Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
urlahmed.com432 points by linkregister 13 hours ago
432 points by linkregister 13 hours 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.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
It mentions DeepMind but also says Research Ready, which is the program funded by DeepMind but run by unis for disadvantaged students.
That said I have no idea how competitive this program is.
>disadvantaged students
That's what it says on paper but that's not reality. If you are asian you are suddenly not disadvantaged even if you are an immigrant. It is just legal racism.
The fact that employers even get to play games like this tells you a lot about our current situation ironically.
He’s in the UK.
DEI hiring exists in the UK. This is not something exclusive to America.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
> I think use the time to network with real people
It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough.
I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
I’ve seen the complete opposite and have gotten my current role from a referral which the company took very seriously (guaranteed first interview).
Just saying "referrals are worthless" or "referrals are useful" doesn't mean much without specifying the type of referral. Obviously if you're talking directly to a hiring manager who's willing to bypass HR, it's much likelier you'll end up with a job than if you're talking to someone who sees an open position on another team and says he'll flag your resume on their ATS if you apply.
> I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
Yes. But not always. Getting an internal referral helps somewhere between not at all and a lot. And it is pretty random, nothing to do with you. Just a matter of timing and attention span and where other candidates are in the queue.
However, it never hurts. So overall, don't expect networking and referrals will get you the job, but do expect it to help every now and then. So it is worth spending some time on that.
My experience is completely the opposite, every quick hire is a referral, jobs constantly ask for and bonus for referrals. The higher up the position the more it matters that you have a warm introduction.
What kind of real people will the average new grad have in their network?
A bunch of other new grads, all in a cage match over entry level that don't exist?
Where are the nativists, and why aren't they demanding a $100,000/license tax on AI?
If they are worthy, they will have parents who have influential friends and family.
Or if they have parents who have influential friends and family, they are worthy.
The people you know aren’t always in a position to hire you.
They are sometimes in a position to hire you.
I'm not in the field any longer, but when I was (pre-LLM) every job I got save one was through my network. And it's 100x more important now.
I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.
If you expand your scope enough eventually you’ll find someone. For example, my first job was from someone who knew my dad.
That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above.
As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
I think you need to find one of those people collectors. I know one of them, and I could ask him to introduce me to somebody with <insert skill/interest> and he'll know somebody within a hundred miles.
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
Hey, I’ve done recruiting since 2005. Here’s the most basic advice I can give you. It’s much more important to have stuff to put on your resume than is it to obsess over how the resume is formatted. Showing what you’ve done and what you can do in the goal. What I typically do for myself is focus on quality over quantity, and then stuff in a few extra keywords relevant to the kind of job I’m targeting.
I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring.
No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
> they REALLY are just not interested in hiring.
That is the point of OP's article yes, that and the idea that being "out of distribution" is increasingly important. This, mentioning his unique qualities (e.g. a Deep Mind internship) and not his similar qualities (everything else) would probably be pertinent
Which is, of course, the meat of the matter. Nobody 'needs' to hire a junior anymore.
Eveyone needs to hire juniors, it's how seniors get made. Management thinks they're smart and have found a shortcut to save money, but it's only going to lead to degregation of skill at the senior level as well as raise the amount of money people that truly operate at a senior level can demand. I've already seen both happen where I work.
The way it used to work was you’d know somebody that’d know somebody and they’d vouch for you. But these days… it’s the same.
No idea about small companies but FAANG companies get > 1 million resume submission a year. You need to take that into account, the recruiters and other people in the chain do not have time to read your essay.
Thanks to modern technology, every advertised job opening now gets > 1 million resume submissions a year, no matter the size of the company.
> I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.
I agree but then the reality is that we are here now, so it's no longer ridiculous. So if you are that brilliant, you understand that there is no point of fighting the current, so to make your life easier and to get the job where you can feel fulfillment, you might have to adjust your CV to fit the reality. That is a part of the intelligence you need to adapt and has always been.
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood. It's a bad situation for both employers and candidates but there doesn't seem to be any practical alternative.
But then you're making it even worse by hiring inexperienced HR staff to do your hiring? Who mostly make their hiring decisions on whether they would want to have sex with a candidate.
> That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood.
Yes, this is a big factor. As an actively hiring manager, there's nothing worse than when HR enables receiving resumes through linkedin apply. We got a flood of many thousands of resumes. While I feel a duty to review them all, it's just flat out impossible so I had to skip most of them without reading.
On my most recent hire I'm glad HR stopped that and required people to file through the company website. Volume was reduced to many hundreds, which is more tractable. I still wasn't able to review them all, but at least a much higher percentage, like 60% instead of 2%
There has to be a way to limit the flood--someone has to pay a fee someplace.
The only fee will be a subscription to AI LLM.
AI will do a cheap job of automatically filtering the potential candidates for a hire.
A suitable AI LLM can even be leveraged as automation that calls up the filtered candidates and evaluates them for the basics.
So that would filter the wheat from the chaff.
And then the humans can take the process further to interview and select the candidates for the hire.
So yeah, AI will replace the HR recruiters at least for the mundane tasks.
Resumes will be increasingly fake, at the same rate. We're already seeing this. Recently interviewed a guy clearly using AI interview cheating tools, which is much higher barrier and risk than just making up shit on your resume.
Maybe only accept applications by post.
Ok - this obviously doesn't work everywhere but recently was flown to a city for an interview. Day long, full loop, 5 45 min interviews + 1 working session with a panel. Had dinner with the team the night before.
There's no way to cheat at that point. You either have what they need (yay btw) or its not a fit
The above posts are discussing how to evaluate and narrow down the avalanche of applications to decide who to fly in for an interview.
Though honestly 40 years ago, sending out hundreds of cookie cutter applications by post wasn’t that hard.
I do agree that once someone gets through an initial filter and screen they should be willing to meet in person. That has costs on both sides but, during the tech boom, one heard a lot of complaints by applicants that they’re no going to travel for interviews, dinner, etc. <shrug>
Buddy, the amount of people these days with MASTER’S degrees that can’t even communicate via 2-3 (short) paragraph email exchanges… yep, it can be rough out there.
When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
Matches my experience. 2 page resume is standard for senior careers, everything below should be 1 page. The reason is simple: I'm evaluating if you are able to summarize the most important points for how you're fitting into this role into a very limited space. This is a important skill that transfers to many other areas and isn't obvious just by looking at the extensive list of your degrees and job positions. I trashed applications for the sole reason when i felt that the applicant missed the whole point of why i'm reading their resume. Yet some hiring folks may prefer it the other way around so it's also a cultural fit filter in some way.
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.
Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
It would be weirder for that blanket resume to be accompanied by posts about how much your wedding taught you about b2b saas sales with your photo, location, and a list of all the people you met through work and are willing to say you're connected to.
> His resume is designed poorly.
Yeah.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
If someone wants to use keywords as a screening mechanism for resumes, they don't need a human recruiter to do that, and some automated tool is perfectly able to parse keywords. You could over-index your resume on the prospect that there's a human recruiter as the first screening mechanism and that recruiter is going through every resume and skimming for keywords, yet isn't very good at identifying relevant keywords quickly, but it's a relatively meaningless micro-optimization overall. Keep in mind they were able to get multiple internships before with presumably the same resume structure, so it's already proven to work well enough.
It's like the old progressive JPEGs or GIFs where the first few kilobytes were enough to render the whole image at a lower resolution and the rest just filled in the detail.
Ha, you’re right.
And I missed it when skimming
The people looking at your resumes will skim because they have a lot of resumes to look at
He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning
His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.
That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.
> 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.
I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).
Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines.
But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.
I had a similar thought. “I was never this articulate as a fresh grad”
I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes.
But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades.
So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.
With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be.
If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
looks at Patreon
Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.
“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
It's not the world of tiktok. Resumes have always needed to be like that.
I'd prefer an editor went over this post and condenced this by at least 50%, and then demanded factual references be added.
Yeah, that CV could also use some colors, spacing, and typography to visually highlight key facts.
I almost get an existential crisis from the fact that this was written by someone in their early 20s
I agree on the first point. I clicked through to the previous blog entry which I also found to be really good.
Agreed; uncommonly good writing, especially for someone with a CS degree.
> his resume is designed poorly ... too long
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees.
My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.
When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
It's a good enough resume. But half as many words would make it better.
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
It might pay for him to listen for a bit.
Oh, I'm sure the person in question has heard this many times, coming in to the job market. Chicken and an egg problem, it is.
Sorry but if people aren’t hiring new grads then that new grad resume isn’t getting read. All the formatting in the world can’t fix the situation.
In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered.
Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.
It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.
This. The guy should forget about the bullshit jobs he could get in the CS field and just do that same thing full time.
He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.
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.
> Great article, well written.
>> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models.
>> 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.
Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well.
The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM
It didn't have LLM smell to me, at all. LLM-written essays are often very fluffy because expanding a prompt into more words often produces lots of air — but this one felt very "dense" with lots of ideas per capita.
the awkward punctuation like using commas suggest that it wasn't LLM generated
It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.
I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
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?
> Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants?
In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size.
I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.
Because the UK does not care about its own technology businesses and simply offshores the work overseas and even when they don't, they end up selling off the company to a foreign buyer.
> Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
That would accelerate the decline.
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?
Actually, you have it the other way around! The US has a rich ecosystem of rapidly growing startup tech companies. Many of us on HN are working for them. There has never been a better time to build something new.
> There has never been a better time to build something new.
Were you not around 10-20 years 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.
Reading this, I was thinking all along that the job you are searching for isn’t the one you are built for. Amazing writing and analysis. Kudos!
Thank you for writing this post. Your writing is insightful and thought-provoking. I would love to follow your blog to read your future posts as well, but I could not find an RSS feed or an email newsletter option. Is there any chance that you would add RSS to your blog in the future?
You have a gift for writing.
As for your job search, I would recommend that you look way beyond your home country if you haven't started doing that already. There are markets where there are jobs and while finding work overseas is not easy, there are markets where ML/product/research roles are still open.
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.
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).
Love the blog :) If you or folks are looking for junior ML roles on training, RL & distributed training, doors always open!
Great post. I think your situation would be a bit more different if you were in San Francisco in the US instead of anywhere in the UK where at least with your AI/ML background, there are lots of related roles there.
However the problem is for every role, you will be faced this 10,000+ other applicants, so you need to keep that in mind.
So instead of that your best bet is to build an AI startup in the US [0]. You have built AI systems for others, surely you can do it for yourself?
[0] Do not build a startup in the UK or Europe.
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.
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.
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.
> so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time
they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc.
And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being received that they didnt invest in personally. This is what the tide that lift all boats are - and because everybody is lifted, those who complain about lack of the trickle down sees the high-flyers benefiting enormously while their own benefits aren't "visible".
I think its more complicated. Has life improved for everyone in the last 100 years? Absolutely. Has life improved for everyone in the last 20 years? Debatable. Baseline needs like housing has only gotten worse. Its easy to compare with 1925. Is it better than 1995, 2005 or 2015?
While purchasing power of goods has gone up dramatically, the growth in house prices have far outstripped wage growth in the last 50 years. Since housing is people’s largest expense, people don’t feel better off even if they can afford nicer gadgets or to go out to eat more.
>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.
> Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
I don't think you're asking a serious question.
What kind of answer would you accept? It's not like you're going to change your mind if they say that e.g. the Cyvorefrx family from Palm Beach is one of the people on the top, right?
Nor is this question an effecive rhetorical device to convince onlookers: they'll rightfully ignore it just like people ignord "Who are these Guantanamo Bay torturers you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of guards and soldiers?"
>I don't think you're asking a serious question.
It's not a serious question because the preceding statement wasn't serious either. It's just a vague anti-elite statement.
At the very least, it's not the CEO's job to keep unemployment rate low. That's the job of politicians and central bankers. To blame unemployment on "people at the top" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how society is structured. To take your Guantanamo Bay example, it's like blaming it on terror on "the military industrial complex". Is it vaguely directionally correct? Yeah. Is it a cogent statement? No.
But CEOs do influence politicians and central bankers. Heck you have people like Elon openly trying to influence elections in many countries using his money and fame.
> Who are the "people at the top" you speak of?
"The people richer than me" is typically the meaning here. You here this complaint often even from people in the top 1% of the richest country on earth.
What people (like you) don’t understand is the wealth (and power) gap between people even in the 1% and people in the top 0.001 is still absurd.
> Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
Look up Bilderberg group
> Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?
AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.
Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
You can look out to other economies to see how software plays out in a "normal" market, not a VC and mega-corp backed one. Salaries in those economies for software are like you are predicting, in line with other skilled professions.
> The $400K jobs may dry up for most
Pretty sure $400k was not on the table for anyone but a tiny minority
True. But a lot of folks looked at the high flying numbers and optimistically thought they could be part of that tiny minority.
It was the same for me growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley in the early aughts, post dot com crash. Even when I went to college in 2008 the conventional wisdom was that there weren’t going to be any jobs in software, it was all being outsourced. I studied CS anyways, because I loved it. It was still very hard to get my first job out of college in 2012.
But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.
I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
> I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
Job markets are bad for everyone though
From what I've seen, CS/programming job growth is significantly worse than in other comparable fields. Though my guess is that's a retrenchment from overhiring and overpaying.
The 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#--:...
It's bad across the board - 20%+ under & unemployment for basically everyone.
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.
One thing I see at my Alma mater is that a lot of the non CS degrees now have explicit variants of $field plus software.
Job markets are pretty good for electricians building data centers.
https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/pfbid02UTHoop...
Back before the Dotcom Boom, unless you were in Silicon Valley, most jobs were "Programmer/Analyst" and you worked for low wages for a big company. This is what I did and it took me many years before I could get my foot in the door in Silicon Valley but once I did, I never looked back.
The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
It doesn't need regulation, it needs taxation. No more billionaires. The endgame is that there's simply not going to be nearly enough jobs. There already aren't, as described in the article, hence why there's all the artificial jobs.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
Why are executives allowed to lie, and the rest of us have to just deal with it? At some point the chickens come home to roost
The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
> CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people
It's no guarantee, I've had a few terrible managers that I assumed were non-technical but was shocked to learn they actually had IT degrees from decades ago.
They just checked out for some reason and would jump from meetings the minute they got even vaguely technical.
"I'll leave that to the engineers as we're self organising, I've got to head off" which left us to run by consensus which slowed everything down.
Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
> Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens.
Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
> Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
Another baseless assumption.
> they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
> Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
Another baseless assumption.
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
I work for big tech and we've been hiring US graduates fairly continuously. We're also taking students for internships.
We've also had people poached by other companies.
I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job.
Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments.
Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats...
Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
Same, we haven't hired in 5 years. I know bright young college grade who has been looking for a job for way too long.
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
You have a grave misunderstanding of how the American government works if you think this isn't things working as intended.
They stoke fear of immigrants to win elections, but to the extent that their donors want that labor, it will be allowed to continue.
Immigrants are one thing, but opening the floodgates to 20 million non-citizens by abusing an asylum law meant to grant relief to tens or hundreds was a huge problem.
That sounds like a big scary Fox News number, got any actual detail or context for it?
Not anymore. H1Bs now require a high salary and $100k fee. Only very rare candidates will be worth it at those costs.
Because H1B was never about shortages, it is about wage suppression and having an exploitable underclass.
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
Yeah, true. I worked for a big tech company when they were building a team in China so they could lay us all off in Palo Alto.
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries.
Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
Do you live in the same reality as the rest of us? Most h1bs are not competitive programming champions, they are totally average in every way
These people are exactly what H1B is for. The problem is that most h1b hires now are not that exceptional.
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
No, companies were already having trouble getting prospective staff H1Bs. Making them more expensive just increases the incentive to move the job offshore.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
A much better solution is something like the hire act.
I'm not sure how that act would differentiate between hiring someone in India vs outsourcing to India.
Also, how would it differentiate between outsourcing and SAAS?
A _better_ solution would be to remove the H1-B cap and continue to skim the best graduates worldwide. Same with removing the green card quotas. Make sure if someone gets an H1-B, they can transition to a green card and then to citizenship.
That's always been the US's super power.
Keep the density of innovation in the USA by inviting people in.
I mean, occasionally he does have a good idea, then he's quickly reminded who he works for.
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
I find it strange. Any other qualified profession like doctors or lawyers would never let there an army of people from other countries to worsen their job market.
>The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in.
Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
I think a lot of tech people feel this way. The feeling of mismatch between my values and the values of leadership is why I left the industry. I'm starting a Master's degree studying birds and it feels like such a weight off of my shoulders to not have to justify corporate decisions to myself.
How does that work financially? Will you work in academia?
Yeah, I'm employed as a research assistant as part of the Master's program currently. There are jobs in government, non-profits, and academia potentially after. I've never loved money (except for the flexibility having it gives me) so I have several hundred thousand saved up after a decade of engineering so while grad school is an 82% cut in pre-tax pay I can withdraw 1% a year from my investments and live fine. Even once I'm out of school my pay will never as good as it was in engineering but I'll be happier presumably.
I'm still figuring out exactly what the research will be but the plan is essentially data science applied to bird migration patterns (lots of statistics and modelling currently). Overall if you like birds and don't like money apparently a strong math/tech background is potentially useful for ecology research with the idea that's it's easier to teach me about birds than teach an animal science person data science and programming (though I did take an undergrad ecology class before applying to ecology programs).
People I know in academia are also having a terrible time. Grant funding is in the toilet. The focus is on providing for current staff not hiring. No one is leaving because no one has anywhere to go.
My guess is I'll end up in government or an NGO but I'm probably going to do a PhD before that so getting a real job is at least 5 years away. The previous grad students for my advisor are all employed with decent jobs so I'm not worried, especially since I have a pretty unique skill set for the field and strong stats fundamentals.
Edit: engineers are always skeptical of my career change but my friends actually in the life sciences are more confident I'll be able to figure it out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years.
It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.
I don't intend to say the author is "bad", I'm just trying to follow up on this reasoning:
I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.
The rules are, do well at your internship, and you'll probably get a job offer.
The author also seems to be saying that they are getting interviews, but no job offers. ("The interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections.") Another rule is, if you do well at interviews, you will get a job offer.
So, without putting any value judgment on anyone, this is what's happening. The author isn't doing well enough on internships and interviews.
So my advice is not "just apply to more places", but to do that and also practice programming in order to interview better.
I have to agree with you. Companies don’t waste time on interviews if they don’t really want to hire. And if they didn’t hire him, maybe is because was not a good fit, and probably hired someone else. So the job was probably filled — by someone more competent?
I would be careful assuming that a lack of performance was responsible for the internships not converting.
At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.
I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.
Yeah, our team of two gets two interns a semester. We cannot convert them to full time as there is no position open. Complete hiring freeze since 2022.
We paused hiring fresh grads, but still hire interns, and those who prove themselves get full-time offers. We've found internships to be a great pipeline to great hires over the years.
We've had several candidates with completed bachelor's degrees apply for internships, prove themselves, and get full-time jobs that way. This "back door" job hiring pathway might work elsewhere as well.
Same here. We pay interns pretty well and we invest a lot in them during their internship. It doesn't make sense for us (and I imagine others) to take in interns and then not hire the good ones. That's the entire reason we do internships to start with.
I believe they addressed this implicitly as a familiar explanation without actually needing to say it. Despite it being extremely rare to be able to pinpoint via external feedback mechanisms which areas conceivably provide tangible roi, it's just always relevant work on your weak spots.
The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed cooked for a variety of reasons, and it's a much better explanation than some skill issue. People who think they're in the same economy just don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, or legitimately don't know many people in that age group.
It was a skill issue to some extent for me when interviews weren't working out because I couldn't do niche algo problems, or I didn't get a second or first call, but it was never the way it is these days. It was difficult in pre-covid times to get back into a job if I got laid off, sometimes took a year, but there was some information to go on. I'd get interviews periodically, maybe second interviews, maybe 5 interviews, before I'd be rejected. It was maybe 1 in 40 in terms of interview to application ratio; bad enough to end up living in the car, but even then I could pick up a manual labor or barista job. Now.. it's honestly not even worth applying in many cases. It got real dark before I landed my current one, to the point where I considered switching industries, but there was no viable path to do that and see prosperity on the other side. Even now that I'm in a relatively well-paying position, it's still precarious, and long-term prosperity is not even really a remote consideration; I have to assume that despite my best efforts to preserve my income, it can and likely will go away at any time, and therefore even the most basic mortgage (which would still be ~4x my annual gross income and give us less space than renting, doesn't seem feasible. I think it would be more beneficial to just completely forget about trying to aim for milestones that barely exist anymore.
Currently, my spouse has been out of work for nearly a year, not in CS, and she's depressed—rightfully so—because it's never been this bad in our adult lives. No responses _at all_ for any job, and she's way more capable on paper for the stuff she's applying to than I am for SE. One single interview in the last 6 months for something paid, and it didn't pan out. This is Canada mind you, but still.
The economy is now composed of people who have jobs and are stressed about them disappearing, people who don't need work and do own all the land, and people who might miss a majority of their 20s in terms of working life unless they pull some miracle out of their ass quickly.
My partner also has good qualifications and skills has been out of full time work for bordering on 2 years now. Similarly she has become depressed / nihilistic about the job market after hundreds and hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews (and this was after a job she had to resign from after only a couple of months due to the company being incredibly incompetent). She has multiple part time gigs now to stem the bleeding, but it's wild and crazy how bad the job market is in places, and how much the older generations seem to generally just not care.
Canada under its current leadership is probably a dead end. I'm not trying to be cruel but that's just the reality of your situation. Time to think about emigrating if you want a better future.
My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.
Agree 100%
It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.
The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.
Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.
Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Indeed, real systems is a lower bar than you imply. In this case it’s unclear from the CV that I’d be getting someone that has ever written more than a 50 line one-off Python script.
You mention mentoring people in undergrad. Sure, by a year-3 course I’d expect to have to coach beyond basic understanding. To say that basic understanding of performance optimization is out of scope for a BS graduate is not supported by my experience, however. We’re not talking about boot camp grads here.
> 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.
You’re looking for seniors with junior pay grades.
When I hire, I always look at personal github projects. They are a hint that the person loves coding and loves creating software. I'm not looking for 1000 stars projects, and I don't even look at the kind of project, just the fact that the candidate has done some work in his spare time.
If there's no github project, I ask the candidate what website, web communities he watches/participates in regularly. I check if they are related to programming or building software (bonus point if you read HN :-)).
Both are good signs that there is an interest in the job that goes beyond paycheck.
While those are certainly indicators of interest, is their absence an indicator of lack of interest? In other words, "has side projects" is sufficient to prove "likes programming", but I don't think it's necessary.
There's only 24 hours in a day, and mastering any serious curriculum already takes the majority of those.
Then there's family: some have parents to support, and/or a spouse they can't just ignore all evening to sit in front of a terminal typing git push.
Lastly, plenty of people learn or tinker on their own, but they don't all have the (socioeconomically loaded) reflex of marketing themselves with a github repo.
Of my whole Bachelor's, Master's and PhD cohorts, I haven't known one person to have a github repo outside of employment. Some were building little things on the side but sharing them informally, never in public.
What you're looking for is people with no social life, no responsibilities towards anyone or anything (even just being an immigrant can be a huge time and energy sink), and with the social background to confidently market themselves by putting what's objectively noise online.
Yeah I had a personal GitHub project in 2010, nowadays it is not feasible with kids. Time is either spent making money or getting together with family, with an occasional something else, coding for fun isn’t usually there (though I wish there was).
You’re looking for special snowflakes, but want to pay usual money. You may find that money also works as a motivation, a transactional relationship between an employer and an employee is healthy in that neither has to pretend there’s anything else that ultimately matters. (The illusion can be kept only until the first round of layoffs anyway.)
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.
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?
When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities.
For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
I was laid off some time ago and made an earnest effort to break into the trades. I have some experience in framing and general handiwork, but it is extremely difficult to find an apprenticeship/get on a track to certification. I’ve heard unions are extremely selective to ensure their current union members can find consistent work.
As with most things, getting into it seems to be primarily about knowing someone to get you in.
I’d love to hear more ideas/advice on finding alternative employment if anyone has any. I’m worried I won’t be able to find a normal job again.
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has a piece circulating now on Fox Business that says classic trade jobs are the best bet in the age of AI. So called "white collar workers" are being laid off by the hundreds of thousands - - - but blue collar jobs are actually HIRING. I am retiring at 71 yrs. from my own "blue collar" company I started 15 years ago, I created and manage both my websites without a lick of javascript, I have averaged $150K+ a year gross, working mostly from May through October. Scuba diving in my area lakes, nothing to be ashamed of, I am out in mother nature, not locked up in a cubicle cranking out code all day. It's your choice. In 2023 I did $335K and have a solid method to add on another 100 to $200K with a related blue collar offering.
From my own searching, blue collar jobs are hiring in the same way tech jobs are hiring: they’re happy to hire experienced folks, but not to train. It’s likely this isn’t the case elsewhere of course, but I am struggling with it.
What kind of blue collar work gets you $335K? What would be a 10 - 20 year average wage / year look like?
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"
Either very high risk work such as underwater welding or owning a contracting business.
Manual labor can be a thing until you get too hurt to continue, and then you'll need another vocation.
Do whatever is of most value you find easy but others find difficult, specialize, find a location with more demand and less competition, brand distinctly, advertise efficiently, and make sure your prices are calibrated correctly. Maybe it's installing security systems or home automation integration.
I’ve been wanting to try starting something simple and sustainable for a while now, this is seems like great advice for doing so. Thank you.
> 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.
> Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem
No, "not enough people" is corporate speak for "the public should train our workers for us"
One of the most frustrating things in my lifetime:
Company CEO paid-orders-of-magnitude-more-than-median-employee:
"Not enough local people with XYZ skills!"
Skilled local person: "I'm right here, just pay me properly."
Unskilled local person: "I'm right here, train me and I'll do it even at your low wage."
Local educational institution: "We could run training courses if you want to work with us on that!"
...
CEO: "Guess we'll have to get them from overseas!"
Yeah, it's frustrating how they [0] deploy the phrase "worker shortage" as a sneaky euphemism, when it's equally (or more) valid to present the problem as a wages shortage.
Similarly, the world has a terrible megayacht shortage! This is obvious, because I can't find any selling for the $20k in my budget. I demand to know what the government is going to do to fix this existential threat to the nation and our very way of life!
[0] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The salaries of most tradespeople are not increasing significantly. That would imply that the field doesn't see a shortage.
Given how damaging manual labor is to your body, that's not a good bet to make.
The housing crisis isn’t solved by more tradespeople. I know an electrician who’s having trouble finding work because there’s no funding for new construction
Which is both odd and market dependent. I have an electrician I partner with for some work in the Midwest, and his book of work is a year out (commercial and industrial, not new resi).
Electricians in data-center states are eating; elsewhere they are scraping by due to macro-economics.
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.
I always feel a bit conflicted when I read these experience from new grads: on the one hand, there's no question the job market today is not the one they signed up for; on the other, the expectation of recent grads is completely alien to me as someone who entered the job market in the shadow of the dotcom bust.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.
Much of your argument rests on refuting the notion that the author feels "entitled" to a high-paying job. In that point, I agree with you. Any engineering undertaking is most productive when it is a meritocratic and competitive pursuit. People that feel "entitled" to an engineering job unfortunately need a reality check on their true competitiveness.
However, that doesn't seem like the authors core point. The authors' core point here is that they feel that the level of competition is past the point where their meritocratic achievements have any weight because to be competitive in the present marketplace, they need to either (1) inherently be _born_ in a different country with a low cost of living, (2) give up certain basic freedoms, (3) settle for a less skillful job where they can be an outlier in the distribution (for how long?) etc. -- all of which, to them, feel less meritocratic.
Of course, they might also feel "entitled" to a job, but that's not the interesting part of their argument (at least to me).
For the last decades being born in the western world has been an advantage. There is an irony in it beeing gradually reversed.
I feel a lot of the same conflict, and I don't know how much of it is just because times are different now.
My first job was at a tiny local marketing agency building portfolio websites, for 1.5x the Aus minimum wage. As a computer science graduate. I'm pretty sure those kinds of jobs don't exist anymore - they've all been outsourced to Wix or Squarespace.
I think this expectation of getting a job when you meet criteria no matter what is a result of them being new grads - that's what happens in classes or exams, you do not compete with others, you just do your thing.
Depressing article but it really captures the zeitgeist among recent tech grads.
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
To answer your question, it’s taken me about two straight years, but I think I’m finally getting somewhere. I didn’t get any interviews between June 2022 and April 2024, and then another year long gap until this April not counting an internship interview.
How did you survive?
Menial jobs because my stipend ran out. Although a couple instructorships are on the horizon.
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
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.
>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.
> Hopefully ["work was the organising principle of life"] changes.
It seems very unlikely that the pattern would hold uninterrupted for thousands of years only to end soon. People organize around their work, whether it's the tasks of a a medieval farming household, an new steam-powered industrial textile mill, or commuting to their office-job.
>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?
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.
Reducing hours worked does not change work being the organizing principle of life as long as that work is still how you earn your status and financial stability. 40 hours, 20 hours, 10 hours, 80 hours, it doesn't matter.
Wishing and wanting will never achieve anything because those who own the businesses never cede anything voluntarily. They'll demand ever more productivity for less pay. There will be ever more homeless people, greater inequality, and ever more skewed power law distribution of wealth until people stop selling themselves short and start voting with their wallets, feet, and sweat.
There was no useful guidance from "the Covid years". What you experienced was just the federal government printing money and giving it away. At some point if we want to have a functioning economy then people have to actually go to work and make things. AI won't change this reality.
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
If this blog post still doesn't help the author find a job, that's a really hopeless situation.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
I'm not so sure. The tech to do this has been around for ages, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm thinking there's something else preventing companies from going this direction.
My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.
>My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Can't people already do massive amounts of damage to a company truck/van by driving it into the water, or dumping gas on it and igniting it? Doing it remotely only makes marginally easier, but most people won't do it because they don't want to be on the lam just to send an anti-capitalist message.
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.
Years ago Marvin Minsky gave a talk before 2001: A Space Odyssey played. He casually mentioned that if NASA (or was it DARPA?) had invested in tele-robotics like he insisted, your house would be cleaned by someone in Africa right now.
The room was stunned silent.
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.
> “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.
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
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
"The people in the middle of the bell curve face a dramatically less promising future than the tail end" is also the key message of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.
Not understanding the 'I did everything right and look what happened' intro, though certainly not a unique feeling. Tech hiring slowed at the tail end of 21 and the mass layoffs started in 22, 4 and 3 years ago respectively. Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results. Not that you should give up, but it's going to be switch majors or ride out the downturn. And that's not unique to now or even computer science(remember the MBA glut from the early 2000s?).
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
> Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results
Yes, if you're in your 30s and have lived through a bunch of corporate downsizings before, it does make sense.
Do you remember what it was like to be 18? I had no idea what people in offices even did all day. My way of thinking about the world was 100% idealistic and had no basis in the gritty realities of corporate life.
(Australian not an American here)
You’d very quickly rise to the top of the public sector
My brother in law is only in his mid 20s and is in charge of half a dozen engineers
No nepotism (we honestly know no one) just leaping from the right firm to the public sector at the right time
Look for government consultant jobs or even better straight engineering roles
You must have gotten lucky that Accenture didn't infect your agency and shift large project engineering positions under them and then out to India.
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.
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?
Interesting to see that the answers to his problems are literally embedded in the intro and outro : what you were “told” by adults was 100% B.S. (adults has no idea what the world was going to be like and what was the “right” path) and he was probably intelligent enough (as we can see by the writing of this article) to realize this by himself (simply questioning the culture around him is enough, what’s teenage years for ?) but he preferred to continue to believe the very serious adulty lies.
Nobody owes you anything. Grow up
What is your recommendation for the young author beyond questioning culture?
I hope you never have a bad string of luck and end up homeless pal, because it can happen to anyone.
What’s the link with the article or my comment? Listening to adults advices can magically avoid being broke? It’s the opposite
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.
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.
Large AI siloes, if allowed to exist, will bifurcate humanity. People who have a stake in those AI companies will no longer need the rest of the population to provide goods and services. We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.
This is why we must break the siloes and give the tech to as many people as possible. Not access through an API, but the weights for the models and schematics for the robots.
I think we'll be fine on that front, though. AI and robotics R&D is open enough and people seem willing and capable enough to keep it that way, so the short-term job market issues will disappear. The remaining threat from AI is a long-term existential one.
> We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.
That's how it's been my entire adult life.
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.
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
‘Nobody hires juniors’ is a possibility, too
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'.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024
With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
>nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
I'm not really seeing it aside from "there's a large uptick because there's eventually a recession".
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.
Reading this reminds me how much I have missed good writing these days.
From the UK. Named Ahmed.
I think this plays a factor.
Upvoted for political incorrectness, because it’s probably true, though the market for juniors is what it is even for Johns and Matts.
Honestly I think "applying for jobs" is becoming a thing of the past.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
In my experience, it's been the case for 20-30 years (forever?) that knowing the right people works way better than applying through the standard channels--but that's the same as saying that things are tougher for junior people which was probably masked by a lot more opportunities in tech for many which led those many to poo-poo the importance of networks because they apply for three jobs on a Monday and have offers the next week given a target-rich environment.
Out of curiosity, I live in Europe where it is quite common to work remotely across countries within the EU or the UK. I have always wondered why so many US companies limit remote roles to people based in the US, and then mention a shortage of qualified talent. It feels like there is a large pool of people being overlooked.
Do you have any data to back up the claim that it's "quite common" to work remotely across countries within the EU/UK. Almost nothing in the "common/single market" works uniformly across the "common/single market". For instance this guy (OP) doesn't have a hope in hell of landing a job anywhere in the EU even though he's in the UK.
In our position we're only hiring for in person roles, so location/authorization is a must have.
But in regards to US/EU remote, I imagine the EU candidates come with slightly higher overhead (different payroll processing, employment regulations, time zones, etc). Which makes it easier to adopt a US only approach.
In Europe, what we do is usually: if the person lives in the same country as one of our business entities, they get hired directly as an employee. If they live in a country where the company does not have a business presence, they get hired through an EOR or as a contractor.
Labor laws. They think it's less profitable to employ people that are protected by regulations that grant them time off etc.
"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
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.
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
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.
It is easier to start your own business than to get a job for a certain class of people in our industry. There is just not enough supply of jobs for people who “did everything right.” It’s a painful economic signal that US economy has run out of cushy Big Tech jobs and now needs an influx of innovative firms. This is difficult to explain to your relatives over Thanksgiving turkey but it is nonetheless the truth in my experience. If I could go back in time I would have gone to an Ivy League, gotten the proper internships, moved straight to the Bay during ZIRP, but alas I don’t have a Time Machine.
Starting a business is easy. Making enough money to live a similar lifestyle from said business is usually not so easy.
The level of effort is becoming comparable: It's not unfathomable to send 1,000 applications to get a new job. Think of all the emails, coding evaluations, high-pressure interviews, LeetCode grinding, multi-round interviews, HR back-and-forths, and inevitable let downs or ghostings you have to endure just to get one measly job. Compare this to making a product that 1,000 people will subscribe to for $10/month, except you own it all forever. The skillsets are vastly different, and starting a business is much less rote and industrialized, but I don't think the level of effort is an order of magnitude greater. All of the experience I have gathered with my own business has paid dividends but the experience of looking for yet another job in yet another downturn seems to mostly have been wasteful in the long-term.
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.
Good luck, one thing I can tell you is I don’t regret making the jump in the slightest, even though it has its own ups and downs.
Just start a business? Now you need to find money and clients. That could be harder than the job search.
So do a PhD? His CV is good, what is there to lose?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting that a new grad that interned at Deepmind is not able to find a job.
If all of this info is factually correct, then I may have to adjust my priors even more about the dire state of entry level job market.
It isn’t just CS anymore. Now, it’s any entry level and even mid-level office positions. Anecdotally, it’s not just one industry or department anymore. There are a lot more applications and the applicants are also way more qualified.
The stock market continues to puzzle me.
The 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[dead]
[dead]
> 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.
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.
Hmm, I'm not sure about the link to lower birth rates. Birth rates have been falling in e.g. Western and Northern Europe for a long time, despite strong social safety nets.
While I think the link between birth rates declining and automation does make sense, it will take quite sometime for this to verifiable as this is a somewhat recent anxiety. The reason for the trend that we have seem over the last decades seem to mostly stem from lower childhood mortality rates, women having access to the job market, and perhaps to a lesser extent climate anxiety.
Young people can’t afford life bringing kids isn’t a smart idea. So the link is definitely there.
This guy was a DEI hire at DeepMind while studying at a rock bottom ranking uni and talks about the job market breaking. We have reached peak irony.
Are you going to address what he said or just continue to spew blatantly racist ad hominems?
If you believe in DEI hiring practices you are a leech on society's back. The economy will speak for itself.
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.
Where are and what are these jobs in the tech industry that people are turning down?
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.