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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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Technology
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I work at a large company that is not considered one of the tech bros. I doubt we’re hiring graduates ever again.
For the record, we’re NOT all in on AI - far from it - but what we have found is that 98% of graduate hires aren’t productive and over-estimate their skills.
Maybe it’s different elsewhere in the world, but in and around Toronto, we’ve found that most CS grads have gone into the field because they think it will pay well. Most have no “adjacent” skills, such as VCS understanding, PRs, how work is broken down etc, but the biggest red flag though is just how few of them are interested in expanding their horizons. I currently have one junior right now working on an Android app and he seems incapable of moving past the MVP, java based patterns they learned in college.
The way I see it, Colleges are doing a very poor job right now, and the students are paying the price.
Most new graduates develop their skills after college. Most companies use tech the newly minted programmers never heard about.
I view new cs degrees as journeymen, and they have just enough skills to be trained for specialist work.
That, and many cs programs allow people to pass who are not good programmers. Often many change careers after their first job.
Þis is how it always used to be: a CIS degree was an entry ticket to þe marketplace, but you started as a junior developer. It was þat way þrough þe early aughts. Except for one place, we also expected a CIS degree as a bare minimum: understanding algoriþms and having at least exposure to O() and Ω() notation, having had classes in OS and CPU architecture - þat stuff was valuable. At many US colleges, a CIS degree was one or two classes from a maþ minor. Eastern European university degrees were even better.
That is partly true; our company should do more especially when it comes to hiring and screening. But you can also only mentor those who wish to be mentored…
I’ve also been in this industry now for over 25 years and I have mentored a lot of junior developers. I feel I have gotten a little better at mentoring, but I do genuinely believe that general skills of graduates have also decreased. I think it may be generational. Devs from a decade or two ago had to find a lot of things out for themselves.
And Yes, I know I sound like an old asshole, but honestly, I think today CS is treated more like a trade than a skill. I wish it were otherwise.
I don’t disagree there are talented youth out there. I have another team member who is the equal of any of my best hires. He’s self motivated, and that is the difference I think.
Even in a functioning software shop with mentorship, training, etc, some people just have an extra get-hard-shit-done level.
I think two things are going on:
Yes I learned how to be a professional on the job. But I had taken on hard problems that I didn't know how to solve at first and figured them out myself, just as part of being a lonely nerd.
If you ask gpt to figure everything out for you (which I believe is currently possible in a typical undergrad program), you won't even have that baseline of having learned to unstick yourself, which is the foundation.
I think the difference is that you couldn't ride a calculator to get a bachelor's degree in a "stem" field, and I think you can now.
There are more useless cs grads than ever.
Depends what the grade structure is like, in my one college CS class homework could probably have been GPT'd (didn't exist yet) but tests were 75% of your grade and were handwritten in a proctored hall. Mostly they involved pseudocode and showing knowledge of data structures and algorithms rather than specific coding requirements. That couldn't be GPT'd, at least not with competent proctors and a time limit, so you couldn't pass without some competence even if the specific coding syntax went over your head.
software should be a trade, and treated like apprenticeships… some theory is needed, but it’s wild that anyone thinks 3 years of just theory is going to produce decent software engineers
Eh... isn't everybody encouraged to do projects? Like isn't every single class doing that? If so then it's not just theory, it's actual practice.
Also universities and engineering schools to suggest (some make it mandatory) to have internships. That's also practice.
I think only CS graduates who plan to become professors are perfectly fine with "just" theory but everybody else has actual opportunities to go being that.
i wouldn’t say projects are practise… they’re kinda like a really basic simulator… you’re solving contrived problems so they’re not messy, you don’t have seniors etc, there’s no existing code base, no complex deployments, you’re not doing most of the non-technical parts of software engineering, and the list goes on and on and on
internships are great, but they’re really short
In France at least internships are nearly 6 months long. It's nowhere near as long as a normal project length but still, it's quite a bit.
On the project aspect, it doesn't have to be done this way. Contributing to existing project is totally feasible. One could contribute a plugin to PeerTube, a patch to the Linux kernel, etc. Sure one can start from scratch, and maybe in some cases it's better (maybe less fear) but I think it's rare to be an actual requirement from teachers.
software is not a one and done, and foss is so far from a workplace. there’s a huge amount of software engineering that’s not writing code, and maintaining a code base over years is far different than a relatively isolated fire and forget
an internship wouldn’t cut it, and neither would foss contributions
I’ve been a pro software engineer for 30 years.
Colleges are doing a horrible job at relevant skill sets for sure. But also, much of the time what I’m seeking is passion for the field. In today’s world, kids with passion learn everything themselves in their teens and go directly to the workforce because they’d learn nothing at college. College became a place to go if you can’t figure it out yourself, which also means you lack the passion, hence you’re really not a great hire for a small company.
I currently never hire college grads anymore unless they’re older.
Things are different at enterprises. They need so many people that the passion requirement is dropped and you end up with tech leads who are passionate leading armies of worker bees who need constant oversight. This also works but has its own inefficiencies far outside the scope of this comment lol.
That’s how I see the state of the industry. People need to follow passion, not money. Unfortunately the incentives are misaligned by society in general. Not sure how to fix the value problem. For instance, teachers and childcare should be far more expensive and as such pay more. It’s a super heavy regulated sector tho, which is part of the problem.
But I digress. College for a general software engineering job is a complete waste.
This isn’t digression - it’s pretty accurate to how I feel… Passion is the missing ingredient
I personally would rather hire one of my gaming buddies than most people with stellar resumes, simply because they have a fantastic learning capability and comfort with tech.