7 ms·

Getting a degree in a field that has jobs helps too.

whymauri 5y ago
It helps, but for many it was/is not enough. Trust me, the job search was brutal even as a computer science graduate from MIT. I had an offer and it was revoked (and companies that I had offers from pre-pandemic would not engage anymore). I'm almost certain that I have classmates who had OF at one point during the last year and I know for certain from Twitter there's Ivy League, Cal, and Stanford students on there. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic when nobody knew how long it might last and the stock market was free diving to what was seemingly oblivion. I guess my point is that in mid 2020, it felt like there were no degrees that had plentiful jobs short of being: 1. A close-to-graduating worker in health or medicine. 2. A finance-compatible major from a Top 15 school with exceptional math, statistics, and inference ability. Likely, previous internships. And there really weren't that many of these. Jobs at software companies that were typically not competitive were getting flooded by top grads and early career applicants w/ 1-3 years of experience who had offers revoked or got laid off. I fought tooth and nail for the offers I got, and the company I joined ended up being terrible -- so go figure. Now consider that there are like, 500k students *not from top schools* graduating in STEM that same year. Suddenly the 'study something useful' mantra fell apart in the matter of months (weeks?).
- brianwawok 5y ago
  What is unemployment among software devs? It's real real low. As someone who hires devs, I could easily hire 2-3 devs right now. However I live in a tier3 city, and don't want to do the remote dev thing right now. If I post a remote job I get 5,000 candidates, if I post a local job I get 0-3. As a new grad, I bet winning a remote job would be hard. But pick a city, any city. Always looking for devs. If still not landing jobs, its a matter of interview skills and non-school resume experience.
  - quantumBerry 5y ago
    Yeah MIT CS grad on OF means 1) Bottom 5% tier grad who has less than zero social skills, thus would also be a low earner on OF 2) Extremely picky about jobs. Instead chose OF for lifestyle/earning reasons. 3) Serious health, legal, psychological, or family problems that would prevent them from any job and probably also would have made attaining their degree very difficult. This is MIT OnlyFans person I feel the saddest for. 4) Some other 1/1000 possibility The idea MIT grads are on OF in mass just to make enough to eat and put a roof over their heads is some serious sympathy farming.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      Hey "quantumBerry" -- What a username to behold! While I find this post witty and well-written ("some serious sympathy farming"!), I don't follow where the parent post was suggesting anything about MIT CS grads on OnlyFans. Do I misunderstand? (Zero trolling.)
      - fsn4dN69ey 5y ago
        The parent comment two levels above mentioned fellow MIT CS classmates having OF.
      - whymauri 5y ago
        Yeah, all I was saying is that statistically, it's likely that I overlapped with an undergrad(s) at MIT who has/have an OF. And that I know for certain from Twitter that there are undergrads from similar schools who have OF. I never prequalified it specifically with 'CS' -- by the way, a lot of the discussion in the thread has tunnel-visioned on CS, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only STEM degree HN would consider 'useful' (if we loop back to the comment I replied to). There's physics, math, engineering, and much, much more -- and all of those had an even worse job market than CS with the exclusion of those jumping into quantitative finance. The point of the original comment is to highlight how you can do everything 'right' according to the poster and, by necessity or tragedy resulting from a global pandemic, may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time. The circumstances of the pandemic are only further exacerbated for the hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates not coming from top schools or internships. Finally, I'd like to note that my original comment (way up in the chain) was neither about STEM nor top schools, so I hold that my observation there still holds weight. TL;DR: the concept that Gen-Z job hunters can simply go to 'the good school' and get 'the good degree' for 'the good job' is entirely subverted in a pandemic, leading to an especially dire job situation for those who are less privileged in education or training. This, coupled with social distancing, was the perfect social context for OnlyFan's recent hypergrowth.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Maybe in the US? The UK market for tech is insanely hot. But perhaps it was previously underpriced.
  - adventured 5y ago
    No. Tech employment in the US remains hot as well. Unemployment for people in the tech industry with a degree is about 1-2%. For a software developer with a degree, it's sub 1%.
- platz 5y ago
  Well when you apply at GAFAM you're competing against a very specific talent pool, and it's a buyers market. Maybe try applying at a smaller company?
- city41 5y ago
  When I graduated with my CS degree in 2002 the job search was brutal. I hang out in cscareerquestions on Reddit and a common theme seems to be getting that first junior dev job is really hard. Is this just an unfair reality all junior devs face?
  - powerslacker 5y ago
    Getting that first job is almost always the hardest. I went through nearly 100 interviews (I have no degree) before I got hired. I wouldn't call it unfair though. I've been on the other side of the interview table since then and I can tell you that the vast majority of applicants to a junior role are so far from employable that its barely worth it to hire a junior. No one wants to wait years for an employee to become productive. The fact is that most schools are not preparing graduates to work in the industry. I know several CS graduates who were almost totally unfamiliar with SQL databases. Considering that the vast majority of SE work these days is on the web, it is shocking that there isn't more focus on fundamental web technology.
  - ratww 5y ago
    It definitely seems so. Whenever I post an internship or junior position on Indeed or LinkedIn I get hundreds of resumes. Whenever I need someone more experienced, it’s either hired by recommendation, or we need a headhunter. Salary is never the issue, it’s just that senior devs complain about getting swamped with offers, so they don’t even have to look anymore. It’s almost like a game theory problem: people have to apply to hundreds of companies to have a shot because everyone is also doing the same. That, and some companies seem to be shifting towards preferring having a low number of experienced developers rather than a larger number of entry-level: I know of a few companies that paused junior and mid-level hirings after getting big investments.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      Joel Spolsky has written about this problem extensively. The best devs are not available and are not looking. I have seen many, many LinkedIn profiles for people who are insanely technical (much more than me) who literally write: "Headhunters: Go away!" LOL.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > I have classmates who had OF What is OF?
  - whymauri 5y ago
    Sorry, OF is the abbreviation for OnlyFans.
  - toofy 5y ago
    OnlyFans. OF is what it’s called often in common conversations. “What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”
- dkarl 5y ago
  I think this is a sign of companies not knowing how to get useful work out of junior developers with only a few years of experience, much less fresh college graduates. This is an extremely challenging problem at small scales, and one that most companies simply aren't up to. In my experience, listening to engineering management discuss these matters, the few people who entertain the idea of hiring junior developers do so for fairly abstract reasons: a sense of moral obligation, a sense of contributing to the health of the industry, a desire to challenge the software engineering team to mature in its practices, etc. I'm sure there are companies out there that know how to employ a junior developer at the going rate and actually get their money's worth, but it isn't common knowledge, and I haven't seen anybody succeed at it firsthand. If my experience is typical, we're just overall shitty as an industry at using young talent. That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it. As an aside, professional soccer solves this by granting a team certain rights to the players it develops, so if a player is trained in Team A's youth academy, and Team B wants to sign them at age 18, Team B pays a fee to Team A. Team A may agree to reduce the fee in exchange for a share of any subsequent sale, so if the player develops into a top professional and is sold to Team C at age 22, both Team A and Team B benefit financially.
  - shagie 5y ago
    > That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it. With juniors being able to be easily enticed away with a bump in salary at a well known company it becomes the situation that the only companies that can afford to hire juniors are those that pay enough to make it so that they aren't enticed away as easily. This then leads to other companies not interested in hiring juniors - not because they don't want them or that they aren't willing to train them, but rather that they can't compete with the big tech company compensation. The result of that is then that you see only job postings for mid and seniors... not so much because they will hit the ground with less training, but that they're likely more mature and less likely to be poached (they're stereotypically interested in settling down and raising a family). Ultimately, if everyone and every organization is similarly self interested, there is no reason to hire a junior dev unless you can pay them top dollar to avoid the possibility of them getting poached by another org before they've been able to produce a positive return on investment... or that the overall income of the org is large enough that the loss in the ROI isn't substantial.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  It sounds like you’re talking about the very beginning of the pandemic when everyone was just trying to figure out what the hell was happening. That seems entirely separate from the topic of the value of a degree these days. I had a similar situation finishing school as the last recession hit, but that wasn’t so sudden. Someone else is talking about it being brutal graduating in 2002. The common theme here seems to be graduating right after crashes or right after pandemics hit sucks.
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  I wanted to add to your list of degrees of plentiful jobs.. but electrical engineering grads have no shortage of people competing to hire them. If you include associate degrees, you can add all the skilled trades to that list. To be clear, I'm talking about all the associate applied science w/[electricial|plumbing|pipefitting|welding] programs out there.
- borski 5y ago
  As an MIT alum - if you had an offer rescinded please let the careers office know. Companies are not allowed to do that if engaging with MIT students in a meaningful way (career fairs, etc.) and MIT can and does penalize them for this (banning from fairs, etc.)
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  I am not MIT, but rather shabby mid-tier state uni, and my experience was nearly identical when job hunting in 2002/3 after graduation. With some distance, the hardest part emotionally, is that one or two years when you are only 22 years old is a LONG time to find a job!
thebooktocome 5y ago
There are about three fields like that now. The median bachelor's degree in math or physics obtained in 2021 is basically worthless.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  A bachelors in math or physics from a decent school should indicate that you have the capacity to learn difficult concepts, work with data, and you should have some experience with programming.
  - thebooktocome 5y ago
    Sorry, but that doesn't translate into employability in 2021. I have mentored math and physics students for six years now and even the good ones are having an increasingly hard time finding employment, and not for lack of trying. It's not uncommon to hear of seniors sending, say, 100 applications only to get ghosted on 99 of them.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Try convincing the median HR drone of that.
  - quaffapint 5y ago
    I would agree with this. A large portion of tech people I work with are not CS grads. I myself have a math degree. You do need to show that you can program and know your stuff, but you can still do that with personal/side projects/etc. Once you get your first job, then you're good to go and most won't care about your degree. I think now it's more a challenge of getting junior level jobs across the board.
    - pjbeam 5y ago
      Same here, math undergrad; not terribly difficult to start my career with and is now an advantage I think, albeit a small one.
- the_only_law 5y ago
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
Doesn’t help when you don’t have the foot in the door because your family is not traditionally professional. I had to ask one of my old graduate project partners for a referral to my current (and first, at 27) tech job and I still feel dirty and guilty that I got it so easily and managed to escape the trap of being extremely qualified while making min wage in a dusty shithole of a warehouse. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a phrase of derision growing up, but it’s how the world works now.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  It's how the world has always worked, which is why it's a phrase in the first place.
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    It’s fucked up is what it is. Right now my coworkers like me, my manager gave me a glowing review, the company is willing to buy me certs and I have been assigned to the subteam responsible for our core functionality. 8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances. I can clearly perform under the stress of work, school, achievement, things breaking but the way the labour market is structured almost broke me which has to tell you something.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      As parent was telling you, that's always been America. Except historically, most jobs have been less safe. You get crap jobs in your teens to have work history. You go to college to get a degree. You make friends at college, network, and maybe get an internship. You leverage all of the previous to get your first job. You leverage your first job and network to get your second job. It's not easy. But it is how the world works. Why do you think so many people in white collar jobs have imposter syndrome?
    - danans 5y ago
      > 8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances I am sorry you experienced this. Many of us have experienced similar things in our careers. When I did, I had my brother's couch I could crash on while I figured things out, and to be honest, parents who could help me with rent when my post dotcom-bust job paid peanuts. To the extent that your difficulties were exacerbated by an insufficient social safety net is perhaps the greatest indictment of our society. Incentive structures matter, and structures that put people at the brink between achievement and self harm do a lot of damage to our human capital. Not everyone will be pushed to the point of self-harm, but the proximity between destitution and achievement is too close, especially for those without family and community safety nets.
NoOneNew 5y ago
Absolutely, and that has always been the case, even in vocations. There was a time where being a tv or vacuum repairman was a pretty good, middle class-ish job. Then the times came where that's not really the case. Picking a career path does have a little bit of luck in it, but that's like thinking it's lucky to not hit a door when going through a doorway. If you stop, think and open the door, you're less likely to get hit by a door, even though that doesn't guarantee it. And yes, this is coming from a guy who has been smacked in the face by someone else opening the door on me. Same with picking a poor career choice pre housing crash in 2008. Adapt and overcome.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
That's basically shooting at a moving target, though.
elliekelly 5y ago
The problem with college is the cost, not the degrees people choose to pursue. And blaming students for studying things that aren’t in demand is a straw man. A lot can change in the four years between enrollment and graduation. For example, I went to college in 2006 when the finance sector was booming. I graduated in 2010 when it very much wasn’t. By the time the jobs had evaporated it was much too late to change my course of study. And I certainly couldn’t go back and renegotiate the tuition or interest rate on my loans. I’m sure the same could be said about people who went to school for anything relating to tourism or hospitality who have graduated into the pandemic. If you’re a new chef, pilot, hair dresser, massage therapist, looking to work in hotel management, etc. the job market that existed when you began your studies is entirely different from the job market you’ve just graduated into.
- Kye 5y ago
  I finished a network admin degree just as all the entry-level jobs were being sucked up by SaaS and a few IT firms that weren't hiring. At least the state scholarship paid for most of it, so I had no debt.
- adriand 5y ago
  And the same can happen in tech! When I started college in the late 90s in software engineering, the market was booming. A year before I graduated the dot-com crash took place and the jobs evaporated. That was the catalyst for pursuing an entrepreneurial path (I had no choice) but in spite of things working out, I always try to be thankful for my good fortune and remember that it can change in an instant.
  - stackbutterflow 5y ago
    Can you expand on the entrepreneurial path you took?
- Guthur 5y ago
  If you are going to uni to do vocational training such as hairdressing, massage and being a chef then something is really screwed.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
Which field "has jobs" anymore? Putting aside the humanities, STEM degrees these days aren't even a guarantee of a job. Biology/chemistry jobs generally require graduate school or medical school, engineering jobs aren't as lucrative or stable as they once were, and math either implies becoming an actuary (i.e. more certification), a quant (insanely competitive) or a programmer. I'm not saying these routes are impossible, but it's harder than you'd think to pick a field that "has jobs". More than a few of my friends who did STEM degrees have ended up in tech for that reason.

It helps, but for many it was/is not enough. Trust me, the job search was brutal even as a computer science graduate from MIT. I had an offer and it was revoked (and companies that I had offers from pre-pandemic would not engage anymore). I'm almost certain that I have classmates who had OF at one point during the last year and I know for certain from Twitter there's Ivy League, Cal, and Stanford students on there. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic when nobody knew how long it might last and the stock market was free diving to what was seemingly oblivion. I guess my point is that in mid 2020, it felt like there were no degrees that had plentiful jobs short of being: 1. A close-to-graduating worker in health or medicine. 2. A finance-compatible major from a Top 15 school with exceptional math, statistics, and inference ability. Likely, previous internships. And there really weren't that many of these. Jobs at software companies that were typically not competitive were getting flooded by top grads and early career applicants w/ 1-3 years of experience who had offers revoked or got laid off. I fought tooth and nail for the offers I got, and the company I joined ended up being terrible -- so go figure. Now consider that there are like, 500k students *not from top schools* graduating in STEM that same year. Suddenly the 'study something useful' mantra fell apart in the matter of months (weeks?).

brianwawok 5y ago
What is unemployment among software devs? It's real real low. As someone who hires devs, I could easily hire 2-3 devs right now. However I live in a tier3 city, and don't want to do the remote dev thing right now. If I post a remote job I get 5,000 candidates, if I post a local job I get 0-3. As a new grad, I bet winning a remote job would be hard. But pick a city, any city. Always looking for devs. If still not landing jobs, its a matter of interview skills and non-school resume experience.
- quantumBerry 5y ago
  Yeah MIT CS grad on OF means 1) Bottom 5% tier grad who has less than zero social skills, thus would also be a low earner on OF 2) Extremely picky about jobs. Instead chose OF for lifestyle/earning reasons. 3) Serious health, legal, psychological, or family problems that would prevent them from any job and probably also would have made attaining their degree very difficult. This is MIT OnlyFans person I feel the saddest for. 4) Some other 1/1000 possibility The idea MIT grads are on OF in mass just to make enough to eat and put a roof over their heads is some serious sympathy farming.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Hey "quantumBerry" -- What a username to behold! While I find this post witty and well-written ("some serious sympathy farming"!), I don't follow where the parent post was suggesting anything about MIT CS grads on OnlyFans. Do I misunderstand? (Zero trolling.)
    - fsn4dN69ey 5y ago
      The parent comment two levels above mentioned fellow MIT CS classmates having OF.
    - whymauri 5y ago
      Yeah, all I was saying is that statistically, it's likely that I overlapped with an undergrad(s) at MIT who has/have an OF. And that I know for certain from Twitter that there are undergrads from similar schools who have OF. I never prequalified it specifically with 'CS' -- by the way, a lot of the discussion in the thread has tunnel-visioned on CS, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only STEM degree HN would consider 'useful' (if we loop back to the comment I replied to). There's physics, math, engineering, and much, much more -- and all of those had an even worse job market than CS with the exclusion of those jumping into quantitative finance. The point of the original comment is to highlight how you can do everything 'right' according to the poster and, by necessity or tragedy resulting from a global pandemic, may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time. The circumstances of the pandemic are only further exacerbated for the hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates not coming from top schools or internships. Finally, I'd like to note that my original comment (way up in the chain) was neither about STEM nor top schools, so I hold that my observation there still holds weight. TL;DR: the concept that Gen-Z job hunters can simply go to 'the good school' and get 'the good degree' for 'the good job' is entirely subverted in a pandemic, leading to an especially dire job situation for those who are less privileged in education or training. This, coupled with social distancing, was the perfect social context for OnlyFan's recent hypergrowth.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Maybe in the US? The UK market for tech is insanely hot. But perhaps it was previously underpriced.
- adventured 5y ago
  No. Tech employment in the US remains hot as well. Unemployment for people in the tech industry with a degree is about 1-2%. For a software developer with a degree, it's sub 1%.
platz 5y ago
Well when you apply at GAFAM you're competing against a very specific talent pool, and it's a buyers market. Maybe try applying at a smaller company?
city41 5y ago
When I graduated with my CS degree in 2002 the job search was brutal. I hang out in cscareerquestions on Reddit and a common theme seems to be getting that first junior dev job is really hard. Is this just an unfair reality all junior devs face?
- powerslacker 5y ago
  Getting that first job is almost always the hardest. I went through nearly 100 interviews (I have no degree) before I got hired. I wouldn't call it unfair though. I've been on the other side of the interview table since then and I can tell you that the vast majority of applicants to a junior role are so far from employable that its barely worth it to hire a junior. No one wants to wait years for an employee to become productive. The fact is that most schools are not preparing graduates to work in the industry. I know several CS graduates who were almost totally unfamiliar with SQL databases. Considering that the vast majority of SE work these days is on the web, it is shocking that there isn't more focus on fundamental web technology.
- ratww 5y ago
  It definitely seems so. Whenever I post an internship or junior position on Indeed or LinkedIn I get hundreds of resumes. Whenever I need someone more experienced, it’s either hired by recommendation, or we need a headhunter. Salary is never the issue, it’s just that senior devs complain about getting swamped with offers, so they don’t even have to look anymore. It’s almost like a game theory problem: people have to apply to hundreds of companies to have a shot because everyone is also doing the same. That, and some companies seem to be shifting towards preferring having a low number of experienced developers rather than a larger number of entry-level: I know of a few companies that paused junior and mid-level hirings after getting big investments.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Joel Spolsky has written about this problem extensively. The best devs are not available and are not looking. I have seen many, many LinkedIn profiles for people who are insanely technical (much more than me) who literally write: "Headhunters: Go away!" LOL.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> I have classmates who had OF What is OF?
- whymauri 5y ago
  Sorry, OF is the abbreviation for OnlyFans.
- toofy 5y ago
  OnlyFans. OF is what it’s called often in common conversations. “What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”
dkarl 5y ago
I think this is a sign of companies not knowing how to get useful work out of junior developers with only a few years of experience, much less fresh college graduates. This is an extremely challenging problem at small scales, and one that most companies simply aren't up to. In my experience, listening to engineering management discuss these matters, the few people who entertain the idea of hiring junior developers do so for fairly abstract reasons: a sense of moral obligation, a sense of contributing to the health of the industry, a desire to challenge the software engineering team to mature in its practices, etc. I'm sure there are companies out there that know how to employ a junior developer at the going rate and actually get their money's worth, but it isn't common knowledge, and I haven't seen anybody succeed at it firsthand. If my experience is typical, we're just overall shitty as an industry at using young talent. That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it. As an aside, professional soccer solves this by granting a team certain rights to the players it develops, so if a player is trained in Team A's youth academy, and Team B wants to sign them at age 18, Team B pays a fee to Team A. Team A may agree to reduce the fee in exchange for a share of any subsequent sale, so if the player develops into a top professional and is sold to Team C at age 22, both Team A and Team B benefit financially.
- shagie 5y ago
  > That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it. With juniors being able to be easily enticed away with a bump in salary at a well known company it becomes the situation that the only companies that can afford to hire juniors are those that pay enough to make it so that they aren't enticed away as easily. This then leads to other companies not interested in hiring juniors - not because they don't want them or that they aren't willing to train them, but rather that they can't compete with the big tech company compensation. The result of that is then that you see only job postings for mid and seniors... not so much because they will hit the ground with less training, but that they're likely more mature and less likely to be poached (they're stereotypically interested in settling down and raising a family). Ultimately, if everyone and every organization is similarly self interested, there is no reason to hire a junior dev unless you can pay them top dollar to avoid the possibility of them getting poached by another org before they've been able to produce a positive return on investment... or that the overall income of the org is large enough that the loss in the ROI isn't substantial.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
It sounds like you’re talking about the very beginning of the pandemic when everyone was just trying to figure out what the hell was happening. That seems entirely separate from the topic of the value of a degree these days. I had a similar situation finishing school as the last recession hit, but that wasn’t so sudden. Someone else is talking about it being brutal graduating in 2002. The common theme here seems to be graduating right after crashes or right after pandemics hit sucks.
clipradiowallet 5y ago
I wanted to add to your list of degrees of plentiful jobs.. but electrical engineering grads have no shortage of people competing to hire them. If you include associate degrees, you can add all the skilled trades to that list. To be clear, I'm talking about all the associate applied science w/[electricial|plumbing|pipefitting|welding] programs out there.
borski 5y ago
As an MIT alum - if you had an offer rescinded please let the careers office know. Companies are not allowed to do that if engaging with MIT students in a meaningful way (career fairs, etc.) and MIT can and does penalize them for this (banning from fairs, etc.)
throwaway2037 5y ago
I am not MIT, but rather shabby mid-tier state uni, and my experience was nearly identical when job hunting in 2002/3 after graduation. With some distance, the hardest part emotionally, is that one or two years when you are only 22 years old is a LONG time to find a job!

thebooktocome 5y ago

There are about three fields like that now. The median bachelor's degree in math or physics obtained in 2021 is basically worthless.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
A bachelors in math or physics from a decent school should indicate that you have the capacity to learn difficult concepts, work with data, and you should have some experience with programming.
- thebooktocome 5y ago
  Sorry, but that doesn't translate into employability in 2021. I have mentored math and physics students for six years now and even the good ones are having an increasingly hard time finding employment, and not for lack of trying. It's not uncommon to hear of seniors sending, say, 100 applications only to get ghosted on 99 of them.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Try convincing the median HR drone of that.
- quaffapint 5y ago
  I would agree with this. A large portion of tech people I work with are not CS grads. I myself have a math degree. You do need to show that you can program and know your stuff, but you can still do that with personal/side projects/etc. Once you get your first job, then you're good to go and most won't care about your degree. I think now it's more a challenge of getting junior level jobs across the board.
  - pjbeam 5y ago
    Same here, math undergrad; not terribly difficult to start my career with and is now an advantage I think, albeit a small one.
the_only_law 5y ago

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

Doesn’t help when you don’t have the foot in the door because your family is not traditionally professional. I had to ask one of my old graduate project partners for a referral to my current (and first, at 27) tech job and I still feel dirty and guilty that I got it so easily and managed to escape the trap of being extremely qualified while making min wage in a dusty shithole of a warehouse. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a phrase of derision growing up, but it’s how the world works now.

GavinMcG 5y ago
It's how the world has always worked, which is why it's a phrase in the first place.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  It’s fucked up is what it is. Right now my coworkers like me, my manager gave me a glowing review, the company is willing to buy me certs and I have been assigned to the subteam responsible for our core functionality. 8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances. I can clearly perform under the stress of work, school, achievement, things breaking but the way the labour market is structured almost broke me which has to tell you something.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    As parent was telling you, that's always been America. Except historically, most jobs have been less safe. You get crap jobs in your teens to have work history. You go to college to get a degree. You make friends at college, network, and maybe get an internship. You leverage all of the previous to get your first job. You leverage your first job and network to get your second job. It's not easy. But it is how the world works. Why do you think so many people in white collar jobs have imposter syndrome?
  - danans 5y ago
    > 8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances I am sorry you experienced this. Many of us have experienced similar things in our careers. When I did, I had my brother's couch I could crash on while I figured things out, and to be honest, parents who could help me with rent when my post dotcom-bust job paid peanuts. To the extent that your difficulties were exacerbated by an insufficient social safety net is perhaps the greatest indictment of our society. Incentive structures matter, and structures that put people at the brink between achievement and self harm do a lot of damage to our human capital. Not everyone will be pushed to the point of self-harm, but the proximity between destitution and achievement is too close, especially for those without family and community safety nets.

NoOneNew 5y ago

Absolutely, and that has always been the case, even in vocations. There was a time where being a tv or vacuum repairman was a pretty good, middle class-ish job. Then the times came where that's not really the case. Picking a career path does have a little bit of luck in it, but that's like thinking it's lucky to not hit a door when going through a doorway. If you stop, think and open the door, you're less likely to get hit by a door, even though that doesn't guarantee it. And yes, this is coming from a guy who has been smacked in the face by someone else opening the door on me. Same with picking a poor career choice pre housing crash in 2008. Adapt and overcome.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

That's basically shooting at a moving target, though.

elliekelly 5y ago

The problem with college is the cost, not the degrees people choose to pursue. And blaming students for studying things that aren’t in demand is a straw man. A lot can change in the four years between enrollment and graduation. For example, I went to college in 2006 when the finance sector was booming. I graduated in 2010 when it very much wasn’t. By the time the jobs had evaporated it was much too late to change my course of study. And I certainly couldn’t go back and renegotiate the tuition or interest rate on my loans. I’m sure the same could be said about people who went to school for anything relating to tourism or hospitality who have graduated into the pandemic. If you’re a new chef, pilot, hair dresser, massage therapist, looking to work in hotel management, etc. the job market that existed when you began your studies is entirely different from the job market you’ve just graduated into.

Kye 5y ago
I finished a network admin degree just as all the entry-level jobs were being sucked up by SaaS and a few IT firms that weren't hiring. At least the state scholarship paid for most of it, so I had no debt.
adriand 5y ago
And the same can happen in tech! When I started college in the late 90s in software engineering, the market was booming. A year before I graduated the dot-com crash took place and the jobs evaporated. That was the catalyst for pursuing an entrepreneurial path (I had no choice) but in spite of things working out, I always try to be thankful for my good fortune and remember that it can change in an instant.
- stackbutterflow 5y ago
  Can you expand on the entrepreneurial path you took?
Guthur 5y ago
If you are going to uni to do vocational training such as hairdressing, massage and being a chef then something is really screwed.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

Which field "has jobs" anymore? Putting aside the humanities, STEM degrees these days aren't even a guarantee of a job. Biology/chemistry jobs generally require graduate school or medical school, engineering jobs aren't as lucrative or stable as they once were, and math either implies becoming an actuary (i.e. more certification), a quant (insanely competitive) or a programmer. I'm not saying these routes are impossible, but it's harder than you'd think to pick a field that "has jobs". More than a few of my friends who did STEM degrees have ended up in tech for that reason.