American graduates have these starry eyes and want to work mostly in two types of companies FAANG or early stage startups... Who's going to go to work at pharma companies, banks, electric companies?
Bootcamp is literally not a CS grad situation. And I have worked with bootcampers just over a year ago - I can only say that it's just a sea of trash. Most bootcampers are just not trained enough to think more than a minute into the future.
As for "they aren't starry eyed", you're literally proving that they are. You should know that starry-eyed doesn't mean only people who are picky, but people who think that learning the bare minimum and just treating engineering like they treated English class at school is going to land them a nice job.
The number of CS graduates that can just about write SQL that I interviewed in the last 2 years is... astounding.
In short - American CS graduates thought that they would get to do the jobs, that we don't need people for. We don't need an American employee that just about writes tests for something a code analysis tool can generate, for the price of someone who can actually deliver a product.
And let's not kid ourselves, CS graduates aren't competing against H1B hires. They're competing against other CS graduates in the US. No one is looking at an experienced engineer in Brazil and a CS graduate for the same position.
I'll agree only that there are a lot of bad candidates who come out of bootcamps. There are a lot of good ones too. A lot of bootcamps run on the model that they train the bare minimum for a student to get a job, so they can take a cut of the paycheck. What you get is socialites learning just enough how to code to pass an interview, and good developers being aggressively trained in how to pass interviews. Some people love bootcamps because it's what got them a job, or got them a cheap candidate, I personally dislike them.
But I did hackathons, game jams, and went to meetups enough while job searching to say that there are a lot of incredibly talented people who are just not getting hired. If anyone is having trouble hiring a quality candidate, it's their hiring process that's broken. Job applications have become so gamified that it's impossible to filter signal for noise. Recruiters post insane expectations like "must know Javascript, React, Postgres, API's, C#, Python, and <obscure technology nobody has ever heard of that is specific to that company>" for a software engineer role. A competent CS fresh graduate won't apply to that position because they might only know Python from that list, even if they've written their own compiler, written ML algorithms from first principles, and have a deep understanding of what the computer's doing under the hood. That student is smart and would be so easily trainable, but they don't apply because the requirements are so high. So the people who do apply are those courageous enough to apply to a role they meet 30% criteria for, those shameless enough to flat out lie on an application, and bootcamp grads who have spent 2 weeks learning all of those technologies at surface level; and then if you quiz them on anything in any amount of depth they flounder.
But those bootcamps advertise themselves as entry-level roles, and so the fresh CS grads apply to those instead of to the companies that have 900 "sea of trash" applicants, which wants an expert in every technology ever invented. The bootcamps often just turn around and have the applicant rewrite their resume into something that's nearly a lie, and then aggressively apply to jobs. Result is companies keep seeing fantastic resumes with not fantastic candidates, and ignoring modest resumes with trainable candidates, and company concludes that the requirements were not high enough to filter out the trash so they add yet another job requirement.
> And let's not kid ourselves, CS graduates aren't competing against H1B hires.
Yes they are. I have great respect for all of the foreigners on H1B that I know, but almost all of them obtained their H1B fresh out of grad school, not after a long career overseas.
The hiring pool could be larger, but HR and hiring managers don't want men over 50.
For instance, American citizens are not going to become farmworkers even if you paid them FAANG engineer wages. They just aren't.
I think to attract people to certain careers, anytime after they're born is too late. You have to have started with their parents. Good chess players are good because they started at age 5, not because they went to school for it.
There's a massive shortage of qualified labor. Over the last three years so many people got to go from junior to senior positions, simply in an effort to retain them.
Brain drain is something they bought into during the cold war and this idea that "they don't have talent" is ridiculous. They have a shit ton of homegrown talent and are also more than willing to hire your talent to further monopolize and supplement it.
