Thousands of applicants, 50 spots, and a 20-year veteran taking an entry-level role: Reddit says this is what CS hiring looks like right now
A post on Reddit’s r/csMajors has offered something rare in the endless stream of job market complaints: actual numbers from inside a company’s hiring process, shared by someone who was lucky enough to land a job and used their new position to ask the questions everyone wants answered.
The original poster is apparently an international student who recently joined a mid-sized company that sponsors visas. Rather than just counting their blessings and moving on, they had coffee chats with HR managers and directors to understand exactly what hiring looked like from the other side. What they found confirmed what job seekers have been suspecting, and then some.
The numbers from HR
The company has been running internship and new graduate programmes for more than a decade. In past cycles, they would typically receive hundreds of applicants. They posted their latest internship opening in early July, and already had over 1,000 applications, for a programme that will take 50 to 60 people.
After filtering out applicants without a relevant technical degree or experience, including, somehow, people based outside the US with no visa who applied anyway, and running the remainder through AI screening, they still ended up with around 4,000 applications per cycle (from previous years).
Four thousand. For fifty spots. It seems to be a nightmare for everyone involved; for HR, having to sift through thousands of applications, and for jobseekers who’d have to compete with others for a coveted spot.
The director’s insight
For a role requiring two to four years of experience, the company ended up hiring someone with 20 years, which, according to the post, was a combination of an IT background and six years as a software engineer.
“How do entry-level people compete when there are applicants like this?” the original poster asked, pointing to the structural absurdity of a market where someone with two decades of experience is applying for and winning roles that are nominally designed for early-career workers.
The comments
The thread drew responses that ranged from frustration to dark humour.
“I can’t even get interviews as an American with almost two years of experience,” one commenter wrote, the implicit point being that if a domestic candidate with experience is getting nowhere, the odds for everyone else are probably even steeper.
Another acknowledged the original poster’s success while contextualising the overall difficulty of the situation: “This is insane, but I am happy that you got your job offer as an international student. It is tough to find a job as an international student nowadays.”
One commenter pointed the finger at a wider cultural assumption that has sent a generation toward CS degrees on the promise of guaranteed employment: “Yet parents are still all telling their children to study computer science, because they think it will guarantee their child a job. They are just following trends and can’t think for themselves.”
What the numbers actually mean
The original poster’s post is valuable precisely because it replaces anecdote with arithmetic. A 4,000-applicant pool for 50 internship spots is a 1.25% acceptance rate. A candidate with 20 years of experience taking a role designed for someone with two to four years is not an anomaly, but a symptom of a market where overqualified workers are competing down the chain because they have nowhere else to go.
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For current CS students and new graduates wondering why their applications disappear into silence, the HR conversation in this thread offers the most honest explanation available: the funnel is so full, and so compressed, that even strong candidates are statistically unlikely to make it through. And it’s not because anything is wrong with them, but because the numbers simply don’t work in anyone’s favour right now.
The original poster’s closing note, that they got the job, and that more than half of their cohort of new graduates are also international students, was meant to offer some hope. It does, but it also raises its own question: in a market this saturated, what combination of luck, timing, and circumstances actually makes the difference between 4,000 applicants and the 50 who get in?
Nobody in the thread has a clean answer to that, which may be the most honest thing the post reveals.
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