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If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.
A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to b…
Arguably, for the type of developer this article is discussing, I see AI coming for the junior “mathematical” or “algo” developer before the product/feature focused developer.
Those skills you don't fully develop at school or university, let alone a half year of bootcamp. I believe you have to have a developer's or engineering mindset in some way, early on in life, to be good at it.
My point being, if you choose a career swap, or suddenly realise you were studying something you are not passionate about, you still have a very big leap to make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has at least as much to do with how wealthy your family is as it does with how well you do on standardized testing. I was accepted to MIT, but my family wasn't poor enough to receive need-based aid, and we certainly weren't wealthy enough for me to go without aid (especially because it would have been out-of-state tuition), so I ultimately went elsewhere. I expect a fair number of others here have similar stories.…
> especially because it would have been out-of-state tuition I'm calling bullshit on this story because MIT is not a public school - there is no in-state vs. out-of-state tuition, and as someone who did a ton of cost comparisons on the private vs. public schools where I was accepted, I have difficulty believing someone who was accepted to MIT would confuse this fact.
What I do remember was that MIT was so incredibly expensive that I didn't have to give it much thought -- it was never a viable option due to cost and lack of financial aid possibilities.