There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

As far as the attitude toward employers, I kinda get it. A lot of these kids were sold the idea that college will mean a solid, lasting career and, pre-pandemic, a lot of companies were trying to sell themselves as a “family” and throwing cheap benefits around (ie. free food, beer, etc) only to yank most of that back during/after the pandemic.

It also doesn’t help that, inside US, it sometimes just feels like we’re trying to scam each other constantly. All of this is breeding a ton of cynicism.

Has your company actually done this?

When I was doing mentoring I heard this complaint all the time, but literally no one (juniors on first jobs in this case) could point to an instance of their employer saying it. They had all picked it up from Reddit as something the archetypical company did, and they felt obligated to punish their company for it.

Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of the take-home interview problems people shared in the #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short, and clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this idea that take-home problems were unfair because they were “a week of unpaid labor” or that companies were using them as a tool to extract free work from candidates. So they tried protest the concept of take-homes and stated they would refuse to do them in protest. Of course, when they actually received one for a job they wanted they would abandon that mentality and do the problem, and in many cases they preferred that to doing in-person interviews. Yet the mentality remained that take-homes were evil exploitation and they must rally against it because they read so many Reddit comments about it being “unpaid labor”.

Ive worked for plenty of companies that pretended that they cared about the human resources and not one that has ever been upfront about the fact that they will lay you off for a bump in the stock price without blinking.

>Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of the take-home interview problems people shared in the #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short, and clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this idea that take-home problems were unfair because they were “a week of unpaid labor”

It's largely been my experience that a lot of companies think an 8 hour take home is actually 2.

They tend to be badly constructed and full of ambiguities that require you to read the mind of the test setter.

Of course the people who set them dont know this and they never test their tests. My experience on the other side of the hiring desk is that rank amateur shit is the norm.

The "unpaid labor" thing happened to me once, I think. It was a company that wanted somebody to build an X. Take home was "build an X". Not common, doesnt happen to juniors, but it happens.

Corporate America could clean up its act or Gen Z could force itself to grin and bear it with a smile it like you seem to want. I wont hold my breath for either to happen.