very hard for junior engineers out there now.

▲ alephnerd 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are too many new grads and the quality bar outside of target programs has dropped nor never existed to begin with.

And the target programs graduate around 15-20k EECS adjacent majors a year.

It's hard to justify hiring a (choosing random college) CS@Ouachita Baptist University grad for $140K TC (50th percentile for an entry level SWE) or even $100K TC [0] (25th percentile for an entry level SWE) unless they are truly an outlier.

For example, back in college I had a buddy who really didn't want to take our OS class because it was hard, so he used transferology and found an OS class offered by some random Christian university in Texas where the class assignments were either writing biblical analogies for system programming concepts like memory management or basic fizzbuzz level assignments. My alma mater's CS program ended up blacklisting that college when admin was working on transferring the credits for that class and began reviewing the class's curriculum.

While that is an extreme example, outside of target programs, the quality bar drops dramatically, and an entire generation of grads are truly unemployable at the current prevailing wages.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

▲ pelagicAustral 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, this is the thing. I was talking to someone a few days back, someone in Academia, and the conversation around the table was about how can we make it so we don't have to resort to increasingly more sophisticated ways to surveil students so they don't AI slop their entire degrees.

The problem is that universities, seemingly on a global scale, decided to run on economic incentives instead of academic ones. There are way too many people just doing degrees they have no interesting in learning about because university is just a way to a better job, and guess what, that "better job" no longer exists... and yet, year after year we have more and more people that have no clue what their credentials claim they should know by heart.

▲ frmersdog 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There wouldn't be too many new grads if all the capital wasn't locked up in a few Death Stars. A robust job market needs

  oodles and oodles of dumb, doomed small businesses and start-up companies chasing stupid products and services that will never succeed long-term

which employ

  not just top-of-class grads, but also mediocre grads and people who taught themselves from a few library books and even that one guy who can't build anything but is amazing at point out flaws and potential stumbling blocks

who

  learn from their mistakes at these companies and grow into knowledgeable and diligent workers from the experiences they have actually working.

Instead, all of the money is locked up in VC and passive funds that are chasing the same companies and technologies and applicants as everyone else. All at the exact same time, even; there's no one sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the model du jour to fail so that they can fund another approach later. This is beyond grads and schools. The entire ecosystem is a generational disaster, which is why we're seeing unprecedented bank bailouts and unprecedented monetary policy working at backstopping and sling-shotting into unprecedented capital market highs. In other words, we stuck one big egg in the incubator, and we're doing everything and anything to keep it from going bad, because we only have the one big egg.

There is a temptation to declare a conspiracy against Millennials and Zoomers, but it's probably more likely that our "job creators" are just that stupid and self-interested.

▲ bgilroy26 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At least in 2020 when I was in this pool, the rate for recent grads from an average program was $75k-$85k

	▲	alephnerd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You were at the lower end of the TC scale. When I started as a SWE my TC was around $150K and that was in the early 2010s. And the Levels numbers line up with new grad salary bands from back in 2019-20 as well. Of course there is also a regional factor, but regional mobility has always been high at target programs (eg. It doesn't matter if you live in Seattle, San Francisco, or NYC but everyone will know UT Austin or Purdue).