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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

"Google, Facebook and Amazon alone probably hire around 30% of all American computer-science undergraduates, reckons Roelof Botha of Sequoia, a venture-capital firm."

This is far more pervasive than the cream, they are getting at best the top third. That is just high demand for programmers, not a talent war.

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Maybe 30% of graduates of top 30 universities. There are lots of CS grads from lower ranked schools that are definitely not getting fought over by the likes of Google/FB/Amazon...

Agreed. I've got an MSc, and the only contact I've ever had was a practically spam message for an Amazon recruiter (who contacted half the province I live in, as near as I can figure).

around 30% of all American CS graduates

That can't be right -- various sources but the number of CS graduates at 40,000 per year. So that'd be 4k CS hires (apart from math and other engineering hires) per company, per year. Sounds a bit high. But like a lot of other things VCs say, it's probably not meant to be taken "literally".

It's actually right in line.

And with a single quote, all of my worries about finding a job after graduation disappeared. That is amazing.

There is no way that is even close to true

For anyone who is looking for a since of scale. There are only around 52,000 total employees @ Google, and there are 3 million+ software engineers. So this quote is either out of context or wildly inaccurate.

They get the best who _want_ to work with those companies.

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