I think its a cool idea, but unless this is aimed at large tech companies (which maybe it is, I can't tell), I can't see the value here. I know you are from highly sought after school but to be honest the working industry of software engineering is very little like your college experience.
You are not going to be hired as new grads to be writing proofs using turing machines. You are going to be thrown into the grinder of (most likely) web application development & software engineering (which you may have taken a class on, but is nothing like the actual experience). Working as a professional software engineer requires so many things not taught in school that the only way to learn this stuff is through experience.
I am not trying to sound like a old bastard but you are over-valuing your hand. Competitive programming, FAANG internships, are all great but its not the same as actually having a job. The hiring shortage is mainly senior engineers and if you were offering an app for senior engineers to find a job together I could see that really paying off, but for new grads I don't see the employers going for it.
It is even worse when aimed at large tech companies. These companies don't experience FOMO when they see a resume of a CMU grad. They get mountains of those a year. And further, large tech companies are going to be less likely to be able to adjust their hiring processes to substitute some external process.
Thank you for the advice. Addressing the first part, yes, we are aiming at large tech companies. This is mostly because we need companies that actually need to hire large numbers of people since groups of 4 > individuals.
Of couse we thought about addressing senior engineers as well, much like Stripe's original hiring program, but we determined that there were too many problems regarding that for now.
There might be a potential market in HFT/trading firms (market makers). They're struggling to recruit right now (industry is doing very well, so high headcount growth) and they're usually pretty small so joining w/ friends means working in closer proximity than you might get in big tech.
Their small class size and heavy new-grad hiring also means that they're usually more flexible with recruiting and some would probably welcome a new pipeline for talented new grads like this.
My experience is that HFT/trading firms are almost exclusively looking for seasoned professionals like low latency engineering specialists.
There's typically the expectation of providing value and filling expertise gaps almost right off the bat. Fresh grads are incapable of doing that.
You are not going to be hired as new grads to be writing proofs using turing machines. You are going to be thrown into the grinder of (most likely) web application development & software engineering (which you may have taken a class on, but is nothing like the actual experience). Working as a professional software engineer requires so many things not taught in school that the only way to learn this stuff is through experience.
I am not trying to sound like a old bastard but you are over-valuing your hand. Competitive programming, FAANG internships, are all great but its not the same as actually having a job. The hiring shortage is mainly senior engineers and if you were offering an app for senior engineers to find a job together I could see that really paying off, but for new grads I don't see the employers going for it.