None of us, graduating from 4 years of more of a highly technical education, have a clue what to expect in the real world. My 40-something friends moan about the problem, but I wonder if perhaps wage compression isn't a good thing in disguise. It makes room for newcomers, as many older engineers change careers to manage the slope of their salary curves. The embedded industry changes at warp speed. I find myself overwhelmed with publications, application notes, and other publications that have the information I need to keep up, but that compete with other demands.
Young developers bring new ideas and new ways of doing things to an organization.
They make mistakes - but a wise outfit uses mistakes as the critically needed learning ground. I still see plenty of crummy C code written by latecomers to the language who clearly continue to think in the computer dialects of their youth. When a business changes as rapidly as this one does, getting stuck in well-proven ruts is dangerous indeed. Though salary compression is nothing more than a result of assigning value to a particular job, it does create a valuable turnover that ultimately improves the industry. In the military one is expected to have the grace to retire if passed over for promotion a couple of times.