There have been many innovations in Silicon Valley over the past decade, but for people who aspire to work in the tech industry, the most transformative may be the assembly line it developed to ingest fresh-faced summer interns and spit out highly paid software engineers. Tech companies have been so desperate for talent that, instead of hiring only for specific roles, many would make a “return offer” to every intern who met certain levels of proficiency.
Dylan Castillo, 21, knew the drill. He interned at Alphabet, Meta, Figma and Stripe and graduated in May from Cornell University with a computer science degree. In November, Alphabet Inc. told him he qualified for a full-time job. Then Castillo met the new Big Tech. For several months, Google’s parent company held off on matching him with a team. It gave him a “we’ll get back to you” update in January. Finally, in March, a few weeks after laying off 12,000 employees, the company rescinded his offer.
Castillo wasn’t shocked that the company had reneged on its promise. It was actively cutting jobs, after all. Still, this wasn’t how things were supposed to work. He’d cleared all the proficiency hurdles—he was good enough. “If you meet that threshold, you should get an offer,” Castillo says. “It was that way before,” he pauses, “whatever this is called.”
