Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?

"but no one is willing to invest equivalent resources towards training and mentorship"

There are companies and teams but you may have to dig deep. I would love to hire an entry level person for our small bootstrapped SAAS company but I run into some problems whenever I am interviewing someone entry level for web application development:

- They overvalue their salary requirements. I may get flak for this but I don't care. Just because you have completed a "bootcamp", you cannot ask for a salary that is FAANG level.

- They think they know more than they really do. I have interviewed a lot of entry level especially bootcampers who can write a app.get('/', (req, res) but have no idea how a GET request actually works. Most cannot tell me the difference between http header and body. But they surely know how to send an ajax request through code. Fundamentals people, fundamentals.

- A lot of them are unfortunately sold on the idea of frameworks to begin with and they start parroting things like "React or Svelte" but cannot write a simple javascript or an HTML form. Many cannot tell me how a form gets submitted from the client and processed through a server. Many have never written a

by hand.

- They are entitled just because they have a github (which mostly is a fork of a project or blank stuff)

- They don't really spend the time learning on their own. This is the biggest thing for me. You need to try and stand out from rest. doing a copied pasted github react project won't help especially when you don't understand the fundamentals.

- They don't want to compromise on "fully remote" even though they would be better off learning in person.

I am sounding rude here but just stating facts. I love to work with people who are entry level so I can teach them but unfortunately you want to be taught before you can be taught. These days, not so much. I would rather have you tell me that you want to learn but don't know much vs telling me how you can build a web app in Svelte but cannot answer basic http questions. I can smell bullshit from a mile because I have been doing this for 19 years now.

Many non-FAANG tech companies only hire new grads that have completed internships, and they dedicate tons of resources towards those programs. That reduces the risk for them and improves the experience for the junior engineer. There is a trend to focus these internship programs on building talent pipelines from underrepresented places - bootcamps, HBCUs, women's colleges, public universities, etc.

Local non-venture backed companies are always hiring entry level software developers. Look at Craigslist posts in Philly suburbs or Cincinnati or Denver or other tier 2/tier3 tech cities and their suburbs.

They cannot compete with venture backed companies so they take what they can get. All they'd love is to be able to hire a smart, ambitious person and train them and pay them well (for the area).

Excellent quality of life if you choose to do it longterm and great stepping stone if you need something now and want to move to NYC or SF later.

Not from the US, but I had assumed this was the whole point of internships right?

These days with the job market being what it is, there's very little incentive for companies to invest money into training when the person they're training is just going to leave in 12 months. Over that time scale the impact of an unskilled/new engineer is bigger than just the financial investment in them - someone, often multiple people have to mentor them which detracts from their productivity as well.

Using a previous role as an example - we had heaps of bespoke in-house tooling and systems that even skilled engineers had to be brought up to speed on and that would often take months before they were as productive as the rest of the team. I couldn't imagine having to do all that for them AND explain to them how DNS works every few days or something.

EDIT: I should clarify here because it sounds a bit like I hate uni grads. I actually only hate boot campers /s

I genuinely enjoy training people - it's very rewarding, and I like talking so everyone wins BUT what I mean is that in this climate it's not necessarily a good business decision in 100% of cases. I'd be happy to explain DNS to an interested audience, but it might not make sense for me to do that if they're just going to take that and work for our competition tomorrow.

> As someone who is speaking with a handful of people stuck in this situation, what direction should I guide them towards

Get experience. By any way possible. Have them build an online app - a blog system specialized for doctors, an RSS reader backend, documentation for an open source project, anything. Software is an unusual sector that experience can be earned outside of paid work.

If these "handful of people" have bachelors, have them apply for masters degrees at highly rated universities, then they get access to the University career services department to help them find a job. Note: I did not say they have to finish the masters degree, just that they enroll in a masters so they have access to the University recruiting pipeline.

You can find similar complains in many fields. Everyone wants you to magically have 2-3 years experience.

Sometimes there are smaller firms near the university that you went to that are interested in hiring graduates.

I think that it depends a lot on location.

I'm about to graduate with a bachelor's in CS and pretty much everyone I know has managed to get a job before graduation. I don't know how much effort other people had to put in, but if anything, I should have aimed higher considering how easy it was. I don't think that this is because me and my friends are incredible, we just happen to live somewhere with a very good local job market. I'm in Sweden btw.

Another tip I would give: try to be timely. Especially for college grads/early career, for some companies even when companies are hiring, they might not be hiring all year long (for college grads). The prime college hiring season (summer and fall) is coming up. Waiting until or starting in the winter and spring tends to be tougher.

My company is hiring junior engineers, but take into account that:

- the positions are filled quicker than any other position due to the number of applicants

- so many applicants do have interesting projects or internships that people whose CV show neither are never really under any serious consideration

The BigTech companies adore new college graduates, try Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft.

Does your college offer career fairs or college-specific job boards? Chin up. Breaking in is definitely challenging, but there are resources out there. Hopefully as the pandemic effects subside, there will be more in-person networking events. Some companies also like to recruit from hackathons and other contests. There are also some medium size companies that tend to keep significant entry level hiring pipelines.

One gotcha I would mention, though, is don’t go in with the expectation that submitting resumes down some company corporate HR website is sufficient. It is definitely worth it to get in front of companies in person when possible.

I have seen it where new graduates are referred internally but have to have a mentor prearranged (typically the referrer) to oversee the work of the junior before they are offered the position...not sure that's helpful though..

When I got my Junior position after university I had just been applying to _everything_, mid-senior engineer positions, did not care. I was eventually booked to interview for a "senior" position where the interviewers made it clear that they knew I was a new graduate with no experience and essentially conducted a more junior-level version of the interview

I have a few tangential questions. What sort of salary are they expecting? Secondly, how long do they plan to stay at the company that invests in training them once recruiters start sending them better offers?

A company can be good at: training employees, paying reasonable salaries, retaining employees. Pick two if you don’t have the funds to play in the “hot job market” (which, I assume, is the situation that the majority of tech companies around the world are in at this moment). And there’s your answer.

We are hiring new grads across the board if you have proofs for exceptional skills. Feel free to take a look at all our engineering postings at: https://neuralink.com/careers.

Companies want crackshot senior engineers at junior pay. Been this way for a while.