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Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

This. If you're graduating without an internship or two, you're in trouble.

As someone who graduated in the summer of 2016 without having done any internships, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.

Finding a job was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Part of that is because I was looking in a very specific geographic area so I could live with my girlfriend (now wife) , part of it was a low GPA, but most of it was because I didn't have any experience outside of college classes.

Eventually I lucked out and found a job with a company that was looking to train someone because they develop software for IBM mainframes and weren't having any luck finding people in that field in the area.

Define "trouble". I'm ten years into my career now, but I graduated with no internships and feel like I've done OK.

I think he is referring to people entering the field now. If they don't have internships then it will be hard for them to compete with others vying for Junior Dev positions that have done internships.

Also applied when I started work in 2001. Having 3 months experience as an intern I think helped - making me appealing to smaller companies who needed someone to get stuck in rather than the big companies that spend the first 10 weeks in a training course. (Those companies were not doing well in 2001)

Anecdotally, I didn't factor in internships at all when I was last hiring for a jr. I didn't interview a single person who didn't have a public code repo.

You don't consider real world work experience relevant when hiring? Just side projects or contributions to open source projects?

That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?

I was asked about that kind of "programmer universe" stuff during my interview process with my current employer. I said I didn't have a GitHub, never been to a programming conference, didn't participate in the local dev scene, and didn't really program on my free time. I said in my free-time I like being outside, hiking, camping, and fishing...It didn't hurt me because I got the job, of course, I'm working for a utility company and not some flashy SV/NY tech startup...

I don't consider work experience relevant at all unless I can verify the work done or hold a particular recommendation in high esteem. Not getting fired for a length of time, while a skill, is not often what I care most about. Without knowing a company's policies, culture, and tech leads I cannot accurately judge whether someone spent 3 years playing ping pong with the CEO or was responsible for programming a successfully delivered system. In a perfect world, I might try to suss out each candidate's strength and then decide based on the totality of data, but I don't often have that kind of time. I look for public or provided code first, and if it's reasonable, will use that to begin a pointed conversation on our trade.

As in it will be a lot harder to get your first job. Once you have that first position or two, it's not really trouble from there obviously. I'd also point out that the dynamics of the junior dev position and the competition have changed a lot since 10 years ago. I suspect this level of experience wasn't as needed in 2006 or 2010 (maybe in 08 after the market crash).

The job market for newly graduated programmers is a little different than it was 10 years ago. I'm 20 years into a development career, but I'm not going to pretend that what was true about the market when I entered it was true about it when you did.

You're already 10 years in. Completely different.

You aren't graduating then are you? You graduated ten years ago. So they weren't addressing you.

I didn't do a single internship either when I was doing my undergraduate either. I wouldn't recommend doing that to young people in a million years now.

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