this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
That's ridiculous.
I'm glad my company doesn't mention specifics. We mention some details about our stack, but we've hired people with almost no experience in anything in our stack and we've been happy. We want competent professionals who are interested in learning our stack.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I've interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don't even have a basic foundation of IT. Don't expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can't even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they're special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don't just jump for a salary increase.
Sorry but a degree just demonstrates that you can pass exams and follow rules. Almost all new graduates I knew had a big ego, a lack of critical thinking, that combined in a massive Dunning Kruger effect. They are better middle management material than engineers. They can't even RTFM, like c'mon. And AI is just making all this worse.
Exactly!
And that's why I generally ask about FOSS work. If you're contributing to upstream projects as a hobby, then you've demonstrated that you can jump into a larger codebase and figure out their procedures and style guidelines, which means you can probably do the same here.
Failing that, I ask them to apply the theory they learned in school to practical problems, like "how would you use design pattern A for problem X? What about pattern B? How do you decide between the two?" Most people can't tell me what A or B is, and they can't even solve problem X with their own methods... I don't care about people knowing arbitrary design patterns, I care that they can reason about problems, consider multiple approaches, and decide between those approaches given the larger context of the project.
So many people just fall flat on their face in an interview on concepts they should have learned in their third year, which even our people who didn't go to college can do since they've been on the job for a few years. Show me you're better than a self-taught person and a few years of experience if you want anything other than an intern role.
I don't expect you to know everything, but while you're in college you can still learn AD, spin up a server, make a domain. See the basics of a web server, see how HFWs work....the foundation of IT. Companies shouldn't be paying you and paying to train you for learning things that, if you're interested in this career path, you should have learned on your own.
I don't know much about IT (I'm CS), but Ad is very specific to Windows, no? Shouldn't you instead be asking them about higher-level concepts like access controls, networking principles (http vs tcp vs ip, routing, dns, etc), and basics of cybersecurity (attack surface, network segmentation, etc)? It sounds like you're looking for practical knowledge about specific solutions rather than familiarity with concepts.
in CS, I can't expect someone to know our specific stack, but I can expect them to know foundational principles, like data structures, algorithmic complexity, design patterns, design principles, etc. So unless they express familiarity w/ our stack, I keep the questions theoretical, and even if they are familiar w/ our stack, I still keep the questions high level (i.e. for Python, I'll ask "gotchas" like what's the difference between a list comprehension and traditional iteration, how does Python's threading work, etc). I expect them to need to learn something in the first month or two, but also to largely learn on their own. Learning our stack when you're comfortable with programming in general isn't all that difficult, learning our stack when you struggle with basic concepts will be a challenge though.
CS still operates heavily in the windows environment. The majority of the world and businesses operate in windows. You should know the basics. Asking high level concepts isn't needed if they're unable to answer basic foundational questions which most companies operate in
And you just summarized what I've been saying.
Also CS is my field as well, and knowing how the basics work inside of a windows environment, is a basic concept.
I don't know why so many are down voting this idea.
If you put out a job listing for say splunk, and you show up and don't even know the basics of how DBs work... that's what I'm referring to.
I don’t mean “doesn’t know the flavour of Linux” I mean doesn’t conceptually know what a web server is so can’t restart the service running on the box.
Yeah, it’s going to be a couple years before you break into the high earner. The problem is that silly valley was hiring tech grads at $300k total comp when money was cheap. Money isn’t cheap anymore.
At least in our university, web dev was an elective, not a required core CS class. It's totally reasonable for them to not know how to deal w/ a web server when all they've done up to that point is algorithms.
We had a Ph.D work for us who struggled w/ that type of thing. They were absolutely brilliant in their niche (complex 3D modeling of fluid simulations), but integrating their work into our web stack was a nightmare for them (but fairly trivial for us). I asked them to structure their code in a way that would be easy for us to plug in to our web stack, and they looked at me like I was speaking Latin, when all I wanted was a simple entry-point with clearly defined inputs (give me a function to call that doesn't need a bunch of magic numbers).
If you want a web dev, hire someone w/ web dev experience or be willing to teach them. Not everyone in CS has that experience.
AI money is stupid cheap if you know who to bullshit. And, y'know, have no principles.
God this is true.
I've seen some real snake oil projects get massive finding and everyone on board getting promos.
The number of times I've had to just say "thank you for your time" and cut a interview shoot is way to much. Shit like this is way way to common.
I had a candidate apologize about 10 min in when it was clear that we expected them to know how to actually write code...
At least they apologized, I did that really early into my career, had a friend of mine set me up with what he thought was a good fit, only for me to walk into a senior level position and after 2 questions realize I'm not a good fit at all, tell them that I apologize for wasting their time and that I'm not qualified for what they're looking for.
I certainly appreciate the honesty, and if we had another role that would suit that person, I would've switched the interview to that one instead.
We had someone apply for a FE internship and they were failing, but I noticed they had BE skills in their resume so I switch the interview to that instead. We ended up hiring them for a FT BE role with the promise they could do full-stack if they wanted. They've been a great employee since, and I'm glad my boss was able to be flexible on that position (we needed another BE, but hadn't created the position yet since we needed FE more).
I can't guarantee everywhere is like that, but I can say interviewing gets old and if we can fill a position (even if it's not what we were expecting), we'll do that.
Not to mention that many IT degrees are basically worthless as far as practical experience is concerned. You'd be better off spending $100k on certification training.
%100 agreed on that. The amount of on the job training I've got to put into fresh college grads is insane.
Fresh college grads should presumably be taking entry level / junior positions unless something about the candidate speaks for itself, it’s wild how hostile you’re acting to the notion of having to teach people who are new to the field how to work professionally in it.
Given that out of college they’d typically at best have internship experience of some kind. People got to start somewhere.
Where are you getting hostility from? I made a comment that suggests that college is not preparing these young adults for their selected careers and is basically dumping them onto the businesses to train. I have also pointed out that a lot of college grads don't start at lower positions, they go for senior level stuff and then write articles like this one suggesting that the 6 figure jobs are gone. They're still plenty of them and they're still around but they're no longer getting handed out to college grads with 0 experience, like back in the early 00s. I also suggested that in this field, you can learn a foundation on your own, which is to be expected. A mechanical engineer should know a good bit of math and shouldn't have the expectation that the company teach them math. That's a foundation they should already have. In the IT world, the foundations of understanding domains, OS's, how firewalls work, etc. Is a foundation you should know already.
No where did I say that I expect new employees to know everything. I said I expect them to at least have a foundation of what's needed for the job.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.