Paul GrahamVerified account

Programmers getting their first jobs after school don't do nearly enough research about where would be best to work. Largely, I think, because they're in denial about the inconvenient truth that research is necessary.

New grads would like to believe that picking an employer is like picking a college, where all the schools at a given level of "elite" are roughly interchangeable. But employers vary a lot more than colleges. Choosing an employer is a much harder problem.

The laziness of new grads is hugely to the advantage of companies like Google, which appears to be the MIT of employers. But there's no such thing. What you want to find is the company that is now what Google was in 1999.

This seems to assume new grads are driven entirely by greed and not other criteria that may be more important to them, like making a positive impact on lives by solving an important societal problem.