Ask HN: Why don't more UK graduates want to join start-ups?

I accidentally signed up for a course called "project proposal" thinking it was about submitting research to conferences, but it was actually about pitching ideas to VCs. Rocked my world.

Although it wasn't quite what I imagine they were hoping for, I dropped out after that semester and have spent the last 5 years happily entrenched in startups.

My best guess would be that they do not know the option exists and/or they do not believe they can do it. It does and they can.

So spread the word!

I agree with robfitz that people don't talk about startups. The companies that do the milkround are the usual suspects. Accenture, Deloitte, Procter and Gamble etc...

1) Location. While London is definitely business and cultural center of Britain, I believe it's a bit of a slog for students to travel down to the recruitments fair, especially since most of the best universities are located outside of the city. SO going to them would definitely help.

2) Most of the companies pitching are relatively unknown to the general masses. My best hires are people who either approached us because they like why we're doing, or people in my professional circles. Professional developers fit nicely into these two buckets, were most students don't. Great companies like Tuxebo and Conversocial don't really have mass appeal. Subsequently, it's hard to get a student who doesn't truly understand the company/space excited about being a part of the team.

The second problem is even further exacerbated as early startups don't want "employees". They want "Employee #1"; someone who is passionate and ready to help push the company forward.

It's a tricky problem.

Possibly timing is an issue, right before or after final exams may catch students when getting a job is more top of mind?

One other idea might be to organise some paid internships. If you have a large number of companies in willing to take interns on (point them to Joels 'smart and gets things done' if they want to see the benefits of getting smart people interested in their company before they leave education) then that may give the CS departments a reason to get undergraduates interested in a startup career.

Good luck with the event this weekend, it looks fantastic.

Generally I've found that the Unions might be more willing to spread the word to the students than the universities.

But generally, working for startups isn't mentioned as an option to students at any point during their course. This is perhaps an issue with university faculty, they probably assume it's not an option since they don't have any contacts to any startups. Placing a call to Microsoft recruitment is easy.

Another reason might be an issue with the education students receive at university, I feel as if only 10 students out of a class of 120 people will know how to program correctly. Startups normally want people with lots of knowledge in many different areas, they don't want people who only know how to do certain things; Hiring a graduate who can only code HTML isn't normally an option for startups since they need the most out of the little money that have.

Until at least 50% of a graduating class are able to perform in multiple areas, backend, front-end, perhaps mobile in multiple languages (they don't have to know them amazingly well, but enough to program efficiently whilst checking documentation – when needed!), startups aren't really an option for most graduates. You would be amazed at how many students can't debug problems in their code, because they're taught to just copy code they find on the internet or on some sort of Blackboard style intranet app.

TL;DR: Students graduate with piss poor skills and until more students graduate with the needed skills, they'll never find themselves in a startup.

a) The likes of Morgan Stanley, PWC and suchlike put a lot of effort into always being at the forefront of student minds, by sponsoring societies, etc. That often means they are the default first choice. They also organise a ton of events to show students how nice they are.

b) Money. No getting away from this one. A decent starting salary might be in the region of 25k, the companies mentioned above usually pay somewhere around 35k. That 10k makes a huge difference after 3-4 years of living in squalor.

c) Inexperience. Coming out of university a job is more-or-less a job. You write some code, get paid, that's it. It takes a bit of personal experience to fully appreciate the corporate reality of legacy code, bureaucracy and incompetence. In my experience it often takes those encounters with the beast that is corporate coding to make you run for the hills or startups.

d) Peers and parental pressure. Your mates are all getting golden hand shakes and nice lunches at Big Corp, it is natural to want the same. Also, when you get that job offer from PWC or similar, your parents' eyes light up with excitement and they run off to tell all their friends about it. When you get a job at a three man company, their reaction is likely to be mild confusion at best. Sad but true.

We need to foster more of a startup culture within university campuses, right now 99% of graduates don't even think about joining a startup - it just doesn't even come into their mind, totally focused on joining a blue chip.

Finally, many (not all!) of the startups here in London don't even have a proper business model and haven't made a profit despite being established for years. So that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the top CS graduates they hope to attract.

I wonder if the answer lies with these recent alumni, and if there's a way to share their experience with the doey-eyed undergrads job-seekers.

Maybe Milkroundabout needs to bring it into the schools, and enable alumni as the awareness vector. Or maybe Milkroundabout could turn some attention to rescuing former grads already employed at big companies, rather than focusing solely on the newest grads.

In my opinon in this case it's a matter of exposure, here at UCL I didn't see any advertisements about siliconmilkroundabout; and I bet more non-technical founders knew about it than computer scientists. Universities are a hard one to crack, you really have to target down hard to the societies(techsoc) and the right areas (malet place).

I was very willing to join a startup, but I also tend to rail against the Silicon Roundabout. I'm just personally not that interested in London.

Are many of these companies based elsewhere?

It's funny because something like this would do very well with Nottingham students. The dedicated business campus also has many computer science students, but we really only ever heard of the usual companies.

Have you looked at the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation on the Nottingham Business Campus, for example?

For instance, it would be useful to be able to see which funded companies were looking for a junior designer and then be able to look at the actual job postings themselves (e.g. via link to that company's website).

I hope you have great success with this event. I have a friend attending and there's a good chance I will come down from Leeds one day to take a look at one of your future events.

Another factor is likely to be a bias on the part of universities towards building relationships with larger employers who are seen as prestigious. An unheard-of startup won't garner anywhere near the interest and attention of a large, well-known company.

Also (and this is totally personal) the Brick Lane location would have put me off a) because it's the other side of London, but mainly b) I have always perceived brick lane (and there abouts) as a London counter-culture/socialism/arty/etc scene, and events there abouts tend to follow that stereo type (for example look at the difference between the New Designers (http://www.newdesigners.com/) show and Free Range(http://www.free-range.org.uk/)). I have no problem with that now, but straight out of uni I was obsessed by money and one thing that a brick lane location doesn't scream to the high heavens is just that: money...

On campus presentations on the other hand are a fantastic way of putting yourself on the radar. I don't mean the recruitment fairs that some Uni's will have on campus, but rather smaller events. I recently went to the final presentation of a phd project and there were 4-5 companies giving a short talk what they did in that field and afterwards they had stands with demos and the actual people who get their hands dirty were there to talk to you (extensively). To me the latter (where it's directly related to a topic I might be interested in) is much more interesting and inspiring than some impersonal recruitment fair.

Let me start by saying that I've always hated recruitment fairs — you're treated like cattle and rarely get to speak to companies (read: HR departments) properly. I found it to be a similar situation with the milkroundabout event only instead of HR departments it was founders and developers.

I don't agree with "selling the brand" of milkroundabout as it will easily be confused with similarly named events/sites/companies. Instead aim to do guest lectures at universities on topics that are bound to get students interested.

If you're the ones with interesting work, why aren't you talking about what you do? Students already get told that they are under prepared for what working life is like and you can expose them to what you've done. You could easily compare this to what life was like at <insert safe boring company> before. If you're so inclined.

Pick topics that are interesting to the students that you want to attract. Then go on a tangent about start-ups, the culture, and the experience. If you show students what it's like to be in a start-up, they'll get involved and tell their friends.

In summary, sell them a better lifestyle than the usual suspects.

I'm a recent grad (just over 2 years ago now) and I have a startup in the UK. I'll be honest this is the first time I've heard about the event.

I think grads / final years are even more scared now than ever about finding a job and while that makes it a perfect time to try and start you own thing, I worry it just adds even more risk to a what they feel is already a dismal employment situation.

At Bath Uni we had an excellent Career's service however and if you wanted to do campus events or even just mailers, I would recommend getting in touch with university career centres. You can even ask them to pass your details on to the CS department and getting them the mail the event (yes, spam in a way) it to all the CS students. They did that at Bath if it was particularly relevant.

It may just be a case of students getting tired of all these career fairs which often don't amount to anything. I know in my final year, by the time I'd seen KPMG/Accenture/Deloitte/Barclays/BT/HP/etc I couldn't take any more being deceived about "fantastic opportunities". Perhaps posting this question to HN and undertaking some Twitter buzz if you can will attract the right sort of people to your event more than career emails.

Anyway, good luck with the event! Great that these things even happen in the UK, Rob

When I graduated I barely knew that startups existed and I certainly didn't know they needed grads.

I went to a Uni that had an associated business park and those companies advertised on the student job board.

I did a graduate scheme with one of those companies but I wish I'd had more exposure to startups and associated events.

Is there a central list of these 500+ roles? Not so people can apply but so students know before hand that they are suited to the positions.

Maybe it's the nature of CS students, it's a pretty daunting time - especially meeting recruiting companies face to face. It's hard to know what to say for yourself if all you've got is a degree in hand.

For the average grads it feels like the competition would be just way to high.

With a few years of work experience it's much easier to go and chat to recruiters as you've got confidence in the projects you've worked on.

I don't know if any of the roles at the event will be suited to me this Sunday but I'm going anyway because I'd love to talk to some of the companies that are there.

I don't think I would have done that as a grad.

Also I noticed there is a careers fair happening today, predominantly big engineering firms/consultancies/banking, and I didn't see if you had any representation there (apologies if you do and I missed it).

I'll second the point many have made about money. It's hard to resist one of the big banks offering you £40k+ straight out of university.