That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age.
> Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term.
The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies.
Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
But the majority of programmers are those mediocre students who didn't do anything extra, and are now slaving away writing some internal purchase order management system for XYZ corp (in Java)--someone has to do that stuff.
> Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.
Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all.
Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java.
> they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.