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I think its a cool idea, but unless this is aimed at large tech companies (which maybe it is, I can't tell), I can't see the value here. I know you are from highly sought after school but to be honest the working industry of software engineering is very little like your college experience.

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.

Thank you for the advice. Addressing the first part, yes, we are aiming at large tech companies. This is mostly because we need companies that actually need to hire large numbers of people since groups of 4 > individuals.

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.

There might be a potential market in HFT/trading firms (market makers). They're struggling to recruit right now (industry is doing very well, so high headcount growth) and they're usually pretty small so joining w/ friends means working in closer proximity than you might get in big tech.

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.

My experience is that HFT/trading firms are almost exclusively looking for seasoned professionals like low latency engineering specialists. There's typically the expectation of providing value and filling expertise gaps almost right off the bat. Fresh grads are incapable of doing that.

It is even worse when aimed at large tech companies. These companies don't experience FOMO when they see a resume of a CMU grad. They get mountains of those a year. And further, large tech companies are going to be less likely to be able to adjust their hiring processes to substitute some external process.

> 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.

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.

It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive. Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10: the ones which get far more recruiter reachouts than students.

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.

Thanks for your input! I agree with all your points. Right now, we're just doing things that don't scale and hoping it works out. A year after the first two batches graduate, hopefully we have enough data points to workout tangible benefits.

If you take away “universities where everyone wants to hire from but very few can”, I am personally dubious of what else there is left.

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.

[1] https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte

> Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult.

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? )

I think youre right for a lot of cases, but there are a few reasons Ive been subject to. You dont know what aspects of the work are persistent across orgs (grass is greener bias but maybe it actually is, its hard to tell), the work can be boring, you might be looking for a better cultural fit. My local team is very small and our tasks disparate, so local cooperation is lacking despite having to be in office. Processes may look smoother elsewhere, or you might just feel undervalued. You mention paying a competitive salary, that also seems hard to do via raises for some reason. Switching jobs can be such a waste but its your best chance to earn and learn more

Retaining new grads is largely a function of companies being unwilling to recognize that when adjusted for experience salaries often increase 50% a year for new grads. HR departments often think 5% is a generous raise and the gap created over two years is staggering. Even if you get a promotion package with a 50% raise you end up getting something over a 25% raise for leaving (in terms of your newer higher salary).

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 that be attractive to employers?

Why would it be a problem if opened up to more schools? I’d love to hear the subtext here made explicit.

> It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive.

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.

> 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.

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 idea of a company being more cohesive seems appealing from the employer side as well.

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.