[Tossrock]

This is patently untrue. I have a friend who graduated from UCLA with a computing minor who was working (unpaid) in a Stanford lab who couldn't find paying work for over 9 months. And no, he is not some kind of idiot, he got a 2390 on the new SAT and even showers regularly.

[msbarnett]

The hiring situation with no experience is a slightly different beast, particularly if you're not involved in open source or otherwise generating a lot of public code that people can look at.

People are rightly wary of hiring untested kids fresh out of college because so many of the just plain cannot program their way out of a paper bag. Not to accuse your friend of incompetence, it's just that until you have some kind of real portfolio, it's damn hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.