BYOT: Bring your own team for new-grads
byot.app
byot.app
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would it be a problem if opened up to more schools? I’d love to hear the subtext here made explicit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
On the other hand, they might be a terrible team. A team of undergrads built Facebook.
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.
On the other hand, they might all bounce as a group if they're unhappy.
I've worked with folks from these schools and juxtaposed with state school grads, there isn't anything special about them that makes them more desirable when it comes to actually working on a business problem that involves software.
I've thought about whether you could have a site like this for experienced teams.
Lots of people stay at employers that suck, because they like their teammates and don't want to let them down. I think it would be a game changer if experienced teams could jump ship in one go. It would certainly benefit the new employer as the cost of hiring would be less, and the time to getting productive would be less. From the employees side, a company that's in the market for an entire team is an attractive prospect, since it's likely to be in a growth phase and well funded
Informally, it's not that rare for a complete team to leave a company and all, or mostly, end up at the same new employer. But formally lots of people have non-solicitation clauses and it may also be some kind of tort to invite people to violate them. But I do wonder how easy or hard such a site would be to legally defend.
That would be the kind of 'disruptive innovation' I could get behind: changing the balance of power and making people's lives better.
Don't waste your time working for the kind of company that would choose to hire through such a program.
Instead, build something together that you think would make a positive difference in the world.
Don't squander your lives selling advertisements or developing weapons or "increasing the efficiency of the markets". Don't sell out. Do something meaningful, damn it.
Why are you so confident you know the labor market? Why are the companies that might considering hiring this inherently be exploiting the team?
I'd like to think a handful of people would be able to spot a griftshop better than an individual and this reads to me like a variant of collective bargaining.
> Instead, build something together that you think would make a positive difference in the world.
The types of new grads who have the social connections to meaningfully act on bright ideas...shouldn't.
I see zero incentive for large tech companies to hand over their interview process to a company run by juniors in college. Zero. As someone else mentioned, Triplebyte failed and had to pivot for a reason.
And if you’re saying, “you don’t even all need to work on the same team,” the incentive is even lower. If I’m bringing in a known team (and for new grads, unless that team has a track record of shipping something substantive together, hiring managers do not care about some students in a club or discord), I’m doing so because I know the value they can provide together. If I’m just going to put them all in different roles and teams anyway, why would I do a mass negotiation? What is in it for the company hiring, especially from a negotiation standpoint, when different teams and roles have different salary scales?
Beyond that, while this sounds great for the grads, this doesn’t seem great for anyone but maybe mid-tier or lower tech companies who struggle to recruit from the top 10 schools. And based on your website and answers here, those aren’t places that your current cohort would be interested in working at (nor that could afford the salaries you would be trying to negotiate).
Where I could see this sort of idea working would be in research sciences or academia, where existing cohorts and teams are very important. Now, for that, you’re not looking at new undergrads, you’re looking at grad students or post-docs, but at least there I could see the value in trying to hire a group of people from the same place who have actual experience working together.
But if I’m a company hiring, or even an individual manager, I really don’t care that 3 or 4 undergrads are friends or have some other relationship to one another. Especially since this seems designed to just get kids to team up together to try to get bigger offers from the same company, regardless of whether they want to maintain social relationships or not.
One final note: your website mentions “absolutely no recruiters” but the role of BYOT is to be a recruiter. If you want to say no outside recruiters, fine. But you’re inserting yourself as the middle man between the hiring managers and the applicants, presumably to take a cut for finding the talent. That’s a recruiter.
I spend most of my time at a new job trying to recruit my former colleagues over. Team is everything. Once you have a group of people who work well together, the problem doesn't matter.
I saw someone saying they'd fight over tabs/spaces - nope. That's what two strangers do. A team has already settled on spaces.
If there are any employers reading my comment, hit me up if you want a solid team.
Working relations are not of the same nature as friends relations, they are less stable and they are, by default, less important. They are also highly affected by the company policies and by individual careers evolution. Ultimately, your relation with your coworkers is constrained by your individual roles in the company. Believe me, you don't want one of your best friends to become your manager.
I'd rather prefer my coworkers to become my friends, than my friends to become my coworkers.
Also, I also agree that one-application should work. There's no reason that it's necessary to do so many interviews. Questions were pretty much the same and they weren't relevant to the job at hand, so why ask them? To assess my skill? Then, a single central application would do.
Still, I would like this for non-grads as well. So my husband and I can use it lest we do this entire thing again. Also agree that knowing someone intimate increases retention. I really dislike the company I work at, but it pays well and my family is here!
The ones who were used to working in different teams (because that's how their courses and schedules worked) were easily the best team mates.
If groups of friends truly believe that they can earn more together, as soon as one person gets a good offer from a company that doesn't want to hire the whole group they'll have to choose to reject it, or to be the reason why their friends earn less. There will be companies that interview the whole team and then only make an offer to one of them.
This is going to kill some of college friendships.
Carnegie Mellon University University of California, Berkeley Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cornell University Princeton University Stanford University California Institute of Technology Harvard University Yale University Dartmouth College Brown University Duke University
…and which ones will be added soon?
There are gangs of CS grads (and undergrads) with irreplaceable team chemistry.
They might see a only glimmer of that through the entirety of their Professional career.
They also know no different than soaring together, as a team.
They aren’t brow beat. They deliver, and they cater to each other’s strengths in a way that Middle Management cannot fathom.
Terribly clever.