Ask HN: Who are hiring junior engineers fresh out of college?

There are lots of reasons, but the main one is that they're expensive. They take a lot of time to train and guide and they tend to write terrible code.

Experience is incredibly important for writing good code, as anyone who has hired a CS graduate will tell you. No amount of theory can prepare you for the tradeoffs and sub-optimal decision-making that you do at a startup.

As an example, one of my friends is a CS grad, and he's only ever written code in C, C++, Python, and JavaScript. As a result, he absolutely loves writing Node applications. He's never written a huge Node application or tried to maintain one written by someone else, but if he did, I guarantee he'd hate Node and wish he could use something with strict typing.

So I think your questions really answer themselves. People want experience, even if they have to pay extra for it.

Your friends will have no trouble getting jobs at large companies, though, and those will be much more stable (and have better mentorship) than most startups.

Startups do not have much money. Even the ones that do should aim to keep their burn rates low. That generally means paying for a few experienced, battle-hardened engineers that produce results instead of picking up the cheap, green labor right out of school.

Training junior engineers is important -- they are the future of our industry, but hiring a junior engineer at a startup is a recipe for disaster. Most startups simply can't afford such an expense and it would be irresponsible to try.