28 ms·

Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

• GianFabien 11mo ago
  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.
  • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    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/ https://layoffs.fyi/
    • jackvalentine 11mo ago
      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?
      • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
        Compounding despair.
  • spencerflem 11mo ago
    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
    • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
      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).
      • cellis 11mo ago
        Electricians in data-center states are eating; elsewhere they are scraping by due to macro-economics.
      • ghaff 11mo ago
        Yeah. My contractors seem pretty busy in the Northeast. Too busy for my taste :-/
  • rsaz 11mo ago
    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.
    • DivingForGold 11mo ago
      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.
      • cuttothechase 11mo ago
        What kind of blue collar work gets you $335K? What would be a 10 - 20 year average wage / year look like?
        • SoftTalker 11mo ago
          Either very high risk work such as underwater welding or owning a contracting business.
        • brailsafe 11mo ago
          I read it as they run a scuba business during the viable months for it, but idk that I'd call that blue collar as much as just "not an office job"
  • accurrent 11mo ago
    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.
    • platevoltage 11mo ago
      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.
    • nradov 11mo ago
      The wages for skilled trades are enough to pay for housing outside of HCOL areas like New York City and the SF Bay Area. People may need to move to restart their careers. There is high demand for electricians in Plano, TX. I understand that making that kind of move is difficult and highly disruptive but at some point workers have to face reality. Regardless of whether the root cause is AI or offshoring or higher interest rates, a lot of the old tech industry jobs are gone forever.
      • elsonrodriguez 11mo ago
        > but at some point workers have to face reality. If workers have to face the current reality, we are in for an unfortunate time. The better outcome would be fixing the current reality before workers see what is being done.
      • arbitrary_name 11mo ago
        If i have two kids to support, how am i going to afford a) cost of relocating to LCOL b) cost of supporting family on lower wage c) while going through a multi year retraining program and d) paying for the training?
        • 11mo ago
  • asdfman123 11mo ago
    > 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"
    • _carbyau_ 11mo ago
      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!"
      • r_lee 11mo ago
        Don't forget, if you oppose the CEO you're Xenophobic, racist and far-right!
      • GianFabien 11mo ago
        Yes, it is often the case. BUT why not get a startup going and address the opportunity? Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Uber, AirBnB, etc likewise saw problems as being opportunities in disguise.
        • _carbyau_ 11mo ago
          I don't see an opportunity. I see it as a "community vs $" tradeoff, and companies are about $ every time. A company could pay/train locals. But why, when you can go fishing for talent from overseas, pay them less, have them be dependent on your company to stay in country. I am mainly frustrated with the "we have no locals with these skills" catchcry, when clearly it is "we have no locals with these skills we are willing to pay for". And when that comes from companies with profits in the billions, it is just a "shareholder vs worker" balance of greed issue.
    • Terr_ 11mo ago
  • bsder 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • rcpt 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • beefnugs 11mo ago
    Yeah my experience is that canada has always sucked: I graduated electronics engineering, then did 20 years of technician, IT, software, just whatever shit beneath my abilities that i have been offered. My resume has always been a list of things i clearly don't want to do anymore. Still get offers for photocopy repair, what a shit low paying job that was/is. But that is what life is for many people i think, can't be too picky, do what pays bills. If you have real skills you are expected to make something of your own on the side. Nobody teaches you how capitalism really works, they want suckers to do the shit work. The ways to win are to work for yourself, eliminate as many middlemen as possible, hide sacred knowledge, come up with scams, hide bodies for rich people.
  • GOD_Over_Djinn 11mo ago
    > For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem. That has pretty much nothing to do with available supply of materials or labor. It has everything to do with burdensome zoning and permitting processes.
• nine_zeros 11mo ago
  > 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.
  • CrazyStat 11mo ago
    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.
    • nine_zeros 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • rcruzeiro 11mo ago
      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.
    • coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
      Young people can’t afford life bringing kids isn’t a smart idea. So the link is definitely there.
  • frm88 11mo ago
    What strikes me most with this quote is that (consistent) labour is very much a defining, if not the defining parameter in all our cultures and the author highlights this later on with data from China etc. I feel we might have a problem with the emphasis on that value in the future. If we think automation through to it's extreme and accept a growing world population and worsening climate effects, we've got to shift cultural values accordingly or face severe societal upheavals. I don't have a point here, just gave me stuff to think about.
• ipnon 11mo ago
  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.
  • kenjackson 11mo ago
    Starting a business is easy. Making enough money to live a similar lifestyle from said business is usually not so easy.
    • ipnon 11mo ago
      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.
      • coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
        This is my conclusion as well, I'm building a few MVPs and the time spent building the MVP was orders of magnitude more productive than sending in 100s of job applications and preparing the STAR method and witnessing my mental health tank rejection after rejection. Tech careers are no longer careers they are gigs. You get in you are lucky but Elon can tweet something and you can be out in a whim. Now it's for geniuses, turbo slaves willing to work 70 hours a week and that's unsustainable for more than 6 months. Keep in mind this is in Europe as well, we don't make the crazy salaries Americans make with stocks. Basically 40-50K salary if you're lucky and that kind of money doesn't warrant the effort required for it.
• margorczynski 11mo ago
  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?
  • cube00 11mo ago
    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.
    • j-bos 11mo ago
      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.
    • clanky 11mo ago
      > 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.
      • andy99 11mo ago
        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.
        • 11mo ago
• lmpdev 11mo ago
  (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
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • cube00 11mo ago
    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.
    • rcbdev 11mo ago
      In the EU, this is not possible. Public Sector accounts are unable to be staffed with Bangladeshi/Indians/Pakistanis etc. developers due to strict time zone requirements and GDPR regulations. They are also highly reluctant to near-shore, as they're dependent on people implementing local laws and regulations - meaning if you don't know the language, you're usually out. The result of this is that Accenture and co. staff with local people on-site for public sector accounts.
    • lmpdev 11mo ago
      Possibly at Federal State and Local little chance they’re not that optimised
• struct 11mo ago
  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.
  • Terr_ 11mo ago
    Or perhaps: Efficiency tends to be inversely-correlated to flexibility. Not just for companies, but but also in the natural world of living creatures. It's a complex gamble on how the environment will (or won't) change. Both are important... but "efficiency" is way easier to measure/market in a spreadsheet.
• silisili 11mo 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).
  • asdfman123 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • physicsguy 11mo ago
    > switch majors or ride out the downturn You can't really do this in the UK where the author is based, it is very difficult. You are normally basically committed to a certain course of study after Year 1.
    • vablings 11mo ago
      Student finance will only pay for X years of education based on your program. If you switch after first year expect to be paying the bill out of pocket for the first year of your new course, if you can stomach that you are in the clear.
• aresant 11mo ago
  "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.
  • ares623 11mo ago
    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.
    • gruez 11mo ago
      >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.
      • ares623 11mo ago
        I'm saying if your remote operator in some southern hemisphere country causes damages, you might have less recourse for punishment than if the operator was local and under your jurisdiction.
    • 11mo ago
• themanmaran 11mo ago
  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.
  • ghaff 11mo ago
    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.
  • rcruzeiro 11mo ago
    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.
    • themanmaran 11mo ago
      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.
      • rcruzeiro 11mo ago
• yesimahuman 11mo ago
  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?
  • tayo42 11mo ago
    Job markets are bad for everyone though
    • ghaff 11mo ago
      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.
      • dmoy 11mo ago
        The data I've seen on under& unemployment for recent grads from the federal reserve bank puts comp sci kinda middle of the pack of other science & engineering majors. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... It's bad across the board - 20%+ under & unemployment for basically everyone.
      • YZF 11mo ago
        I would expect CS doing better than EE or Physics or Chemistry or ME ... In some science fields good luck getting a job if you don't have a Ph.D. But otherwise, yes, these things are cyclical. But I think the trend, even with AI, is still towards more software. We've had explosive growth over the last few decades.
• lacker 11mo ago
  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".
  • andy99 11mo ago
    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.
    • platevoltage 11mo ago
      This was my experience after I did an internship in 2024.
      • ghaff 11mo ago
        During that period a lot of companies had hiring freezes and even internal transfers were basically impossible. They may still have had limited intern programs but hiring those interns could be very challenging.
        • platevoltage 11mo ago
          Yeah, my counterpart who interned for a similar team, and performed better than I did also didn't get hired. My manager was honest with me about what was going on.
  • blackjack_ 11mo ago
    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.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• bradlys 11mo ago
  "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
• lifeisstillgood 11mo ago
  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
• joshdavham 11mo ago
  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).
  • selimthegrim 11mo ago
    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.
    • kjkjadksj 11mo ago
      How did you survive?
      • selimthegrim 11mo ago
        Menial jobs because my stipend ran out. Although a couple instructorships are on the horizon.
• alyxya 11mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • AdieuToLogic 11mo ago
    > 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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • gruez 11mo ago
    >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.
• mike_hearn 11mo ago
  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.
  • phatfish 11mo ago
    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.
    • nradov 11mo ago
      Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants? Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
      • rolandog 11mo ago
        Actually, you have it the other way around! Why hasn't the US done more to create a rich ecosystem of tech companies, instead of a couple of bloated giants that syphon our wealth and avoid taxes?
        • nradov 11mo ago
• lvl155 11mo ago
  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.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• etothepii 11mo ago
  > 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.
• windowshopping 11mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pizlonator 11mo ago
    > 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.
    • ttoinou 11mo ago
      He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning
    • alyxya 11mo ago
      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.
      • pizlonator 11mo ago
        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
• trentnix 11mo ago
  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.
  • tdb7893 11mo ago
    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.
    • rudedogg 11mo ago
      How does that work financially? Will you work in academia?
• mproud 11mo ago
  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.
  • platevoltage 11mo ago
    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.
  • xboxnolifes 11mo ago
    Where are and what are these jobs in the tech industry that people are turning down?
• pizlonator 11mo ago
  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
• anonymous_343 11mo ago
  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.
  • weakfish 11mo ago
    I’m interested - any chance we could chat? Email is Jack AT weakphi DOT sh
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  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.
  • ForHackernews 11mo ago
    BigTech were not running bootcamps out of the kindness of their hearts. Employers have always wanted to expand the supply of labor so the price goes down.
• chaostheory 11mo ago
  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.
• tkgally 11mo ago
  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.”
  • rudedogg 11mo ago
    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.
    • tkgally 11mo ago
      The author's argument is framed more widely than just LLMs. He also discusses robots, teleoperation, and other areas where workers in the middle of the bell curve seem especially vulnerable to displacement. I accept, though, your point that economic factors not directly related to AI are also playing a role. Presumably economists are now trying to to pick apart the effect of each factor on the job market.
  • Animats 11mo ago
    That is indeed a good insight. What's being hollowed out are jobs for the middle of the bell curve, which, of course, is where most of the people are. The author says that in several different ways, pointing out that a quiet, reliable long-term job is no longer something that's even a likely possibility. Then he says it's only a matter of time until the outliers are automated too. That's more speculative, but may not be wrong. It's only been three years since ChatGPT shipped. This is just getting started.
• adeptima 11mo ago
  > 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
• txrx0000 11mo ago
  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.
  • platevoltage 11mo ago
    > 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.
    • baq 11mo ago
      Maybe, but not quite. Wages increased modestly and real estate prices have increased... substantially. Today's young adults are basically incapable of buying a place to live anywhere remotely close to a place where they could work to earn for it.
• ttoinou 11mo ago
  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
  • jackblemming 11mo ago
    I hope you never have a bad string of luck and end up homeless pal, because it can happen to anyone.
    • ttoinou 11mo ago
      What’s the link with the article or my comment? Listening to adults advices can magically avoid being broke? It’s the opposite
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • linkregister 11mo ago
    What is your recommendation for the young author beyond questioning culture?
    • ttoinou 11mo ago
      That’s already 50% of the work. Then one can find ideas of his own
• qazxcvbnmlp 11mo ago
  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
  • baq 11mo ago
    ‘Nobody hires juniors’ is a possibility, too
    • sevenseacat 11mo ago
      Maybe 'no-one doing whiz-bang AI research is hiring juniors'. I really doubt that 'no-one anywhere in the tech industry is hiring juniors'.
• htrp 11mo ago
  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.
• andika12 11mo ago
  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?
• disambiguation 11mo ago
  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024 With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
  • gruez 11mo ago
    >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".
    • disambiguation 11mo ago
      To rephrase, the start of a large uptick looks like a small one in real time - like we see now. Further, the graph is otherwise smooth. We don't really see small bumps - 1 or 2 exceptions not reassuring.
  • hexbin010 11mo ago
    So the author just has to wait 4-9 years and everything will be OK?
• torton 11mo ago
  "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.
• nextworddev 11mo ago
  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.
• cuttothechase 11mo ago
  [dead]
• ineedasername 11mo ago
  >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.
  • gruez 11mo ago
    >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. How would this work for the jobs that can't be replaced by AI? Sure, the programmer might be able to work 10 hours a week because of AI, but it's unlikely anything similar is going to come any time soon for nurses, so do they have to continue working 40 hours? What happens to salaries? If programmers can work 10 hours and still get paid 6 figures, wouldn't everyone flood into it, driving down prices? Conversely wouldn't the wages of jobs that can't be replaced with AI go up, because we still need nurses or whatever?
    • ineedasername 11mo ago
      It doesn’t happen instantly. Wages for jobs like nurses: Yes. Conversely, as the labor market adjusted and everyone’s expectations were adjusted towards shorter work weeks, people would begin going in to something like nursing for the salary, labor supply would gradually equalize in line with new work week expectations and salary. None of this is radical, it happens on a small scale constantly. Happening at this scale this fast is going to be painful, less so if there’s a minimum of thought put into it, but still painful. But there has to be some change in things. There is no equilibrium possible in having the world produce the same amount of stuff but half the population has zero money or everyone has half as much— and can’t afford that stuff so then it just wouldn’t be produced, but that isn’t the way the economy has ever gone either. We have a 5 day work week in part because 1) industrialization made it possible and 2) It gave people more time to themselves, which was required in order for people to have time to spend more money on all of the things being produced by industrialization. It was a somewhat deliberate process and even happened pretty quickly. Something similar should hopefully happen here. There are alternatives! A “Covid 2.0” that ends up being much deadlier could present a much more morbid solution in the form of outright population loss. But then again, absent a little economic foresight then even without a sequel worse than the original Covid the social unrest and other upheaval might simply lead to a bunch of absurd wars and we get the same or worse population loss… sorry, I don’t want to get into the territory of bad Hollywood movie plots. But massive changes to labor force expectations on what employment means are pretty much required in some form or fashion.
• silexia 11mo ago
  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.
• crystal_revenge 11mo ago
  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.
  • muds 11mo ago
    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).
• CosmicNomad 11mo ago
  I appreciate the authors points here. There are definitely large swaths of interns/juniors who are going through this pain. That being said, it is also true that the quality of graduates we are seeing has dropped dramatically in the last 2-3 years. We have really been struggling to hire competent juniors. Most bomb their interviews, and with coding tools many have not actually had to learn fundamentals at university. Computer science has exploded in popularity because of the money that can be made in the industry and the distribution of people who enter the field has changed significantly. I do wonder about the signal to noise ratio here from people who maybe should not have entered the industry.
• bwhiting2356 11mo ago
  > “I am not the person in the VR rig or in the forklift chair. My world is the white collar side of this,” Society should not be engineered to make sure members of the professional class don’t have to enter the working class. To do so would be unfair to the working class, not to mention bad for competition and productivity. Demand is high for a variety of trades and healthcare jobs.
  • suriya-ganesh 11mo ago
    The goal of society was to encourage upward mobility and not the other way around. Not that working class has anything wrong with it. Most of us are. Preferring to do white collar is perfectly alright. Considering the emotional toil rote work has on you
• coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
  Ahmed with Deepmind internship can’t get a job? It’s not your resume that’s the issue it’s your name and the market in general.
• burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  This is what happens when there is hyper-optimization of capital rate of return at the expense of cruelly suppressing the rate of labor wage increases. The middle class shrivels up to nothing and the precariat explodes with millions of under-counted homeless and functionally-homeless people. I guess billionaires really want to live in fortified gated communities in otherwise poor countries surrounded by favelas, criminal street gangs, and abject suffering.
• urlahmed 11mo ago
  Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ). I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion. Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques! I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat. Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention. In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
• urlahmed 11mo ago
  Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ). I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion. Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques. I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat. Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention. In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
  • nextworddev 11mo ago
    This is top notch blog post. Keep creating. Substack or Beehive allows for amplication since HN virality is a crapshoot. Best of luck and reach out if you need advice.
  • YZF 11mo ago
    Good luck with your search. Free advice from the Internet- That role you're describing is pretty rare for new grads. You'd normally look for someone with experience and a track record before trusting them with open ended work or product management roles. Start by being a "junior" builder in a team, then as you prove yourself you'll be given broader scope, this can take a while. There are teams building things that need strong builders. The smaller the company the more likely you'll be able to grow faster if you perform well.
    • khafra 11mo ago
      Your free advice is well-taken and apropos in 2015 and before. The major point of the essay is that junior builders--e.g., people doing tasks that are standardized and understood well enough to automate--no longer get hired. Either we get a new way to identify the ability to complete open-ended work, or the tech sector suffers a succession failure (or everybody gets replaced by robots before the current generation of senior experts retires).
• ericpauley 11mo ago
  My two cents: As someone who is actively hiring and looking at a lot of résumés from fresh grads (albeit looking for more systems programming experience), I would personally not move forward with an interview for this CV. Red flags for me: * Talks a big talk on AI but it’s inscrutable if any of it goes beyond “I installed PyTorch and ran example code/prompted an API” * Multiple projects but from demos it’s very unclear what they actually did. (Not “very legible technical work”) * No GitHub on résumé despite claiming it on “skills” I can get a good engineer onboarded to AI tooling quickly (heck, some of the referenced techniques have existed for only months), but I can’t reliably take someone from AI consumer to engineer. These issues are very widespread. I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together.
  • knappe 11mo ago
    >I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. But perhaps my expectation of "real systems" is different than yours. To put this into perspective, I mentor and have mentored lots of juniors from code schools and traditional, four year university computer science majors in web dev. Having some concept of both the web stack/language and a basic understanding of good coding practices is about the most I'd expect. All thing things that sit on top of it, like scaling the stack, performance optimizations and the like are things I wouldn't even come close to expecting a junior to know. Those are things I'd expect to have to coach on.
    • tavavex 11mo ago
      > They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. This is just how the junior job market seems to operate now. Barely anyone wants some open-ended, curious recent graduate who's eager to expand their technical knowledge with new skills that are taught to them at the job. Everyone wants juniors to punch well above their weight - to even have a chance of an interview, ideally your resume should indicate that you're already an expert at every required skill in the job listing. They fish out the top 1-5% of all graduates and the really desperate people who are willing to go work a junior job despite extensive work experience - everyone else is welcome to keep putting in hundreds of applications elsewhere. Of course, it makes sense that you'd want the best - but it feels like there's active pressure now to hire as few people as possible regardless of circumstance. Companies will keep searching for the miracle candidate - if they don't find one, they'll just repost the listing until one shows up. Everyone else has locked the doors on hiring altogether. We're probably going to see a push on juicing more value out of existing workers than paying new ones, so the average graduates will continue having nowhere to go.
• pnathan 11mo ago
  The number of junior roles I have seen my companies open in the past 8 years - and I've been at a few different shops - is less than he fingers I have. And this is _before_ the AI-copolypse. Management has generally become persuaded that juniors are not worth hiring. My current shop is a bit more thoughtful on this which is good. But. The desire for senior+ is out of line. Particularly when companies want to pay junior rates. =} --- Dear author, I don't know any period in the past 20 years where entry level jobs were properly allocated outside of FAANG. I have always advised talking to Microsoft, as my perspective is that they have the best entry level pipeline. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can afford to stay in it" is an old stock traders proverb. And I believe it applies the AI fad. I do not believe that the dreams of actually replacing humans will work out generally. But it will be a painful experience for the employees and the prospective employees.
  • coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
    2015/16 was totallt doable to get a junior job nowadays companies are just barely hiring and most open positions wait for a unicorn with low rxpectations to snatch.
• cruffle_duffle 11mo ago
  It’s not popular to say in these parts, but societies insane covid reaction fucked over the younger generation so, so, so bad. Our kids are gonna be paying for that nonsense for their entire lives. We stole so much from them it isn’t even funny. And I say “not popular” because so many tech people directly benefited from perpetuating and supporting those harmful policies. We were one of the primary beneficiaries of the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” and all that… As long as the massive paychecks kept coming and the work remained at home… we had no reason to question any of it. Sadly the chickens are finally coming home to roost and it’s our kids that are fucked the most.
• m0llusk 11mo ago
  This seems badly supported, likely entirely wrong. There is a lot of hype about automation, but hiring has all but stopped before without any automation revolutions being needed. If automation were driving this then there would be a shape to things with the most readily automated tasks sticking out, but what the labor market is showing is an extreme slowdown across all sectors broadly. An alternative explanation is that this is an unusually ugly correction brought about by a combination of factors including but not limited to a prolonged period of essentially zero interest rates and a long time since the last real correction.
• wagwang 11mo ago
  At the heart of every fast destructive technology leap is the (econo-militaristic) competitive drive to not be left behind. Whatever sociological damage technology causes pales to the innate desire to avoid being subjugated. This is on the mind of every major leader right now.
• LoganDark 11mo ago
  In my experience, the best way to get hired is not actually to apply traditionally, but to put yourself in places people are actually looking. For me that has been Hacker News. Both of my latest jobs I've gotten from posting in the HN jobseekers thread, and all of the applications I've made outside of HN have never even gotten a reply. I think employers looking for exceptional candidates are more likely to look in exceptional places rather than "normal" places.
• ivell 11mo ago
  Reading this reminds me how much I have missed good writing these days.
• eduction 11mo ago
  In the boom times people get too cocky and in the retrenchment they get too pessimistic. Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well. Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will change things more than offshoring but once again not as much as everyone seems to think. We still have offshoring but it didn’t stop programmers ramping toward and beyond seven figure salaries. To the author’s credit this doesn’t read like panic, it’s level headed, but it is inevitably quite dark. In the 90s recession people temped, worked in coffee shops, and made or listened to amazing music. Not to be flip but maybe for a college grad (no kids) getting sidetracked from a tech developer job for a while is a blessing in disguise.
  • tavavex 11mo ago
    Where the "panic" part starts to set in is that the people who are educated in the discipline aren't going anywhere. Suppose the trend does eventually reverse. In 5 years you will still be competing with the people who graduated alongside you today, most people who graduated over the last few years, and people who will graduate in 2030. The supply side will continue overflowing with candidates, so anyone who graduated a long time ago and has no job experience after that will be left behind - this is the group that's graduating today. It truly feels like not being able to find a job under a certain time limit will basically make your education irrelevant for hiring purposes. And even if you manage to find a job after that indeterminate amount of time, it seems like anything but a blessing in disguise. Putting everything you've worked for on hold to work some soul-crushing, minimum-wage, abusive job while the rest of the world moves on without you. Even if you find a job in your field after this, you would've missed out on years of development that people who graduated during a boom would have acquired by now.
    • selimthegrim 11mo ago
      I spent a long time in grad school and I’m totally running into this.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• moi2388 11mo ago
  From the UK. Named Ahmed. I think this plays a factor.
  • baq 11mo ago
    Upvoted for political incorrectness, because it’s probably true, though the market for juniors is what it is even for Johns and Matts.
  • t0rt01se 11mo ago
    Chin up. There's always the civil service.
  • vablings 11mo ago
    Why, Ahmed is one of the most common names in the UK
    • selimthegrim 11mo ago
      Well, the people doing the hiring might have some feelings about that
• 5350-uiop-1130 11mo ago
  the irony here is that you are studying AI and looking for work in AI, presumably to reduce future jobs in the outer edges of the distribution curve
• thomascountz 11mo ago
  As a high schooler in 2008, I watched my family struggle. Pay cuts, temporary furloughs, and constant stress became normal. The same for my friends and their families. The vestiges of 90s excess and advancement were over. At that time I realized my American Dream of becoming an engineer was just that: a dream. A shared illusion we all propped up until we couldn't. So, I turned down engineering schools, took a year off to work in a coffee shop, and went to university for a Bachelors in Fine Arts. I figured: if I was going to be unemployed and living paycheck to paycheck, I might as well follow my own dreams and try to have fun doing it. Only a few years after graduating, I'd return to engineering—computer programming instead of robotics—but that experience has always stuck with me. Almost 20 years later, I feel the same gut-punch as I see whats happening to young people.
  • r_lee 11mo ago
    And it's incredible to see people here say that it's just a "skill issue" or whatever, sitting on "young people". Like do we want the population to grow or not? Which one is it?
• jackhuman 11mo ago
  I wished I could get someone passionate on my team who wants to learn n grow. I’m at a FAANG company. I’m a self taught idiot with no college, but a lot of being in the right place, the right attitude and willing to grind to fill in my missing gaps. I’m top performer on my team, but I don’t think I’d make it today though starting at the bottom. I know I’d have a hard time getting a new job today for sure.
• moktonar 11mo ago
  You could try investing the unemployed time in your own project and see if it goes somewhere. Do the things you’d like to get hire for. Innovate. I understand it’s unwaged work but at least you don’t waste your time and it will make your cv better.
• jongjong 11mo ago
  A lot of millennials have had this feeling "I did everything right, but I'm not seeing any results" because the job market is all new to them it's like "Am I supposed to be seeing result by now?" They literally have no idea what to expect. But they keep having to lower their expectations... It was already a bit like that when I graduated in 2012. In retrospect, I think there was a huge difference between me and people who graduated just 5 years earlier. It's like there used to be a social contract that made sense but it stopped working suddenly at some point and we're basically gaslit because everyone from previous generations thinks the social contract is still working... Meanwhile since us millennials didn't know what to expect we kept convincing ourselves that it's just a bit harder than we thought... 5 years later; OK even harder than we thought... 10 years later, OK this is insanely difficult... 15 years later... Ok ok something's really wrong about the system... I'm basically a work zombie and no results. Talking with my parents about career feels like talking to aliens from a different parallel universe with completely different economic laws inhabited by completely different beings.
• MITSardine 11mo ago
  I just wanted to comment on the "out of distribution" solution the author proposes, partly for the young grads on this forum. Going "out of distribution" in abilities also means your job prospects go "out of distribution". When you specialize, so too does the kind of position you'd be the better fit for. This can mean radically fewer possibilities, and strong geographic restrictions. To give an example, my PhD topic concerned something "that's everywhere" but, when you look at things more closely, there's only < 10 labs (by lab, I mean between 1 and 3 permanent researchers and their turnover staff) in the world working on it, and around that many companies requiring skills beyond gluing existing solutions together, in which case they'd just as well hire a cheaper (and more proficient) generalist with some basic notions. This isn't even a very abstract, very academic field, it's something that gets attacked within academia for being too practical/engineering-like on occasion. I understand the "belly of the curve" gets automated away, but consider that the tail end of the curve - producing knowledge and solutions to novel problems - has been for a long time, since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, if not oral communication. The solutions scale very well. A researcher's job is, almost by definition, to work themselves out of a job, and this has been the case since long before AI. Once the unknown has been known, a new unknown must be found and tackled. There's very, very few places in the world that truly innovate (not implementing a one-off novel solution produced in some academic lab) and value those skills. I don't mean to be overly bleak, but it doesn't necessarily follow from this automation that the freed salary mass will go towards higher-level functions; just as likely (if not more), this goes towards profits first.
  • khafra 11mo ago
    Seems like the hope, for OOD workers, is that matching weird employer needs with weird employee capabilities is a belly-of-the-curve problem that's about to get automated away.
• GardenLetter27 11mo ago
  So do a PhD? His CV is good, what is there to lose?
• jfewhfuehg 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ah27182 11mo ago
    Are you going to address what he said or just continue to spew blatantly racist ad hominems?
    • jfewhfuehg 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      • coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
        Even as DEI hire, DeepMind would get thousands upon thousands of applicants so he would still need to better than the other applicants.
        • jfewhfuehg 11mo ago
          [flagged]
          • deleted 11mo ago
            [deleted]
• misja111 11mo ago
  To me it seems that there's a contradiction in what the author is trying to say. On the one hand he's saying that for new grads like him, the job situation is getting worse and worse, because of AI. He's saying that AI, while taking over low skilled jobs, is growing and dominating the labor market. But, the author's skill is exactly where the growth is: he's a AI graduate! If author has trouble finding a job, the reason certainly couldn't be the lack of growth in AI automation jobs?
• danieltanfh95 11mo ago
  > young person complains about jobs because automation, outsourcing and immigration > looks at resume > garbage formatting that only AI would love, with little substantial content beyond the sea of candidates would offer. All the talk about humans and yet producing a piece of paper that doesnt respect human time.
  • tavavex 11mo ago
    > garbage formatting that only AI would love If AI would truly love it, then that seems like the best-case ATS-optimized resume to me. The right tool for the job. Imagine using real people to review applicants - what is this, the 1800s?
• Havoc 11mo ago
  Well author writes very well so I’d imagine he’ll land on his feet. The scary part to me is that it’s not obvious what the correct response to this potential future is. A pivot into out of distribution is functionally impossible for many. The new grad because if they don’t know the in curve stuff yet then expecting out from them is a tough ask. And for established people it’s a big leap out of comfort zone if you can even figure out which way to leap It’s like telling someone to be smarter. Easier said than done
• real-hacker 11mo ago
  If this blog post still doesn't help the author find a job, that's a really hopeless situation.
• TrackerFF 11mo ago
  The hard truth is that companies overhired the year after COVID hit, and have spent the last year or two laying off those. If you look at any graph showing job listings, one will see that during COVID year (back to ZIRP), the numbers exploded. In the year prior to that, from '18 to '20, the numbers of job listings had started to flat out. Remember that the interest rates were going up back then, until COVID hit. Right now the number of job listings is roughly following the same trajectory as prior to COVID. Meaning that if you had built some regression model up until COVID, the model would put us around where we are today. For the young people that have never experienced this, it has happened before. And it will happen again. Most people are lucky enough that they will only experience this after big financial crashes, while others work in industries with natural boom and bust cycles. One day recruiters will wine and dine you, promising a job 12 months before you graduate, with a fat signing bonus and other perks. The next day they'll ghost you. I've gone through two of these.
  • ghaff 11mo ago
    Yep. Go back in time to read accounts of aerospace engineers driving cabs in Seattle or chemical engineer—-and drilling employment—-during oil industry downturns.
• asciii 11mo ago
  I enjoyed reading your essay - really nice work. With regards to job prospects, please review the resume. Those big paragraphs should really be bullet points and even then, highlight the contribution or interest you have that makes you "out of distribution human" in the CV.
• physicsguy 11mo ago
  I'm based in the UK and have been a hiring manager pretty recently. I have seen a lot of CVs like this. This was the junior positions I was advertising two years ago, this wouldn't have made it through the filter. Because largely, we (as even a small company) would get ~250+ applicants for a single position. My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities. Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special. The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like: * 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc. * Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of> * A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+) And even then, you can't interview all those people.
  • insane_dreamer 11mo ago
    250 applications per junior position shows how rough the market is for new grads
    • physicsguy 11mo ago
      If you think that’s bad, about 15 years ago I asked a recruiter from Rolls Royce how competitive their grad scheme was and it had over 20000 applications per year at the time.
      • 11mo ago
• tracker1 11mo ago
  Honestly, it just reminds me of 2000-2002 or so... Seemed to hit the coastal cities before here in Phoenix, but it got bad here right after 9/11 and I had trouble finding any work for close to a year. I was able to start working again for half what I was making before almost a year later... I'd done a handful of projects, but nothing solid at the time. I spent most of my free time reading and learning as much as I could. I learned C# offline from "The Complete Reference" and the beta command line compiler as I didn't even have consistent internet access. It was a rough, severely depressing time in my life. It absolutely sucks. Right now, I'm working under a contract role that I like, but zero benefits, which is a problem financially/medically. And the job market is rough (already took a 35% pay cut) just to keep working. All I can suggest is stick to it, stay busy as much as you can and focus on work-adjacent hobby projects as much as you can. As others have pointed out, maybe try your hand at writing. There's always room for good technical writing out there, though it doesn't always pay the best, it can help your career and can be good for supplemental income.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• adammarples 11mo ago
  This guy is in the UK, like me. The UK hiring market is freezing up, and has been since reeves et al raised employer taxes on hiring employees. They also just added some more legislation to make them harder to dismiss, and increased minimum wage, fueling wage compression. Now everyone is waiting for the budget in November to see what will happen next. I'm pretty sure most of this guy's problems are related to that, not AI. I work as a contractor in tech and bounce around different businesses. A lot of them are encouraging/using AI in some form but there are always new hires, whole functions aren't being replaced. People are on boarded every week. This is more science fiction than reality at the moment. The problem is taxes and regulations.
• EchoReflection 11mo ago
  the book "Ultraltralearning" by Scott Young was/is a useful resource for people who want to "open their minds" to different perspectives on finding work, imo: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/r81s4t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/r81s4t/ https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ultralearning-accelerate-your-career-master-hard-skills-and-outsmart-the-competition-9780008305703/new https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ultralearnin... https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competition-Accelerate/dp/006285268X https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competi... https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Scott-Young-audiobook/dp/B07ST3Z1Q6 https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Scott-Young-audiobook/d...
• mecHacker 11mo ago
  Similar situation (in some sense, an entry level entrepreneur here) Except, I have a decade plus experience. Yet find your situation relatable. After graduating with an engineering degree from a not so bad college in India, all my job applications were going in an abysmal pit. Even the 18 call centers I applied to rejected me (despite being told of having reasonably good English language skills). What worked was relocating to a metropolitan town and literally going door to door in person and show up at companies and walk-ins, and I got an engineering job (btw, I'm at that exact stage now - will get to it later). Few years later, went to US for MS, spent a year after graduating in applying for jobs - stopped counting applications after 2250th application. Didn't even get a single interview. Out of desperation, did a site-wide search for some niche enterprise software name I knew about on craigslist, landed a craigslist subdomain page for a town I hadn't heard of - got job interview and the job. Fast forward a few years later, I had been looking for a way to find a meaningful occupation to return to central India - spent all my vacations over the years looking for something that I could do. Never found it. So one fine day, I packed up my bags from a year old FAANG job, and came back. Since then, I've been building, demoing, pitching, improvising but haven't yet made an income - neither through my network back in the US, nor cold calling. So now, I'm on foot again, just showing up at companies and realizing: the local market is much different, their needs are different ; and in person presence is a huge catalyst in advancing sales cycle. In person communication is introducing me to signals and adapt my offerings. AI, if anything, has only helped be more productive, but I totally see how it would impact entry level engineering jobs - and I don't have any answers for that. Except, that increasing the surface area by in-person interactions may be an avenue to explore if you already haven't. Hanging out at coworking spaces, going to meetups where your potential "customers" would hang out etc. might be worth a try. For a such a well written article, I'd hope someone with the right opportunity may reach out to you. Good luck.
• bazingayang 11mo ago
  This page is no longer accessible. Why did author take it down?
• port11 11mo ago
  I'm getting a 404 so: https://archive.is/viaSP https://archive.is/viaSP
• Georgy25 11mo ago
  I’m in a similar spot but from a slightly different angle: I just finished a CS degree, but I’m working in IT Ops at a fintech while trying to move into SWE/SDET. What you describe about the “center of the curve” hollowing out matches what I’m seeing from the inside. A lot of the work that would have gone to juniors is being either handed to automation tools or piled on a few senior people with AI assistance. Job titles still exist, but the entry rungs feel thinner and more contested. The “out of distribution human” framing really resonates. Right now my survival strategy is to lean into weird combinations rather than trying to be a generic junior dev: mixing ops, security, automation, and AI glue work so I’m the one deciding where to use models instead of being the person they’re replacing. I’m curious if you think there’s still any value in aiming for “standard” entry level SWE roles, or whether the only realistic play for new grads is to find niche, messy, cross-domain work and hope that’s far enough in the tail for long enough.