Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work.
They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.
So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.
Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.
I would also be willing to bet that the skills being learned during this training period are far less portable than most coding skills. If your startup teaches you how to crank out a crud RoR app in six months you can probably walk out the door at that point and get a 25% salary bump from another startup that now does not need to spend six months training you. If you learn the details of your specific cog at Lockheed in six months you are not going to be able to go to General Dynamics and apply the same skills as soon as you walk in the door.
That is completely true. It only gets worse the longer you stay in one group. After 20 years of doing 1 little piece of a giant puzzle (of which there is only one and there are no competitors), can you really go anywhere else and be anything other than entry level? And how do you give up $120k for $60k as an entry level guy elsewhere even though after 20 years you should be making $180k.
It is a giant trap for those that aren't aware of it from day 1.
They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.
So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.
Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.