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 will likely be a sense of FOMO for companies in order to recruit these groups, as they'd be losing out on multiple highly regarded talents. Eventually, we would scale down the quality factor as this method of hiring becomes less peculiar. We've already had a number of companies commit, so I suppose it's working.
Plus, these students don't necessarily need to work together in the same department. Students have expressed a tremendous want towards just being in a new city with the same subset of friends.
There's also some unfounded benefits we will be analyzing and testing in our first few batches. We theorize that this could greatly influence the retention and burnout rates at companies, which is a big issue in tech.
As for trusting a third-party with interviews. We agree that this is one of the biggest leaps companies will have to make, but we think multiple rounds of leet-code style interviews aren't correlated with success anyway. And, applicants have to do basically the same problem sets over at each interview and company. We also let companies add supplemental questions to roles, like the college admissions process, so we hope that's enough to bridge the gap for now. I agree that is might be even more experimental, but I think it's necessary in the long run, for other reasons too.
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 grinder of (most likely) web application development & software engineering (which you may have taken a class on, but is nothing like the actual experience). Working as a professional software engineer requires so many things not taught in school that the only way to learn this stuff is through experience.
I am not trying to sound like a old bastard but you are over-valuing your hand. Competitive programming, FAANG internships, are all great but its not the same as actually having a job. The hiring shortage is mainly senior engineers and if you were offering an app for senior engineers to find a job together I could see that really paying off, but for new grads I don't see the employers going for it.
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.
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.
That's cool, but I think your inexperience might be blinding you about what actually makes a good engineering team. The actual hard part of software engineering is almost entirely disjoint from competitive programming or math competitions. When I hear a sentence like this I read "potential, but needs mentorship." It is hard for me to imagine this making me more likely to want to hire a blob of new grad engineers onto the same team.
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 its because of the group setting, that could make the premium laid worthwhile.
You still need to convince companies to trust your assessment method: not a problem while you only have new grads from the very top schools, but would be a problem if you open up to all colleges.
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? )
It’s kind of shocking that we say retention is so hard it’s close to impossible when we don’t acknowledge our own processes lead to a dramatic salary shortfall. I think if we paid new engineers accurately in the first five years of their career the number leaving for new jobs would dramatically decline.
I'm not even sure this is true. The big tech companies that they are targeting can already hire from the top programs.
> Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10
This is the rub. How many graduates do the top 10 programs put out annually? That's a very hard cap on this sort of system, even if employers get on board with farming recruiting out to a bunch of undergrads. Picking very loose numbers of 10,000 grads annually, an incredible 10% adoption rate of the program, and $10,000 charged per placement. That's... 10m in revenue per year.
Also you might want to look to understand what went wrong at Triplebyte which wanted to provide a one interview-only experience for experienced candidates but it never worked. Companies still did their interviews. The company also had to pivot their business model from this and explained in detail why they did it [1]
Triplebyte was targeting a very valuable and hard-to-hire group of experienced engineers. You are targeting the easiest to hire group. Consider what will make you succeed as a business where Triplebyte could not, even though they solved for a much bigger pain point for hiring managers.
Why would it be a problem if opened up to more schools? I’d love to hear the subtext here made explicit.
Don't take this the wrong way, I don't want to subtract anything from your accomplishments. What you are describing as "highly regarded" is primarily different forms of artificial tests that provide a leading indicator of talent or quality, but are not the same thing as having a proven track record of success shipping high quality software.
Most companies, especially larger companies, even tech companies, are more conservative than they let on. What you are essentially doing is showing "benchmarks" for a team the way one would for hardware, but the thing that really matters isn't how well something scores on benchmarks, it's how well it runs the actual application that your business cares about. Conservative companies don't buy hardware on the basis of benchmarks, they wait for reviews using their applications or get a proof of concept built. So it goes with hiring as well.
As someone who's hired many engineers, when I think "highly regarded", I think someone that people I know and respect in the workplace speak about with positive reviews and references, not someone who has a high rank on LC, a high GPA, and won a math contest. Of course, this is unfair for new grads because they cannot have met anyone who would refer them yet, except perhaps through internships. That's the reality of things though, and it's part of why who you know is often as important or more important than what you know in life.
I would find this program more compelling as a hiring manager if it was a team of people who had previously worked together (even if that was in college) but had individual separate work experiences showing success outside the team, e.g. 2-3 years after you have all bagged your first full-time job. At that point, you would have each individually demonstrated success, and have described a preference for working together with strong camaraderie. That's worth hiring as a group at a premium, since team morale and camaraderie is often one of the most crucial pieces of performance.
I don't remember if I've seen studies to back this up, but I'd suspect that retention is much higher when your employees have formed meaningful relationships within the company.
On the other hand, they might all bounce as a group if they're unhappy.
They're definitely a minority but they exist and if this company can select groups of new grads that ship. I remember very well I was working with a team of great engineers when I was in uni and we all sadly split up to pursue different careers.
That said, focusing on new grads sounds limiting, if I was BYOT I'd allow any groups of developers to participate. There is plenty of freelancers groups who may find it attractive to work together for a single client.
The main reason I don't like working inside companies is that I'm subject to whatever BS management think will make us more productive. In hindsight, in my 15 years of professional experience, that never works. A group of motivated seniors contributors will always find a way to self organise which is more efficient than whatever rituals are imposed.
The difference with this is the new cohort would have better cohesion from the get-go and might stand a greater chance of dealing with cultural fusion, imposter syndrome, "am I paid appropriately" syndrome, "why shouldn't I advocate a union" syndrome, etc
The less cohesive the team, the better my team looks to the HR gods that send me threatening meeting invites.
Agree it could be a hard sell internally but if they had a track record of building great apps, I could see hiring them to build another one.
That said, if a team is that strong they should probably start their own company.
On the other hand, they might be a terrible team. A team of undergrads built Facebook.
In that case, we should not primary refer to them as to "new-grads". The primary thing about them is that they already successfully build multiple apps. They should be referred to as "existing team".
New grad positions are usually the easiest to fill, by far - much easier than any software engineering position where you’re hiring for some former experience. Also, new grads are almost always put on a team with more experienced engineers - one new grad at a time. This is so they get mentorship, onboarding and taking team dynamics into account.
So I see little to no point in bringing a cohesive group of new grads into a company, who want to negotiate a higher compensation to come in, as a group. Instead: just hire individual new grads, have them start together, they are broken up into teams but give them space to socialise with each other. It’s how new grad programs work at most tech companies.
I get that this setup sounds amazing for new grads. Come with a team you already know! Earn more money!
But I just don’t see the sell working for most companies.
Paying a premium to hire a team of engineers with experience absolutely makes sense, assuming that team keeps working as the same unit. This is why acqui-hires often negotiate a higher price than hiring each member would be. Note that during acqui-hires, companies interview each team member and usually refuse to take on people who they decide don’t meet their hiring bar.
A team of new grads, who likely wouldn’t work on the same team after hiring? Trusting interviewing with a third party company which probably has a different standard than my company? Paying more for this group than if I individually hired new grads? I cannot see any appeal, putting my hiring manager hat on.
What am I missing?