1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things:
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.
I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
>To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it.
Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
>Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.
> Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?
AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.
Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
From what I've seen, CS/programming job growth is significantly worse than in other comparable fields. Though my guess is that's a retrenchment from overhiring and overpaying.
The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
No, companies were already having trouble getting prospective staff H1Bs. Making them more expensive just increases the incentive to move the job offshore.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
First, I'm sorry you're having problems finding a job -- that sucks.
Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.
Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.
What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years.
It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.
I would be careful assuming that a lack of performance was responsible for the internships not converting.
At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.
I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.
Yeah, our team of two gets two interns a semester. We cannot convert them to full time as there is no position open. Complete hiring freeze since 2022.
We paused hiring fresh grads, but still hire interns, and those who prove themselves get full-time offers. We've found internships to be a great pipeline to great hires over the years.
We've had several candidates with completed bachelor's degrees apply for internships, prove themselves, and get full-time jobs that way. This "back door" job hiring pathway might work elsewhere as well.
It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.
The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.
Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.
Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.
>The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life
Hopefully this is what changes. If, for example, AI reduces labor needs by 50%, we ought to gradually move to a 20 hour work week. Consumption patterns would change— the Covid years provide some very limited guidance on how such a dynamic would be shaped by changing the demand for different forms of entertainment and leisure activities.
The main thing though especially in the US with its cultural roots is that western society will need to reevaluate the idea of person worth so tightly coupled to labor and career- and the Puritan Work Ethic.
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
I think a lot of tech people feel this way. The feeling of mismatch between my values and the values of leadership is why I left the industry. I'm starting a Master's degree studying birds and it feels like such a weight off of my shoulders to not have to justify corporate decisions to myself.
Yeah, I'm employed as a research assistant as part of the Master's program currently. There are jobs in government, non-profits, and academia potentially after. I've never loved money (except for the flexibility having it gives me) so I have several hundred thousand saved up after a decade of engineering so while grad school is an 82% cut in pre-tax pay I can withdraw 1% a year from my investments and live fine. Even once I'm out of school my pay will never as good as it was in engineering but I'll be happier presumably.
I'm still figuring out exactly what the research will be but the plan is essentially data science applied to bird migration patterns (lots of statistics and modelling currently). Overall if you like birds and don't like money apparently a strong math/tech background is potentially useful for ecology research with the idea that's it's easier to teach me about birds than teach an animal science person data science and programming (though I did take an undergrad ecology class before applying to ecology programs).
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
I'm not so sure. The tech to do this has been around for ages, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm thinking there's something else preventing companies from going this direction.
My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.
>My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Can't people already do massive amounts of damage to a company truck/van by driving it into the water, or dumping gas on it and igniting it? Doing it remotely only makes marginally easier, but most people won't do it because they don't want to be on the lam just to send an anti-capitalist message.
Years ago Marvin Minsky gave a talk before 2001: A Space Odyssey played. He casually mentioned that if NASA (or was it DARPA?) had invested in tele-robotics like he insisted, your house would be cleaned by someone in Africa right now.
Depressing article but it really captures the zeitgeist among recent tech grads.
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
To answer your question, it’s taken me about two straight years, but I think I’m finally getting somewhere. I didn’t get any interviews between June 2022 and April 2024, and then another year long gap until this April not counting an internship interview.
When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities.
For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
I was laid off some time ago and made an earnest effort to break into the trades. I have some experience in framing and general handiwork, but it is extremely difficult to find an apprenticeship/get on a track to certification. I’ve heard unions are extremely selective to ensure their current union members can find consistent work.
As with most things, getting into it seems to be primarily about knowing someone to get you in.
I’d love to hear more ideas/advice on finding alternative employment if anyone has any. I’m worried I won’t be able to find a normal job again.
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has a piece circulating now on Fox Business that says classic trade jobs are the best bet in the age of AI. So called "white collar workers" are being laid off by the hundreds of thousands - - - but blue collar jobs are actually HIRING. I am retiring at 71 yrs. from my own "blue collar" company I started 15 years ago, I created and manage both my websites without a lick of javascript, I have averaged $150K+ a year gross, working mostly from May through October. Scuba diving in my area lakes, nothing to be ashamed of, I am out in mother nature, not locked up in a cubicle cranking out code all day. It's your choice. In 2023 I did $335K and have a solid method to add on another 100 to $200K with a related blue collar offering.
Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing.
I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.
Yeah, I came from the automotive repair industry. The only people who made money were the shop owners, and their family members. You really have to be running your own business to make ends meet.
It's a good callout. Also important to note that ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month.
There will be jobs, but also, it might take more time and energy to find them (~12 months vs ~6 months historically). Plan accordingly (structural living expenses, cash on hand, etc).
> Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
The housing crisis isn’t solved by more tradespeople. I know an electrician who’s having trouble finding work because there’s no funding for new construction
Which is both odd and market dependent. I have an electrician I partner with for some work in the Midwest, and his book of work is a year out (commercial and industrial, not new resi).
Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
> There are already public memos from large companies where leaders tell their staff that any request for headcount has to come with a justification for why an AI system cannot do the job
spot on! at my place - playwright + prompts instead of hiring QA. data analytic guy is gone ... noone is missing him
today's random quotes
- "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is" ...
- "he job market in India has grown 9% in 2025, so far. 53 million in new jobs. I wonder, how many jobs came from U.S. companies being off shored?"
5 trilllion off the global IT bubble funded by VC money taken somewhere else poured into GPUs and data centers
look at number of linkedin profiles in US companies like Accenture in India .... 450 000 + ... feel really bad biggest transfer of head-counts from US, chatgpt just fuelled it
“Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. ... Models feast on that part of the curve. ... The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. ... An out of distribution human, in my head, is someone whose job sits far enough in the tail of that curve that it does not currently compress into training data. ... [But T]hey are not safe; nothing is. They are simply late on the automation curve.”
All of this started before ChatGPT. There are graphics showing it, sorry I can’t remember the source.
I guess I’m just annoyed that everyone in the comments is reaffirming the AI is stealing jobs narrative, but half the studies coming out say it’s actually wasting peoples time and they are poor judges of their own productivity.
It just feels like AI is a convenient excuse for businesses to cut costs since the economy is crap, but no one wants to admit it for fear of driving their stock price down.
I always feel a bit conflicted when I read these experience from new grads: on the one hand, there's no question the job market today is not the one they signed up for; on the other, the expectation of recent grads is completely alien to me as someone who entered the job market in the shadow of the dotcom bust.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.
Much of your argument rests on refuting the notion that the author feels "entitled" to a high-paying job. In that point, I agree with you. Any engineering undertaking is most productive when it is a meritocratic and competitive pursuit. People that feel "entitled" to an engineering job unfortunately need a reality check on their true competitiveness.
However, that doesn't seem like the authors core point. The authors' core point here is that they feel that the level of competition is past the point where their meritocratic achievements have any weight because to be competitive in the present marketplace, they need to either (1) inherently be _born_ in a different country with a low cost of living, (2) give up certain basic freedoms, (3) settle for a less skillful job where they can be an outlier in the distribution (for how long?) etc. -- all of which, to them, feel less meritocratic.
Of course, they might also feel "entitled" to a job, but that's not the interesting part of their argument (at least to me).
Reading the posters cv and experience, I suspect they have a skill gap in theory of mind. ie, understanding how they are perceived. Sure, the economy is hard, and finding a job is difficult. Questions I have
- What jobs are they applying for?
- Do they understand the benefits they can bring to a team?
- Are they showing up in interactions like they show up in this blog post? How can they take radical responsibility for the problem of finding job? Doing what you are told and not getting a job sure sucks but if that's all someone tells me about what they did, I am 100% not passing on a good recommendation.
- Their resume needs work
"The people in the middle of the bell curve face a dramatically less promising future than the tail end" is also the key message of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.
Not understanding the 'I did everything right and look what happened' intro, though certainly not a unique feeling. Tech hiring slowed at the tail end of 21 and the mass layoffs started in 22, 4 and 3 years ago respectively. Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results. Not that you should give up, but it's going to be switch majors or ride out the downturn. And that's not unique to now or even computer science(remember the MBA glut from the early 2000s?).
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
> Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results
Yes, if you're in your 30s and have lived through a bunch of corporate downsizings before, it does make sense.
Do you remember what it was like to be 18? I had no idea what people in offices even did all day. My way of thinking about the world was 100% idealistic and had no basis in the gritty realities of corporate life.
> For most of the industrial era, you could assume that any large physical operation, like a warehouse, would need a certain number of human bodies to move boxes and drive forklifts.
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
Large AI siloes, if allowed to exist, will bifurcate humanity. People who have a stake in those AI companies will no longer need the rest of the population to provide goods and services. We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.
This is why we must break the siloes and give the tech to as many people as possible. Not access through an API, but the weights for the models and schematics for the robots.
I think we'll be fine on that front, though. AI and robotics R&D is open enough and people seem willing and capable enough to keep it that way, so the short-term job market issues will disappear. The remaining threat from AI is a long-term existential one.
Interesting to see that the answers to his problems are literally embedded in the intro and outro : what you were “told” by adults was 100% B.S. (adults has no idea what the world was going to be like and what was the “right” path) and he was probably intelligent enough (as we can see by the writing of this article) to realize this by himself (simply questioning the culture around him is enough, what’s teenage years for ?) but he preferred to continue to believe the very serious adulty lies.
Where I work we desperately need two new graduates for embedded controls dev jobs on-site in the US. We're very picky, looking for attitude and aptitude rather than super-specific skill sets. But over the next year we definitely need two and our preference is new graduates.
Came out right after dotcom bust. It was really disappointing when I learned that corporate America simply moves on to the next graduating class. All the recruiting mechanisms in place means you’re going to get burned pretty bad if you miss that hiring wave. Some of my classmates took years to find something long term. You’re so much better off taking a year off from school to reset. As most things in life, timing is everything.
I’m not saying people should get jobs they are way overqualified for, but I believe there are many in these situations who choose to be unemployed rather than work in jobs that they could do in their industry.
Certainly there are new grads who think they are hot shit, but I have to believe that the vast majority would take whatever they could if it meant a foot in the door, especially right now.
I don't know why we need to be so dramatic about AI and automation. The reason you're not getting hired is because there's not enough positions and we have a huge amount of people in the industry. Tech is not exploding like it was in the 2000s and 2010s. It is a mature industry. That comes with mature industry issues like when the economy sucks, it doesn't grow anymore.
Have you noticed how we're still in a trade war? What about the government shutdown? The high interest rates? All time highs for cost of living? Wages not keeping up with costs at all for practically any profession? Dang, it's almost like if all the money going to AI stonkz wasn't happening... we'd be in a recession... hmmmm
Remove all government regulations and all of these people would have decent jobs quickly. You can learn any trade with YouTube videos. Electricians make $175 / hr in Washington state now. I replaced my own electrical panel after reading a book and watching YouTube videos.
Honestly I think "applying for jobs" is becoming a thing of the past.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
In my experience, it's been the case for 20-30 years (forever?) that knowing the right people works way better than applying through the standard channels--but that's the same as saying that things are tougher for junior people which was probably masked by a lot more opportunities in tech for many which led those many to poo-poo the importance of networks because they apply for three jobs on a Monday and have offers the next week given a target-rich environment.
Out of curiosity, I live in Europe where it is quite common to work remotely across countries within the EU or the UK. I have always wondered why so many US companies limit remote roles to people based in the US, and then mention a shortage of qualified talent. It feels like there is a large pool of people being overlooked.
In our position we're only hiring for in person roles, so location/authorization is a must have.
But in regards to US/EU remote, I imagine the EU candidates come with slightly higher overhead (different payroll processing, employment regulations, time zones, etc). Which makes it easier to adopt a US only approach.
In Europe, what we do is usually: if the person lives in the same country as one of our business entities, they get hired directly as an employee. If they live in a country where the company does not have a business presence, they get hired through an EOR or as a contractor.
If i am manage to land an entry level job with a pathetic pay and keep it for a few years, I will be well suited to benefit from the eventual shortage of the mid-senior level engineer. am i right or am i just coping?
The same BigTech that for the past couple of decades have loudly proclaimed "go to a good college and get a degree in CS and you'll get a decent job" have now betrayed those who followed their advice. It's heartbreaking.
It's not just this fellow. I'm hearing it from friends and relatives whose children are new grads in CS, cyber-security or and similar fields.
It is easier to start your own business than to get a job for a certain class of people in our industry. There is just not enough supply of jobs for people who “did everything right.” It’s a painful economic signal that US economy has run out of cushy Big Tech jobs and now needs an influx of innovative firms. This is difficult to explain to your relatives over Thanksgiving turkey but it is nonetheless the truth in my experience. If I could go back in time I would have gone to an Ivy League, gotten the proper internships, moved straight to the Bay during ZIRP, but alas I don’t have a Time Machine.
The level of effort is becoming comparable: It's not unfathomable to send 1,000 applications to get a new job. Think of all the emails, coding evaluations, high-pressure interviews, LeetCode grinding, multi-round interviews, HR back-and-forths, and inevitable let downs or ghostings you have to endure just to get one measly job. Compare this to making a product that 1,000 people will subscribe to for $10/month, except you own it all forever. The skillsets are vastly different, and starting a business is much less rote and industrialized, but I don't think the level of effort is an order of magnitude greater. All of the experience I have gathered with my own business has paid dividends but the experience of looking for yet another job in yet another downturn seems to mostly have been wasteful in the long-term.
It isn’t just CS anymore. Now, it’s any entry level and even mid-level office positions. Anecdotally, it’s not just one industry or department anymore. There are a lot more applications and the applicants are also way more qualified.
> The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.
Hmm, I'm not sure about the link to lower birth rates. Birth rates have been falling in e.g. Western and Northern Europe for a long time, despite strong social safety nets.
While I think the link between birth rates declining and automation does make sense, it will take quite sometime for this to verifiable as this is a somewhat recent anxiety. The reason for the trend that we have seem over the last decades seem to mostly stem from lower childhood mortality rates, women having access to the job market, and perhaps to a lesser extent climate anxiety.
Two initial thoughts:
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
Why do you think any of that has to do with being a good programmer?
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.
Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.
> his resume is designed poorly ... too long
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
> His resume is designed poorly.
Yeah.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
Ha, you’re right.
And I missed it when skimming
The people looking at your resumes will skim because they have a lot of resumes to look at
He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning
I had a similar thought. “I was never this articulate as a fresh grad”
I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes.
But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades.
So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.
That's a really standard CV
His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.
I agree on the first point. I clicked through to the previous blog entry which I also found to be really good.
Agreed; uncommonly good writing, especially for someone with a CS degree.
It's a good enough resume. But half as many words would make it better.
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
It might pay for him to listen for a bit.
Oh, I'm sure the person in question has heard this many times, coming in to the job market. Chicken and an egg problem, it is.
Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things:
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.
I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
>To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it.
Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
>Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.
> Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?
AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.
Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
Job markets are bad for everyone though
From what I've seen, CS/programming job growth is significantly worse than in other comparable fields. Though my guess is that's a retrenchment from overhiring and overpaying.
The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
Why are executives allowed to lie, and the rest of us have to just deal with it? At some point the chickens come home to roost
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
Same, we haven't hired in 5 years. I know bright young college grade who has been looking for a job for way too long.
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
You have a grave misunderstanding of how the American government works if you think this isn't things working as intended.
They stoke fear of immigrants to win elections, but to the extent that their donors want that labor, it will be allowed to continue.
Because H1B was never about shortages, it is about wage suppression and having an exploitable underclass.
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
Yeah, true. I worked for a big tech company when they were building a team in China so they could lay us all off in Palo Alto.
How long did it take?
>The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in.
Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
No, companies were already having trouble getting prospective staff H1Bs. Making them more expensive just increases the incentive to move the job offshore.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
I mean, occasionally he does have a good idea, then he's quickly reminded who he works for.
you know the answer
First, I'm sorry you're having problems finding a job -- that sucks.
Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.
Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.
What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years.
It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.
I would be careful assuming that a lack of performance was responsible for the internships not converting.
At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.
I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.
Yeah, our team of two gets two interns a semester. We cannot convert them to full time as there is no position open. Complete hiring freeze since 2022.
We paused hiring fresh grads, but still hire interns, and those who prove themselves get full-time offers. We've found internships to be a great pipeline to great hires over the years.
We've had several candidates with completed bachelor's degrees apply for internships, prove themselves, and get full-time jobs that way. This "back door" job hiring pathway might work elsewhere as well.
Agree 100%
It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.
The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.
Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.
Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.
This was my experience after I did an internship in 2024.
>The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life
Hopefully this is what changes. If, for example, AI reduces labor needs by 50%, we ought to gradually move to a 20 hour work week. Consumption patterns would change— the Covid years provide some very limited guidance on how such a dynamic would be shaped by changing the demand for different forms of entertainment and leisure activities.
The main thing though especially in the US with its cultural roots is that western society will need to reevaluate the idea of person worth so tightly coupled to labor and career- and the Puritan Work Ethic.
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
Steve Ballmer keeps them up night.
I think a lot of tech people feel this way. The feeling of mismatch between my values and the values of leadership is why I left the industry. I'm starting a Master's degree studying birds and it feels like such a weight off of my shoulders to not have to justify corporate decisions to myself.
How does that work financially? Will you work in academia?
Yeah, I'm employed as a research assistant as part of the Master's program currently. There are jobs in government, non-profits, and academia potentially after. I've never loved money (except for the flexibility having it gives me) so I have several hundred thousand saved up after a decade of engineering so while grad school is an 82% cut in pre-tax pay I can withdraw 1% a year from my investments and live fine. Even once I'm out of school my pay will never as good as it was in engineering but I'll be happier presumably.
I'm still figuring out exactly what the research will be but the plan is essentially data science applied to bird migration patterns (lots of statistics and modelling currently). Overall if you like birds and don't like money apparently a strong math/tech background is potentially useful for ecology research with the idea that's it's easier to teach me about birds than teach an animal science person data science and programming (though I did take an undergrad ecology class before applying to ecology programs).
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
I'm not so sure. The tech to do this has been around for ages, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm thinking there's something else preventing companies from going this direction.
My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.
>My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Can't people already do massive amounts of damage to a company truck/van by driving it into the water, or dumping gas on it and igniting it? Doing it remotely only makes marginally easier, but most people won't do it because they don't want to be on the lam just to send an anti-capitalist message.
Years ago Marvin Minsky gave a talk before 2001: A Space Odyssey played. He casually mentioned that if NASA (or was it DARPA?) had invested in tele-robotics like he insisted, your house would be cleaned by someone in Africa right now.
The room was stunned silent.
Depressing article but it really captures the zeitgeist among recent tech grads.
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
To answer your question, it’s taken me about two straight years, but I think I’m finally getting somewhere. I didn’t get any interviews between June 2022 and April 2024, and then another year long gap until this April not counting an internship interview.
When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities.
For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
I was laid off some time ago and made an earnest effort to break into the trades. I have some experience in framing and general handiwork, but it is extremely difficult to find an apprenticeship/get on a track to certification. I’ve heard unions are extremely selective to ensure their current union members can find consistent work.
As with most things, getting into it seems to be primarily about knowing someone to get you in.
I’d love to hear more ideas/advice on finding alternative employment if anyone has any. I’m worried I won’t be able to find a normal job again.
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has a piece circulating now on Fox Business that says classic trade jobs are the best bet in the age of AI. So called "white collar workers" are being laid off by the hundreds of thousands - - - but blue collar jobs are actually HIRING. I am retiring at 71 yrs. from my own "blue collar" company I started 15 years ago, I created and manage both my websites without a lick of javascript, I have averaged $150K+ a year gross, working mostly from May through October. Scuba diving in my area lakes, nothing to be ashamed of, I am out in mother nature, not locked up in a cubicle cranking out code all day. It's your choice. In 2023 I did $335K and have a solid method to add on another 100 to $200K with a related blue collar offering.
What kind of blue collar work gets you $335K? What would be a 10 - 20 year average wage / year look like?
Either very high risk work such as underwater welding or owning a contracting business.
> Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem
No, "not enough people" is corporate speak for "the public should train our workers for us"
One of the most frustrating things in my lifetime:
Company CEO paid-orders-of-magnitude-more-than-median-employee:
"Not enough local people with XYZ skills!"
Skilled local person: "I'm right here, just pay me properly."
Unskilled local person: "I'm right here, train me and I'll do it even at your low wage."
Local educational institution: "We could run training courses if you want to work with us on that!"
...
CEO: "Guess we'll have to get them from overseas!"
> there is a housing crisis
It's intentional. The housing problem is a policy failure. It's illegal to build homes where people want to.
Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing.
I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.
Yeah, I came from the automotive repair industry. The only people who made money were the shop owners, and their family members. You really have to be running your own business to make ends meet.
It's a good callout. Also important to note that ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month.
There will be jobs, but also, it might take more time and energy to find them (~12 months vs ~6 months historically). Plan accordingly (structural living expenses, cash on hand, etc).
> Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
https://layoffs.fyi/
While ‘only’ twice as long to find a job, I get the feeling that it’s almost exponential in its impact the longer you stay unemployed.
Anyone got a way of characterising that?
> Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The salaries of most tradespeople are not increasing significantly. That would imply that the field doesn't see a shortage.
Given how damaging manual labor is to your body, that's not a good bet to make.
The housing crisis isn’t solved by more tradespeople. I know an electrician who’s having trouble finding work because there’s no funding for new construction
Which is both odd and market dependent. I have an electrician I partner with for some work in the Midwest, and his book of work is a year out (commercial and industrial, not new resi).
Electricians in data-center states are eating; elsewhere they are scraping by due to macro-economics.
Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
> There are already public memos from large companies where leaders tell their staff that any request for headcount has to come with a justification for why an AI system cannot do the job
spot on! at my place - playwright + prompts instead of hiring QA. data analytic guy is gone ... noone is missing him
today's random quotes
- "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is" ...
- "he job market in India has grown 9% in 2025, so far. 53 million in new jobs. I wonder, how many jobs came from U.S. companies being off shored?"
5 trilllion off the global IT bubble funded by VC money taken somewhere else poured into GPUs and data centers
look at number of linkedin profiles in US companies like Accenture in India .... 450 000 + ... feel really bad biggest transfer of head-counts from US, chatgpt just fuelled it
Great essay. This part seems particularly astute:
“Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. ... Models feast on that part of the curve. ... The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. ... An out of distribution human, in my head, is someone whose job sits far enough in the tail of that curve that it does not currently compress into training data. ... [But T]hey are not safe; nothing is. They are simply late on the automation curve.”
All of this started before ChatGPT. There are graphics showing it, sorry I can’t remember the source.
I guess I’m just annoyed that everyone in the comments is reaffirming the AI is stealing jobs narrative, but half the studies coming out say it’s actually wasting peoples time and they are poor judges of their own productivity.
It just feels like AI is a convenient excuse for businesses to cut costs since the economy is crap, but no one wants to admit it for fear of driving their stock price down.
I always feel a bit conflicted when I read these experience from new grads: on the one hand, there's no question the job market today is not the one they signed up for; on the other, the expectation of recent grads is completely alien to me as someone who entered the job market in the shadow of the dotcom bust.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.
Much of your argument rests on refuting the notion that the author feels "entitled" to a high-paying job. In that point, I agree with you. Any engineering undertaking is most productive when it is a meritocratic and competitive pursuit. People that feel "entitled" to an engineering job unfortunately need a reality check on their true competitiveness.
However, that doesn't seem like the authors core point. The authors' core point here is that they feel that the level of competition is past the point where their meritocratic achievements have any weight because to be competitive in the present marketplace, they need to either (1) inherently be _born_ in a different country with a low cost of living, (2) give up certain basic freedoms, (3) settle for a less skillful job where they can be an outlier in the distribution (for how long?) etc. -- all of which, to them, feel less meritocratic.
Of course, they might also feel "entitled" to a job, but that's not the interesting part of their argument (at least to me).
Reading the posters cv and experience, I suspect they have a skill gap in theory of mind. ie, understanding how they are perceived. Sure, the economy is hard, and finding a job is difficult. Questions I have
- What jobs are they applying for? - Do they understand the benefits they can bring to a team? - Are they showing up in interactions like they show up in this blog post? How can they take radical responsibility for the problem of finding job? Doing what you are told and not getting a job sure sucks but if that's all someone tells me about what they did, I am 100% not passing on a good recommendation. - Their resume needs work
"The people in the middle of the bell curve face a dramatically less promising future than the tail end" is also the key message of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.
Not understanding the 'I did everything right and look what happened' intro, though certainly not a unique feeling. Tech hiring slowed at the tail end of 21 and the mass layoffs started in 22, 4 and 3 years ago respectively. Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results. Not that you should give up, but it's going to be switch majors or ride out the downturn. And that's not unique to now or even computer science(remember the MBA glut from the early 2000s?).
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
> Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results
Yes, if you're in your 30s and have lived through a bunch of corporate downsizings before, it does make sense.
Do you remember what it was like to be 18? I had no idea what people in offices even did all day. My way of thinking about the world was 100% idealistic and had no basis in the gritty realities of corporate life.
(Australian not an American here)
You’d very quickly rise to the top of the public sector
My brother in law is only in his mid 20s and is in charge of half a dozen engineers
No nepotism (we honestly know no one) just leaping from the right firm to the public sector at the right time
Look for government consultant jobs or even better straight engineering roles
You must have gotten lucky that Accenture didn't infect your agency and shift large project engineering positions under them and then out to India.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024
With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
>nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
I'm not really seeing it aside from "there's a large uptick because there's eventually a recession".
> For most of the industrial era, you could assume that any large physical operation, like a warehouse, would need a certain number of human bodies to move boxes and drive forklifts.
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
Large AI siloes, if allowed to exist, will bifurcate humanity. People who have a stake in those AI companies will no longer need the rest of the population to provide goods and services. We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.
This is why we must break the siloes and give the tech to as many people as possible. Not access through an API, but the weights for the models and schematics for the robots.
I think we'll be fine on that front, though. AI and robotics R&D is open enough and people seem willing and capable enough to keep it that way, so the short-term job market issues will disappear. The remaining threat from AI is a long-term existential one.
> We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.
That's how it's been my entire adult life.
Interesting to see that the answers to his problems are literally embedded in the intro and outro : what you were “told” by adults was 100% B.S. (adults has no idea what the world was going to be like and what was the “right” path) and he was probably intelligent enough (as we can see by the writing of this article) to realize this by himself (simply questioning the culture around him is enough, what’s teenage years for ?) but he preferred to continue to believe the very serious adulty lies.
Nobody owes you anything. Grow up
What is your recommendation for the young author beyond questioning culture?
I hope you never have a bad string of luck and end up homeless pal, because it can happen to anyone.
Research Intern at Deepmind
Data Science Intern at Eco Startup
MLE at Health Startup
-----------
Did most everything right but is definitely falling through the cracks somehow.
Where I work we desperately need two new graduates for embedded controls dev jobs on-site in the US. We're very picky, looking for attitude and aptitude rather than super-specific skill sets. But over the next year we definitely need two and our preference is new graduates.
Came out right after dotcom bust. It was really disappointing when I learned that corporate America simply moves on to the next graduating class. All the recruiting mechanisms in place means you’re going to get burned pretty bad if you miss that hiring wave. Some of my classmates took years to find something long term. You’re so much better off taking a year off from school to reset. As most things in life, timing is everything.
I’m not saying people should get jobs they are way overqualified for, but I believe there are many in these situations who choose to be unemployed rather than work in jobs that they could do in their industry.
Certainly there are new grads who think they are hot shit, but I have to believe that the vast majority would take whatever they could if it meant a foot in the door, especially right now.
"It's the economy, stupid."
I don't know why we need to be so dramatic about AI and automation. The reason you're not getting hired is because there's not enough positions and we have a huge amount of people in the industry. Tech is not exploding like it was in the 2000s and 2010s. It is a mature industry. That comes with mature industry issues like when the economy sucks, it doesn't grow anymore.
Have you noticed how we're still in a trade war? What about the government shutdown? The high interest rates? All time highs for cost of living? Wages not keeping up with costs at all for practically any profession? Dang, it's almost like if all the money going to AI stonkz wasn't happening... we'd be in a recession... hmmmm
What we cannot know is: which of these are we seeing:
- Just another recession, nothing to do with AI or automation. It'll pass and things will be back to normal.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs away from western countries.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs to automation and AI.
What an "exciting" time to be alive
Remove all government regulations and all of these people would have decent jobs quickly. You can learn any trade with YouTube videos. Electricians make $175 / hr in Washington state now. I replaced my own electrical panel after reading a book and watching YouTube videos.
Honestly I think "applying for jobs" is becoming a thing of the past.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
In my experience, it's been the case for 20-30 years (forever?) that knowing the right people works way better than applying through the standard channels--but that's the same as saying that things are tougher for junior people which was probably masked by a lot more opportunities in tech for many which led those many to poo-poo the importance of networks because they apply for three jobs on a Monday and have offers the next week given a target-rich environment.
Out of curiosity, I live in Europe where it is quite common to work remotely across countries within the EU or the UK. I have always wondered why so many US companies limit remote roles to people based in the US, and then mention a shortage of qualified talent. It feels like there is a large pool of people being overlooked.
In our position we're only hiring for in person roles, so location/authorization is a must have.
But in regards to US/EU remote, I imagine the EU candidates come with slightly higher overhead (different payroll processing, employment regulations, time zones, etc). Which makes it easier to adopt a US only approach.
In Europe, what we do is usually: if the person lives in the same country as one of our business entities, they get hired directly as an employee. If they live in a country where the company does not have a business presence, they get hired through an EOR or as a contractor.
Labor laws. They think it's less profitable to employ people that are protected by regulations that grant them time off etc.
If i am manage to land an entry level job with a pathetic pay and keep it for a few years, I will be well suited to benefit from the eventual shortage of the mid-senior level engineer. am i right or am i just coping?
The same BigTech that for the past couple of decades have loudly proclaimed "go to a good college and get a degree in CS and you'll get a decent job" have now betrayed those who followed their advice. It's heartbreaking.
It's not just this fellow. I'm hearing it from friends and relatives whose children are new grads in CS, cyber-security or and similar fields.
Interesting that a new grad that interned at Deepmind is not able to find a job.
If all of this info is factually correct, then I may have to adjust my priors even more about the dire state of entry level job market.
It is easier to start your own business than to get a job for a certain class of people in our industry. There is just not enough supply of jobs for people who “did everything right.” It’s a painful economic signal that US economy has run out of cushy Big Tech jobs and now needs an influx of innovative firms. This is difficult to explain to your relatives over Thanksgiving turkey but it is nonetheless the truth in my experience. If I could go back in time I would have gone to an Ivy League, gotten the proper internships, moved straight to the Bay during ZIRP, but alas I don’t have a Time Machine.
Starting a business is easy. Making enough money to live a similar lifestyle from said business is usually not so easy.
The level of effort is becoming comparable: It's not unfathomable to send 1,000 applications to get a new job. Think of all the emails, coding evaluations, high-pressure interviews, LeetCode grinding, multi-round interviews, HR back-and-forths, and inevitable let downs or ghostings you have to endure just to get one measly job. Compare this to making a product that 1,000 people will subscribe to for $10/month, except you own it all forever. The skillsets are vastly different, and starting a business is much less rote and industrialized, but I don't think the level of effort is an order of magnitude greater. All of the experience I have gathered with my own business has paid dividends but the experience of looking for yet another job in yet another downturn seems to mostly have been wasteful in the long-term.
It isn’t just CS anymore. Now, it’s any entry level and even mid-level office positions. Anecdotally, it’s not just one industry or department anymore. There are a lot more applications and the applicants are also way more qualified.
The stock market continues to puzzle me.
> The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.
Hmm, I'm not sure about the link to lower birth rates. Birth rates have been falling in e.g. Western and Northern Europe for a long time, despite strong social safety nets.
While I think the link between birth rates declining and automation does make sense, it will take quite sometime for this to verifiable as this is a somewhat recent anxiety. The reason for the trend that we have seem over the last decades seem to mostly stem from lower childhood mortality rates, women having access to the job market, and perhaps to a lesser extent climate anxiety.