Hacker News Reader

Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

That seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.

View on HN

On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.

Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there.

Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship

The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.

Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.

Companies found a better and cheaper way to short circuit this, just hire H1B’s and slog them till they get their green cards(which is forever).

That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)

>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers

In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico

In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants

In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore

I got out of school in the mid 90's, and had three good job offers to choose from within a month of graduating. It wasn't because I was special, as most of my friends had similar experiences. It just matters what kind of job market you happen to graduate into.

Appropriate username, given this sentiment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com