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I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find an
by TuringNYC 1y ago
I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tekla 1y agoThat seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.
- sneak 1y agoAppropriate username, given this sentiment.
- sfpotter 1y agoOn the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.
- y-curious 1y agoYeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there. Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
- rmah 1y agoThe 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.
- sfpotter 1y agoWhy not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.
- victor106 1y agoCompanies found a better and cheaper way to short circuit this, just hire H1B’s and slog them till they get their green cards(which is forever). That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)
- haleem123 1y ago>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore
- technothrasher 1y agoI got out of school in the mid 90's, and had three good job offers to choose from within a month of graduating. It wasn't because I was special, as most of my friends had similar experiences. It just matters what kind of job market you happen to graduate into.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago[flagged]
- abirch 1y agoFrequently people want experience. The new grads are facing a bleak reality with AI and offshoring.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoCorrect if I'm wrong, but from what I observe, lots of job postings have "new grads ok"
- abirch 1y agoI only saw 3 jobs mentioning new grad (or recent grad) on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093192 1 "Zigment (https://zigment.ai) | Bangalore / Bengaluru, India | Full-time | ONSITE" 2 "Rinse | IT Manager / Network Administrator / System Administrator | Hybrid in SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York (Brooklyn), Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, or Newark. (Primarily remote with some on-site responsibilities.) | Full-time | https://www.rinse.com" 3 "CVector | Full Stack Software Engineer | USA | REMOTE | Full-time | $75k – $120/yr + 0.3% – 1%" maybe I missed a few because I'm not a new grad and I'm happy at my current company
- koakuma-chan 1y agoIf you go to workatastartup.com and select experience 0-1 years, you'll see, coincidentally with the previous number I wrote, about 200 results. Is there something wrong with them? Genuine question, because I tried applying and never got a response.
- t-3 1y agoThose postings get flooded with applicants, many of them not new grads. New grads are competing with experienced people just to get a foot in the door. Both of those groups have to compete with an AI-generated flood of grifters and scammers and a AI-driven resume filter judging them on whether they match the AI-generated criteria for getting the AI-generated posting which was created because some middle manager wanted to get his nephew a job.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Consultant32452 1y agoWe have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.
- MangoToupe 1y agoYou could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.
- Consultant32452 1y agoI agree the empire is in a very dangerous place because it has expanded the labor force more rapidly than it has expanded supply of jobs. This is an existential risk to the empire.
- coliveira 1y agoThe US is quickly becoming something else than the core of the global economy. The signs have been there already: advanced chips are done somewhere else, manufacturing in general is done in other places as well. What we see now is the biggest companies hiring in other countries like India and employing AI instead of workers. The US population is becoming less and less relevant.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago[flagged]
- Consultant32452 1y agoThe elites have put themselves in a position where the two main options are the sentiment above or Luigi Mangione. It honestly scares me a bit what's coming.
- the_snooze 1y agoFor any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursuing those.
- solardev 1y agoWho's hiring even those people?
- the_snooze 1y agoWhen I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis, I had a handful of internship and full-time offers at various national labs and similar orgs thanks to my supervisor tipping me off about those opportunities and making introductions on my behalf. When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarter than your peers, but having that initiative lets you avoid competing with them directly. My particular path is just one of many.
- etblg 1y ago> When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis, Keep in mind that was 17 years ago, how do you know the job market is at all the same now?
- the_snooze 1y agoWhat's fundamentally different that initiative and strategically picking your battles are no longer applicable? I'm on the other side of the hiring table now. I proactively look for students that exhibit these traits. I'm not the only one.
- meroes 1y agoMore than half of STEM grads with careers don’t have a career in STEM.
- dataflow 1y agoDon't have, or didn't start with one?
- irrational 1y agoAnd here I am - an ancient history grad with a career in STEM. Life is odd.
- sdenton4 1y agoPretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things. Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
- closewith 1y agoYour CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.
- sdenton4 1y agoSorry you feel insulted. Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...) Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve. How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
- alistairSH 1y agoWhy didn't they take an internship or co-op or some other job? FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).
- paulpauper 1y agoBut they still will be faring better than others though. I am sure STEM grads are doing better than law school grads or humanities grads. But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
- irrational 1y agoWhy better than law school grads?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ac29 1y ago> But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago> The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". Given that the T" is "Technology" I should hope so. Likewise the "E" and "M" are broad and include many fields that have nothing to do with "tech".