The single most important thing that every CS new grad looking for a job right now needs to know

The single most important thing that every CS new grad looking for a job right now needs to know is that every tech company wants a scrappy generalist who's on the cutting edge of AI right now. The easiest way for you to compete against and even beat out candidates who have like years and decades of experience on you is just to get deep into the AI stack. Like build RAG pipelines, implement some knowledge graphs, experiment with agentic memory. Like these are the things that every tech company wants to build into their product. And guess what? Their employees don't have the time to become experts in these things cause they gotta keep the lights on and do their actual jobs. But you have all the time and leverage in the world to one up these veterans because the tech is so new to everyone and you have way more neuroplasticity to become fluent in this stack. Like I interviewed maybe 30 mid-level candidates for founding engineer a few months ago, like super cracked, super smart senior engineers. I was shocked that almost none of their intuition about the pre-AI stack translated to the AI questions that my company's grappling with. And they don't have feel a sense of urgency to upskill because they're like resting on their laurels that companies will always need human engineers to do like load balancing or whatever, which may or may not be true. But this is your unique moment to arbitrage this and get ahead.