jp_newgrad · 3 replies
I keep seeing Comcast on job boards for new grad SWE roles but I have this instinct that it's a "settled" company where you get stuck on COBOL or something. is that fair or am I way off?
also for behavioral questions, do they actually care about new grads not having much work experience? I have internships but not full-time and I don't want to get dinged on the behavioral rounds for not having big "influenced a whole org" stories.
the COBOL fear is overblown for new grad roles. you're not going to land in the billing mainframe team out of college. most new grads in tech go into Xfinity digital product or the platform engineering orgs, which run Java/Go/Python on AWS. it's not sexy but it's real systems with real scale.
on the behavioral side: as a hiring manager i'm not expecting a new grad to have "influenced org-wide strategy." I want to see that you can tell a coherent story about something you did, that you can own a mistake and say what you'd change, and that you actually want to work on the problem. those stories can come from internships or school projects.
that's reassuring, thank you. I'll apply. the scale point is real, I'd rather be on a system that actually has 30M users than a startup with 400.
I got my first SWE job at a cable company (not Comcast but similar). the tech was a bit older in places but I learned a ton about reliability, operational stuff, production incidents. not glamorous but genuinely useful for your second job too.