an elite school (so not sour grapes or anything)...
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