I'm thankful I found a company like that after graduating. Seemingly the only such specimen in America today. It's a giant international consultancy company that seemingly has a questionable reputation online but it was all I could get that paid anything remotely respectable and they even do paid training. It's seems to be one of a rapidly dwindling handful of paths for new grads who are graduating and finding out the online hype like "it's easy to get a job in CS if you do [some combination of good side projects, internships, good gpa, etc]" is an outright falsehood at this point in time - it's very hard unless an opportunity approaches you like what eventually happened to me amd it turned out all that applying and trying was a waste of time.

In my case I had no choice but to do a draining unpaid internship in college, their return offer was only $15/hr, nowhere I applied to for months (likely hundreds of applications) would take me even though I did all those things in the list and continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit, except one offer for 30k. 15/hr and 30k are abysmal insults to the amount of time money and effort put into programming since middle school, getting a BS CS degree, volunteering on big online projects since high school, etc. I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, this was NY/NJ.

These experiences signal to me that the tech field is hightly oversaturated for new grads and it's a matter of time before people realize the bubble popped. Someone in my position should not be getting offered what amount to poverty wages taking into account student loans, the high price of car insurance for a driver of my age range, etc. Programs like what google is doing are just going to make this problem even worse as companies feel further emboldened to require increasingly more experience out of junior programmers and offer them salaries further approaching minimum wage.