I wonder why more of the larger companies don't just do this themselves.
When I got out of college ~13 years ago, I went to work for a large retail corp. Their stuff was all mainframe and COBOL. They had a hard time finding new hires obviously so they had their own internal training program. The interview process was intense, around 4 hours of face to face interviews followed by a 3 hour written test (language independent, all logic and flow charting). If you got accepted, you were brought on and paid a salary for 3 months to go through their mainframe training program. The total cost for them was around 15k per student, which is far less than what I see the big tech companies offering as a signing bonus.
Microsoft had such a program back in the mid 2000s. It was not heavily advertised but it basically trained people with math/science backgrounds in undergrad. You came in and went to class for half the day and then worked on a product team for half the day over a period of nine months. Just about everyone who came through (being bright already) was able to make it as a high-quality engineer on products around the company. Unfortunately, the program was axed during the Great Recession and hasn't come back.
When I got out of college ~13 years ago, I went to work for a large retail corp. Their stuff was all mainframe and COBOL. They had a hard time finding new hires obviously so they had their own internal training program. The interview process was intense, around 4 hours of face to face interviews followed by a 3 hour written test (language independent, all logic and flow charting). If you got accepted, you were brought on and paid a salary for 3 months to go through their mainframe training program. The total cost for them was around 15k per student, which is far less than what I see the big tech companies offering as a signing bonus.