[the_snooze]

Undergrads have tons of opportunities to gain experience and make connections, both on and off campus: internships, research, TA jobs, sports, Greek life, volunteering, clubs, etc.

When I review resumes from new grads, it's that kind of extracurricular stuff that stands out. It shows they had the initiative and commitment to pursue things that matter to them. If a resume is only coursework, then sure, that won't stand out.

[scarface_74]

This still doesn’t answer the second part - why hire a new grad over someone with two or three years of experience? There are plenty of those hungry for a job that would work for the same compensation.

[the_snooze]

My team has to be in-person, and new grads are far more likely to be open to relocating. I'd rather spend valuable time recruiting and interviewing people who are likier to accept an offer over those who'd balk at moving.

Students have way more advantages in hiring than they realize. Openness to moving is a big one. So is getting experience and connections via extracurriculars. If you're a university student and you take the small steps to build up these advantages over time, you won't need to resort to resume-spamming.

[scarface_74]

And if they “have to be in person” is that because you are doing programming with specialized equipment?

I can’t imagine hiring a bunch of new grads can actually end up being productive. Back in the day you would open an office in a place where you can get relatively cheap experienced devs like the suburbs of Atlanta (where I use to live).

[the_snooze]

Yes, specialized equipment, and also restrictions on what systems we can do some of our work on.

My organization isn't a run-of-the-mill software shop. We're an FFRDC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...) that does applied research for the US government. As such, our culture is to bring people in who we can develop and retain for a long time. A junior staff member's tasking and skill set may be limited to software development. But eventually they grow into technical experts on whole systems and use-cases, or team leads with established relationships with external stakeholders.

I'm in the latter position, and I'm pretty good at identifying, recruiting, and developing people right out of school. To go back to the original topic, resume-spamming isn't the way you end up in an organization like mine.

[scarface_74]

Fair enough

But then we get into the whole “salary compression and inversion” where because of HR dynamics vs market dynamics, you’re almost always better jumping ship after the first 2-3 years.

As a hiring manager, that’s out of your control. So you know that you usually can’t get more than 2-3 years out of an employee. If they are spending the first year doing “negative work”, is ur worth it?

[WD-42]

How is this different than any other job? Experience is experience I don’t see how that justifies pissing off your potential employers with mountains of AI slop resumes.

[scarface_74]

How would you know if it is AI written? Every article on how to write a resume even before LLMs gave the same advice and mostly read the same.

Non AI driven resumes were the same slop.

[WD-42]

What I was trying saying is that a lack of experience isn't some kind of unfair disadvantage that justifies making all our lives worse by using tools like this. Instead one could spend their time, I dunno, acquiring experience? There's plenty of OSS projects out there that could use help, and personal projects are always a great differentiator.

[scarface_74]

Let me tell you about a story behind the advice of “personal projects” and contribution to open source.

Last year after leaving AWS, I had quite a good open source portfolio. When I was working for AWS Professional Services, it was quite easy to put everything we did after we sanitized it through the internal open source approval process and get it published to AWS Samples

https://github.com/aws-samples

And then I forked it to my own profile. I actually used 5 of the 8 projects at my next job after forking them to our internal repo.

I was also a major contributor to a popular open source AWS Solution in its niche

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/

I had both in my profile. The only company that cared was a niche of niche in AWS where it was their specialty.

Companies barely look at your resume. They definitely aren’t going to take time to look at your private profile.

[WD-42]

I’ve done plenty of hiring and I definitely do look at personal profiles and websites. In fact it’s the first thing I look at after experience. I can also say that a personal project of mine was a huge factor in landing a previous job. Showing competency and interest in the industry you are applying for goes a long way.

Sorry your “open source” contributions didn’t get you far. I looked at your examples and it appears to be niche documentation for AWS services, so basically all in the service of amazon? Cool.