[Cadsby]

As someone who has been involved in the hiring of engineers at a large multinational corporation you might recognize, there is some truth to this sentiment.

Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this, it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.

Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction of the salaries they were commanding previously.

You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.

[panda_person]

I agree totally with everything you said, I'd just add that I think companies are outsourcing the training of new employees, often, to college internships. Which is great if you are at Stanford and have lots of connections that implies, not so great if you are a community college student or at bumfuck state u