[alephnerd]

> New grads have to do their part. They can't just coast through college and think some company is going to hire and train them up just because they have a degree and no drive.

I fully agree with you! No one should be complacent.

> Always be improving on your own time. Otherwise you'll be one of millions of people who got into tech for the money

EXACTLY

> If you can hack the hacking, get into QA, it pays pretty ok too

This is the issue - relatively meritocratic entry level roles like Support Engineering, QA, SRE, ITOps, etc have been offshored (eg. at my last employer, we completely offshored TAM and L1 Support Eng), because of a mix of cost savings and a lot of us old timers don't mentor as much.