My experience graduating right into the dot-bomb was it absolutely sucked. I, a fresh-faced grad, was competing against experienced engineers who were laid off after Y2K, Cosmo, Yahoo, and other dotcoms for entry-level jobs. I wasn't very bitter then, but now when I meet mid-20s developer with "senior" or "director" titles, it hurts knowing that 3-5 years of my career was wasted trying to string together credible work history portfolio.
The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.
Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.
It's as much a response to regulatory stuff as it is a marketing and perception thing.
All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.
Usually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.
After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
One of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
>such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.
Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.
I've met a few people who have spent time in prison and developed the same habit of always sitting so they're facing the door. One of them told me he just can't feel comfortable otherwise.
I thought this was well-known, that everyone's a VP in the financial sector because a lot of contracts required a VP or higher to sign off on a lot of things and it was easier to make everyone a VP. Sort of like giving everyone sudo access.
That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.
I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.
It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.
Graduating in a recession is really unfair to the graduate. Economists have looked at the effects on lifetime wages and it's estimated that recession kids lose in aggregate about 20% in lost lifetime wages, and to no fault of their own.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
Life’s not fair in general. Personally though I have no regrets starting my career in 2001. Sure it was harder to get a job and it paid less, but it made me more willing to join a startup which gave me experience and skills that opened more leadership doors later.
By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.
Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.
I have a former coworker in their early 20s who left a startup as Senior (they were 1 year out from graduating) to become a "Director" at another startup. Their first job was implementing the control law for the robot's wheels. In this case (and perhaps many others), "Director" just meant "Only person we have".
It can also mean that on the way down. At a private unix software company in 1994, the rise of Linux destroying our business led to firing nearly everyone in support except the cheapest person (me). As I was the only person left in tech support, I became Director of Tech Support by default.
I actually told a startup o joined a few years back that was 5 people that I wanted a more junior title. Because cod it didn’t make it off the ground I didn’t want folks rejecting me as overqualified for roles I was well suited for and under-skilled for ones say my title
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
Can confirm, I myself was a one person support desk (for a restaurant chain) and just never officially had a title. The internal moniker of "the IT guru" was fine for an email signature, but certainly not for a resume. (I've since made other retroactive edits to that, both for something more sensible and to better represent years of scope creep.)
If you don't mind sharing, what would be the things that a person should think about it before doing the same action that you did? I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
Not OP but same experience. If you're not overly concerned about a certain quality of life, number of cars, square footage of house, etc., then there's nothing to think about. Engineering is a fine career (granted, AI takeover notwithstanding) and a few-year gap isn't going to leave you on the street. Being a few years behind your peers in your 30's may gnaw at you a bit, but by your 40's things will have reasonably equalized. My "wealthier" friends have some nicer things, go on more lavish vacations, but it's never really bothered us. And they generally got that way because they're type-A personalities to begin with. So they're not the type of people who would even ask the question about taking time off. Maybe one downside is they can also afford private schools and tutors etc for their kids, though, IDK, we could afford to do the same (though it would be more than a blip in our finances), but they seem to be doing well and happy where they are.
So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.
[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.
Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I've been thinking about it for some time and your answer puts the "life after" in perspective. I don't have big plans for life, but the financial aspect is something that worries me, though.
Actually, a further thought about my higher-wealth friends. About half of them got there by a good mix of ability and determination, but half of them just seemed to be in the right place at the right time (early engineers at Facebook, engineers at NVidia just as it exploded, etc).
The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.
I'm not the guy you asked, but given the way that things are going right now, if you're currently gainfully employed and not miserable, then you should continue banking money for as long as you can.
For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.
Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.
Admittedly there can be some survivorship bias in the stories one hears about, but anecdotally I know several people who have taken time off from their careers and zero have regretted it. On the converse side, I know lots of people who never took time off but wish they had. (I also know plenty of people who never took time off because "time off" isn't in their DNA, but they're not the ones who are considering the option).
Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.
I feel that young people having a Big Adventure Before Settling Down is very traditional, the sort of thing that adds "life experience" even if (especially if) some of the experiences are difficult. But it does need to be cheap. And the 21st century crackdown on worker mobility has made it much harder to have a proper international adventure.
Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.
Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.
> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
I know someone at a growing division of a FAANG who has not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now. They're critically understaffed but the screws only tighten with each year.
When I was last in tech research we were prevented from working in new interesting areas as that work was being handed over to the China branch. I think we’re entering the looting stage of empire collapse. A hyper focus on short term gains to the detriment of long term gains.
These companies that have been built on the backs of US infrastructure that now don’t want to hire Americans should be razed to the ground. Fuck them, let them try to operate in Indias fucked up business environment.
> not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
As a FAANGer, I'm acutely aware that I'm an expense line item whose days are numbered. Do people still think it's a flex? There are hundreds of thousands of us. Working for an AI unicorn is the new flex.
Second 174 changes from BBB pretty much are for the tech industry - dropped the prior 5 year depreciation schedule to immediate, and foreign depreciation is now 15 years (!!!).
I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.
> I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
Yea, GCC style optimizations don't work until your company hit the 150-200 headcount mark.
But it is those sized organizations that tend to represent the majority of hiring.
A company with 100 or fewer employees tends to be much more hard pressed with hiring, as revenue for these sized orgs also tends to be lower.
The Section 174 changes didn't have much of an impact one way or the other for larger companies and organizations.
The expectation for output has largely been set now, and even with the current changes I don't see much of an impact on hiring trends.
This also doesn't include the impact that AI productivity tools like Cursor is starting to have on AoPs. It's already the halfway point and I myself am starting to see increased proposals from Engineering leadership to leverage Cursor style tooling wherever possible. And a number of the seed and Series A companies I've funded over the past 2-3 years have largely kept headcount below 100 and heavily utilizing automation where possible, and are on track to hit Series B style FCF metrics with a much leaner workflow.
Section 174 changes absolutely have an impact on all sizes of orgs. It’s been a major downward pressure for the last several years on the US market, and causing a major outsourcing push. It’s likely to do the opposite now.
That said, larger orgs can weather it better - but it’s a fundamental change.
And my point is that the outward trend for offshoring (along with the increased feasibility of AI Productivity tools) has been occuring irrespective of the Section 174 change, and this assumption that it's change will suddenly restart hiring just isn't going to pan out.
certain domestic market protections would be wise for any politician to support, unfortunately the craziness of this administration smothers the conversation.
I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few years. This feels much worse than 2008 and 2008 was bad. At least back then there was hope that things would recover, now it feels like a permanent malaise has set in.
I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it.
The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute.
I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.
Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.
I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent.
For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
Lots of assertions in the article, but the only fact I see is that new college grads looking for work had a 6.6% unemployment rate over the last 12 months, along with a hand-wavey
> about the highest level in a decade—excluding the pandemic unemployment spike
Why "about"? What was this number 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? During the dotcom bubble? The housing crisis? An actual recent crisis (the pandemic) is conveniently excluded from the comparison for some reason.
Weird for the WSJ to declare an "unemployment crisis" based on a handful of anecdotes and no actual data.
I think the thing that’s unusual and backed up by data is that being a college grad right now has higher unemployment rate than the total average unemployment rate. This has never been the case in history until recently.
well according to the article:
"Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis."
Interesting to read this from the other side of the border on the Canadian side. Our numbers definitely support the anecdotes that suggest youth unemployment rates are terrible, but if anything I think they obfuscate how bad the problem might be. Lived experience and the real anecdotes from people I know in the cohort lead me to believe there's going to be major downstream economic breaking points some time in the next few years.
Additionally it's funny to see the term "housing crisis" be applied to the past rather than the present. If that means 2008, we tend to call it the 2008 financial collapse, but our response to it created the current conditions of what Canadians would now call the "housing crisis"
>and older homeowners vote in much higher numbers.
Because they're stuck with this fairly illiquid asset and therefore have a very big incentive to exert their inconsequential shred of control over the institutions that more or less unilaterally control their experience owning that asset.
Something I’ve recently started to consider is how an aging population will impact this over time.
Unlike the 60s and 70s the number of people coming of age now and in the years to come is smaller than older people (unless we get liberal with immigration). How will that impact the future direction of society?
In Canada, the working age population is massively subsidizing the older generation already, while getting fucked by them on the cost of shelter, and from every direction on the cost of basic necessities compared to income. There's fewer working age people per old age security and CPP recipient than ever, and it's our federal government's largest line items. An average 30 y.o in a population centre probably makes substantially less then the average retiree would have ever made, pays them more rent they'd ever have imagined, and pays most of their taxes directly into that hypothetical landlord's pocket. It's crazy and idk wth is going to happen because also there's almost no jobs available or clear upward mobility/stability, all of that shit went out the window long ago unless you're in a trade union already with a decade of experience, or just lucky.
This will keep getting worse if birth rates remain low. It’s one of the biggest negative social consequences from a far below replacement rate birth rate. Immigration can make up some of it but there are limits to immigration rate before it causes other problems and provokes a generally very right wing populist backlash.
It's also a circular negative feedback loop until it gets balanced out. Imo, below replacement birthrates can be thought of as "getting worse", but they're skewed by a narrow window of immense prosperity and wealth that was basically fabricated, and could thus be the rebalancing, of governments let them. Less prosperity for a whole generation of people that effectively make up the future market for overvalued static assets, means there is hypothetically a ceiling, likewise if the population is only inflated by economically low-value immigration; if systems are working,(they're not) then there simply won't be enough domestic money flowing around to keep supporting that type of hockey stick growth. That's my theory anyway
>> The housing affordability crisis isn’t a crisis if you own a home you bought in 1980
It isn't a crisis for them now. It was a crisis for them in 1980, someone buying a home in 1980 would have had an interest rate of around 14% on their mortgage.
Yes but that was a temporary response to inflation caused by multiple back to back recessions in that time. Those interest rates eventually cooled off, and salaries caught up.
I met an old timer a few days ago with a beautiful garden, who bought their house in Vancouver, BC for $24,000 in 1972. Checking the tax assessment data now, the land underneath the house is worth $1.6m, while the building is assessed at $40k. Based on recent sales nearby, his property is realistically worth (on the market, maybe with some renos) 100x what he originally borrowed to buy it in absolute dollar amounts, about 20x accounting for inflation, or about 2x a conservative compounding investment. The guy was pleasant to chat with, and sympathized, because he knew his son-in-law who's probably my age won't be able to set up even close to the same sort of shelter without some very high incomes coming in, and he can see the future not looking so great for people in his life.
But that's a modest, old, not that nice detached home. If I were to shoot for a small ~800sq ft 2 bdr condo built in the last 20 years, it would be require $120k down, $20k just in transfer taxes, and $7k a month to service the debt.
Yes, 1980 sucked, money lost a huge amount of value relatively speaking, but what are we talking about here.
Looks like when you set the graph to annual average (which you have to do to avoid spikes each year when everyone graduates), the new college grad unemployment rate is in fact the highest it's been since 2014 when you take out 2020 and 2021. It's higher than it was in 2002, but lower than it was during the housing crisis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGBD2024#
Unemployment is a loaded statistic anyway. I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job. They're likely working in a restaurant or in retail which is technically employed.
My qualitative view on the job market right now is this line holds true
> But it is a bad time to be a job seeker—especially if you are young.
Unemployment comes from surveys (the CPS) where they call people and ask if they're employed. So the answer to questions like "do Uber drivers count as employed" is, it's up to them.
There's other questions about full-time or part-time, or multiple jobs.
(Multiple jobs are interesting because you'd think they'd belong to overworked underpaid poor people. But they're not really associated with that, and they go down in recessions since that's when you have no jobs.)
> I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job
This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.
I'm not making blind assumptions. I've studies unemployment statistics and aware of how they exclude things and can lag and generally are kind of rig the calculation. I'm just here making a passing comment, so I'm not going to lay all the evidence out there with citations, but feel free to have a LLM tell you all about it. I'm also aware there is another statistic called underemployment which is what I described, so no, I did not replace anything with my imagination. I just don't have any source of data to say exactly what is what right now, but based on a lot of signals I'm seeing (knowing a few recent grads, knowing how many of my mid-career peers are not hiring and actually looking for additional efficiencies, having a few friends finding it impossible to find work even with experience, etc) - I feel/assume the stat as reported is not telling the whole story and the original article was trying to shed light on what's going on. Sometimes boots on the ground conversations is the best way to know the truth today versus just looking at data/stats.
Unemployment here is being used in its capacity as a trend line. It’s not loaded in the sense you are considering. From what I recall, recent graduates would not be working in retail, but currently looking for roles.
I can only say that this direclty matches the experience of my two college graduates.
First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.
Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.
Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.
I’ve worked with a bunch of Nuke Es. Smart, interesting people with strong technical skills. They’re not working in the field though. If you really want to be around nuclear reactors, you’re much more likely to get there if you join the navy.
This is what I would say to my younger self if I was starting out today: This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway. In the meantime, create your own job. Youthful flexibility is your biggest asset. Be helpful and you will succeed. Oh, and stay away from social media. It is the cigarette of the day - you don't need to smoke because everyone else is doing it.
> This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
This feels a bit unwarranted. There doesn't need to be some major new paradigm shift for things to get bad from an employment perspective. All that needs to happen is for this creative destruction rate to slightly exceed the new job creation rate, and there's your tipping point. I certainly feel that your average grad today doesn't have the same opportunities I did in the late 90s.
> New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?
If you frame it like a farmer back in the day hearing there will be more jobs because of the industrial revolution so they conclude that means there will be more farmers but just doing a new type of farming, that would obviously be wrong.
To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
Not OP, but of course they can’t be sure. No one can but if it doesn’t come along we will just be kind of screwed.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
> Can you be surely something else will come along?
something has come along - the new fangled AI stuff.
People back then also didnt think the internet would amount to much when it first came out, and people also thought mobile phones were for business users not casual consumers.
Of the many good comments, this is the one that IMHO is the most helpful.
I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.
My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.
Pleasantly optimistic sentiments, but if you want to get certain kinds of job you benefit from being on LinkedIn, and if you want a "be your own boss" job it's almost mandatory to have a social media presence so that you can find customers. It's like being in the phone book used to be.
It took me way too long in life to realize that you can do whatever gives you money, at the end of the day. Like it doesn’t have to be a job, just anything that gets cash to you.
Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!
I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.
I'm trying to work out the theory behind this, but the rough metric is that it's due to increased transportation, automation, and consolidation. As businesses expand they leave less opportunity for those local to do something meaningful while those who run the companies are rich beyond measure. Students cram into college for the hopes of being on the other side, not the "below the API" side.
Measurement then becomes graded upon standard features as differentiation becomes harder: GPA, test scores, essay rubrics, etc. Combined with increased communication, online portals become spammed within minutes.
All this leads to quite a difficult time for the young. Inequality likely ends up being a function of the country size. It explains the USA, PRC, India, but not sure about places like Pakistan, Brazil, or Indonesia.
I was a recent grad (2023) too but now I think that expecting a job solely with a bachelors isn't realistic anymore. Standards are being raised and it's even more "who you know not what you know" than it used to be. The only thing advice i can give to grads right now is work on what you are passionate about and take care of your health.
If you're young and reading this and having feelings of fear and dread, I can sympathize. When I graduated with an engineering degree the industry was saying that there would be no jobs for us because all of the engineering was either being done elsewhere or that our skills wouldn't translate to what engineers needed to know. There were bits of truth in that, hardware was moving off shore, software was still very much local, and new tools and techniques were sprouting up.
But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed. What they are spending their "cleverness beans" doing (as an early mentor of mine once called the propensity for humans to innovate) is always in demand. And no matter what you have heard, there has yet to be invented any replacement for either human intuition or creativity.
> But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed.
Not exactly. I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise. Moreover, even if what you say is true, it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
> I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise.
I would be interested to hear how you reason to that. What is your definition of "success" and what is your definition of "cog wheel"?
Here is why I ask, I know hundreds of engineers who consider themselves "successful" because they have accumulated enough wealth to not ever have to work again if they choose not to. Recent data[1] shows there are over 342 thousand millionaires in the Bay Area alone. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that they were all 'corporate cogwheels' (which sounds a bit pejorative but again, I don't know how you define it).
> it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
Again, I really would be interested to hear more about this. I find it trivially easy to tell who is "smart" and who isn't. But I will grant you that it is a skill that is enhanced by a lot of exposure to people who aren't smart but would like you to believe they are. They are a LOT of those types around. There is also a nuance between "smart" and "lazy" in that I know some really smart people who are also incredibly lazy, avoiding actually learning things if they can get by with faking it or cheating.
Your comment also made me realize that I have a working definition of 'smart' that is different than 'book learning' smart, it is more a mixture of a willingness to learn, the humility to learn from anyone, and the fortitude to put effort into seeking out new information. That is different than what some people call 'smart' and I might call 'quick' in that they can make up a plausible answer quickly so it sounds like they are speaking from understanding not just bullshitting you. My wife used to call that 'Male Answer Syndrome' :-). The idea that one must never say "I don't know" or "I have no idea."
1. What I'm talking about is that most companies that grow beyond startup phase create an environment where a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket. Programming has become a blue-collar job except in front of a PC. As an individual programmer, you typically have very little saying in what exactly you're doing and why. Even matters strictly related to engineering end up "I'm doing this because my manager wants it". Here intelligence is a negative trait, because if you question your superiors, you'll be labeled "problematic" and "not a team-player". This holds true too for situations where a group of engineers is left alone to figure out a solution - if you're smarter than the rest, your idea will simply be rejected because others don't understand it, and don't support your view of assumptions that are difficult to quantify. During a discussion, genius is often indistinguishable from stupidity.
2. Sure, you in particular can sense who is smart and who isn't according to some arbitrary definition that you have. The problem is, this doesn't scale. There's no process that allows ten recruiters to recruit fifty smart programmers efficiently. For a while we had Leetcode, until it turned into a memorization contest, and in my opinion, memorization is a different skill from intelligence. We rejected Leetcode without pointing to any alternative. And now in the age of LLMs and international jobs, cheating is rampant. If you apply to 500 jobs using automated scripts, there's decent chance that at least one company won't notice that "PhD in Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" is a problem rather than an asset. They have 50 000 applicants anyway, so they just use LLM to go though the resumes. And then you use LLM to answer whatever questions they have.
"... a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket."
In your first bullet there, you describe what I think of as CRUD jobs, and I agree with you that not only are they more 'assembly line' than art, a lot of them will be eliminated by the ability of LLMs to synthesize common solutions. Typically if the company's business is extractive[1] rather than value producing then much of the company's work will be to revitalize its novelty rather than actually achieve anything. Value producing companies however typically both value innovation and creativity more and they generally create durable net wealth growth over time (they are valued more for their core competencies than their monthly recurring revenue or daily active users). Having some of your compensation in equity in the latter is valuable, equity in extractive companies evaporates when the company's herd of data cows moves on to other pastures.
But your examples speak more to poor management and training than to the job quality. Yes, there are managers who are so unsure of themselves that they cannot tolerate having their decisions questioned, and yes there are developers for whom their managers haven't helped them develop the ability to lead and lift up others to their level of understanding. And that makes for a shitty work environment.
When a developer questions their manager with regard to the assignment it is on the manager's shoulders to help them understand the constraints and to listen to the questions. If they can't share some of the non-public parameters that are affecting the available choices, they can say ask for the developer's patience until those things come out which will answer the questions. And of course good questions can open up even better solutions so should be entertained and explored. Too many managers however are already suffering from imposter syndrome and that makes them really resistant to questions. If you're manager is bristles at your questions, that's something to work on in itself. Learning to 'manage up' as they say is just as important as learning the best way to update a database with the current transaction.
"Figuring out a solution when left alone" is a leadership test. If no one else understands your suggestion, you can work back from first principles and see where you diverge, when they ask questions you have to listen and teach rather than listen and correct. No one will listen to someone, no matter how smart, if they aren't willing to listen themselves. Further, even the most ignorant and 'stupid' person has something to teach. There is tremendous value in 'helping' someone develop their 'stupid' idea. Both parties get a better appreciation for how the other one thinks about things.
I agree 100% that hiring is broken. It was funny because when I was at Google and part of the hiring process they did lots of data analysis and discovered that no matter how they selected, 10% of the people they hired did well, 50% were average, and 40% ended up getting laid off within a year or so. They pushed and pushed to have people submit the resumes of people they knew because Google knew that this was a much better selector than recruiters or head hunters. I've been at companies where another factor would hold, managers would get '1' requisition to fill, so they wanted a superstar, but it is impossible to know if someone is a superstar because there is so much entanglement between what the person likes, the environment they work in, and the management style that works best for them. I knew people who were superstars where I was working, got recruited out to a different company and failed miserably. Similarly people who came in as 'just get someone' and rose to the occasion to become really great.
Hacker rank, leetcode, others, all were great at figuring out that someone could write code creatively and actually understood it, but said nothing about whether or not that person could be civil with others who were there to help. You need both for success.
Thanks for adding the additional information. I agree that it sucks that there are a lot of 'job slots' that fit your descriptions well and and it doesn't help that the managers are under trained as well. I'd also agree that those jobs are set up, intentionally or not, to make long term success in them unlikely. And given how little capital it takes to start up an extractive business there are more of those jobs in the pool than the ones where the company is making products of intrinsic value. My unpopular opinion is that licensed software products fill that gap, but that is a different discussion.
[1] The 'web 2' business where a company creates an website that attracts humans for the purpose of extracting data about those humans for re-sale to third parties. The websites come in many flavors 'games', 'news', 'fashion', 'recipes', but have in common that they need to maintain novelty to prevent boredom and their users 'leaving', so they essentially rewrite themselves over and over and over again, and work on ways of trying to extract more kinds of data from their users. Every one of those I've seen up close has been run by someone who sees exploiting people for personal benefit as a 'business model' so workers there are just as exploited as the users their code is exploiting, just along a different vector.
Thanks, probably better than TFA. The under-employment numbers are always telling, anyone who talks about employment without mentioning this is running a scam. Sobering to see that only elementary ed and nursing are really doing ok, fields where we're always chronically short. And even while everyone's talking about demographic bombs and aging populations, nurse-adjacent med-tech is still sitting at 57.9%.
Even so, computer science is still among the fields with the lowest reported underemployment rate. It's essentially tied for second place, after nursing, with a much higher salary.
I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
> I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.
Or perhaps its a vanity degree? Or its pursued by people with family wealth and good connections, the sort that an auction house or high-end gallery would want to hire.
6-7% of 1+ million software engineers (according to BLS) is a lot of actual people.
Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.
I remember well early 1986 when I was applying for jobs. Experience required, but no way to get experience. Frustrating as hell, especially since I had no peers around and had no BA (I left college a semester early cuz I had enough credits but didn't graduate for months). I ended up getting a cool job for $11,000/year and cobbled together a stable work life. It took another 5+ years to finally get my shit together.
Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.
A non-insignificant portion of HNers found jobs during one of the last 3-4 economic downturns. They seem to happen frequently.
In truth it’s always a crisis mode. Build your networks and demonstrate value and competence such that when people leave your company they’ll regret not having you on their team. This is the right way to stay employed once you land your first gig.
Referenced unemployed new grad here! I think a lot of what contributes to this is the thought that a degree=employment for college students. We feel scammed, confused, and quite frankly just angry that this was the timing to graduate into.
As a CS student I have many thoughts around the reasoning for this (AI reducing need for junior engineers, oversaturated market from COVID bubble, opaque job requirements/too low of bar). As much as I'd like to believe it's just a skill difference on my side, it's hard to deny my peers' and friends' struggle around me. I don't want my livelyhood to come down to a numbers/chance game. But sadly, that's what it is looking like right now.
This is maybe kind of rude, and hopefully it doesn't come off this way, but where were you still getting the message that degree = job?
Not that a degree doesn't help, but I graduated 10 years ago and the message was already pretty clear across the media I interacted with that that was no longer the lived experience / that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.
Literally nobody noticed because everyone had covid trauma the second time, so we had a "vibecession" where everyone felt like there was a recession because they wanted there to be one.
11 years later. I know the numbers say we recovered. It took so long I think people mostly forgot what pre 08 life was like
2008/9 was a change in the expectations of college degrees. Going into 2008, we all got the advice to get degrees and jobs will just show up. After the crash we never got back to that point. Common knowledge ever since 08 has been college doesn't ensure a job at the end and your stuck doing unpaid internships and dealing with a competitive job market
Not wrong! The degree was always the stepping stone, and even for me I was always told work experience would make the difference. But now having graduated college 2 years early, with 2 high quality internships under my belt, my options are slim. Thankfully, I love what I do and don’t plan to ever stop doing it, but I feel bad for the people that “did everything right” and still aren’t landing jobs.
It’s not AI, It’s offshoring and H1B. Accepting that won’t make you friends at parties in some circles, but it’s true and you should all be furious about it
Good luck out there from a millennial that's been through a couple "once in a lifetime" crashes, a global pandemic, decades of unending war, and a reduction in labor protections that appear to be just getting started.
My only advice is to keep costs low, don't give up, and find work where you can. It seems to cycle around so hopefully you'll end up ok but the days where degree=job were dying when I graduated 20 years ago so I assume there is left of that by now.
Yea my year entered the job market from college in 2008 - pretty much the worst time ever at that time. It sounds very similar. I think, if I look at my more successful peers including myself, many of us hunkered down and took whatever jobs we could get, many of us went back to school and got second "useful" degrees such as CS/nursing/etc.
My career path is so bizarre I don't really ever talk about it in great detail because it is so unique I think it identifies me and me exactly. Lots of others I know with similar stories. I would not want to go through it again.
To be fair, the previous iteration of "degree=job" that was dying 20 years ago was the older definition - broad enough to include "degree in literally anything", which was closer to how it operated say 50 years ago.
GP looks to have gone with the newer advice of "get a more useful degree = job". That wasn't really dying 20 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.
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Definitely agree about keeping costs low. Even if you do get a good job, if you keep costs low for long enough, it compounds like crazy.
At some point mother is the necessity of invention which is a shift in perspective. You may have to make a market for yourself basically. It's not easy. This being a YC site, I would go through and apply to all of the interesting YC work at a startup places. There is an opportunity right now to understand AI and how to apply it to the digital workplace. Anyway, it is not easy and I wish you the best of luck!
I also don't understand this. For years now, social media has been flooded with objections that this is not the case. Where were these people who didn't hear this message?
But it goes further: the young people around me who are brand new to fairly fresh into the job market - who must have heard of the problem - are still coasting probably scared but as far as I can tell not doing anything about it. Where are efforts at building references? At buidling networks? Some education streams have been (for years also) very much about building networks: THEY understood (and in the case of MBAs, to the point that everybody complains about them.)
And still further, this applies to more senior people also! It feels like many people with years of experience also have little network to show for it. It's not for lack of opportunity. And go through interviewing on (self-destructive) auto-pilot when they might have enough experience with that for significant statistical results just from their own experience.
I'm way at the front when it comes to arguing that schools do not teach fundamental skills like career development, business (/real) world awareness, or even basic reasoning skills, intro law, etc. But there may also be a question of passivity, obliviousness, wishful thinking.
Blaming the victim? Yes but I also blame the schools. Perhaps there is plenty of blame to go around. And not much of it is about the latest AI nonsense.
(And historically this can go pretty far: In the US there is a background of fast food jobs as entry level youth jobs. Whyyyy? Plenty of the high school and college students around me are plenty qualified enough to fulfill the duties of much more responsible and higher paying jobs. But they don't look for them.)
To all the naysayers here denying that an employment crisis for STEM graduates exists... I didn't believe it either until it happened to my kid. He is a top notch software developer, far better than I was at his age, problem solving comes naturally for him.
And yet, he can't even get an interview. He worked at Dropbox for a year as a contractor right out of school, until they did a huge layoff and hasn't been able to find anything in 6 months. Real interviews are super rare - most of it just recruiters fishing for stuff.
So that is the reality that he and his peers are facing.
My experience is that there is an AI war going on right now. Employers are deluged with AI-augmented/generated resumes that make candidate seem perfect (but then they flop in an in-person interview), so employers are now filtering said AI-augmented resumes with AI to even determine who to advance in the pipeline. It's a viscous arms race and if you aren't playing the game it's really hard to get an "in" without knowing someone on the inside already.
If you're on here, there's a good chance you have more connections in the industry than you realize. The best way to avoid being AI-filtered is never have your resume get fed to the AI in the first place, which means applying through back channels.
Recommendations from trusted employees are valuable not out of nepotism or some other sinister force, they're valuable because it acts a pre-filter for the kinds of fuckups that no one would be willing to recommend.
Recruiting, as a whole, has been extremely harmed by technology and has therefore become an incredibly low-trust game.
There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.
For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.
Did he use an LLM to write the bullshit parts of his resumé? It's mandatory. Companies are running LLMs to look for a certain kind of bullshit and you're supposed to use an LLM to write it. I got more interviews after asking ChatGPT to write my "professional summary" saying I have a proven track record of building reliable applications with a strong understanding of software architecture, blah blah blah. Nobody mentioned this section, even the ones who wanted to talk about the rest of my resumé. But I got more interviews.
1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.
2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.
We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.
Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:
1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project
2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.
3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing
4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you
5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting
6. Highly specialized and targeted education
And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.
Having a highly educated population is a major competitive advantage for a society that materializes itself in more ways than I could ever hope to enumerate. We need to bring tuition down closer to what the educational portion of it actually costs and pump as many able people through college as possible. Engineers, waiters, cops, everyone.
All we need is an ultra cheap online accredited option. We can easily mass produce education at this point for almost nothing.
This would be hugely beneficial to society but there is obviously a lot of rent seeking and cartel like behavior by some in the network or we would already have something this obvious.
College grads average IQ had dropped from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022. For many jobs an IQ test would be sufficient to determine expected likelihood for long term success. College still teaches domain expertise but to a larger and less intelligent cohort - so I would attribute the lower value of degrees more to it's decreased relevance to general intelligence. Which would suggest the very thing to fix it would be through the use of IQ tests, but we're not allowed to do that.
IQ scoring is routinely adjusted so that 100 represents the mean. It should be expected that IQ scores for college grads trend towards 100 as higher percentages of the population go to college. University is also not designed to maximize standardized test scores the same way that public high school is. I would expect recency and intensity of math education to play a higher role in IQ scores than the specialized knowledge and exposure to the arts that comes from a college education.
Certainly expanding the cohort alone is sufficient to cause a drop in average IQ scores - which is exactly what I said. College is no longer a useful proxy for IQ score. I made no claim that college would cause IQ scores to increase and if they do play a role I don't think it is a very large one. Raw scores are fitted to a normal distribution but the IQ scores are normalized across time by comparing that distribution to other distributions. Certainly some processes for obtaining IQ scores can be more flawed than others.
There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.
I see what you are saying, thank you. Personally, I would not rely on IQ scores for much, mainly because people have become increasingly specialized and I wouldn't expect specialized knowledge to translate well to a general intelligence test. It also does not seem as though other general forms of intelligence map well to IQ and it may even be arguably one of the less useful measures of intelligence outside of the extremes. e.g., I would expect a high school student in Calc 2 to crush me in a math test, but I would never go to them seeking life advice. I'm not married to this belief and could probably be swayed, but that is my current impression.
By my observation IQ correlates to anxiety disorders so often people with high IQs tend adopt risk adverse behaviors to minimize that anxiety and that undermines opportunities for success. People with really high IQs tend to end up on the spectrum and regularly burnout. Extremely gifted youngsters tend to end up with similar and often pretty severe health problems. So while I do agree that in general past success is a good indicator for future success and IQ is not the be all and end all, I would suggest that many high IQ people can be properly medicated to lead much more productive lives than currently do. And this difference would explain much of the residual lack of expected success.
So much of my growth and maturity came from University. It gives you the time, resources, and space to learn and unlearn in a supportive community environment. Provides a structured environment to meet others on a similar path. So many people that start work after highschool end up in a career track of life where work is the only thing they can imagine in life. It's hard to break out of that.
where I'm from, apprenticeships are not seen as a gatekeeping mechanism, but instead as an opportunity to learn something "useful" (aka some trade or craft) and get started with low or no pre-training - typically apprenticeships will start at age ~15 and take 3 years. Businesses are supported by state subsidies for educating apprentices.
It's not all rose petals but overall seems like a valid option for someone who can't/doesn't want to pursue a higher education career.
I think Americans are culturally afraid other people will take their jobs, so they love industry barriers to entry. Even when this means the only people working in a given field are all about to retire.
The hardcore version of this is labor unions of course, but the small version is occupational licensing for all kinds of small-time occupations like hairdressing.
They shouldn't worry so much, since Americans are also culturally afraid of any kind of job where you have to do X if they think they aren't an "X person", to the point they won't apply to do it for any amount of money. Applies to physical labor (farmworkers) as much as mental (anything where you have to do math).
I'm currently a senior in university (Dual CS and Computer Engineering), and I can say that it looks unbelievably grim in the Computer Science side of things.
In my classes there is hardly anyone that has been able to get their hands on an internship, and even the professors have started their classes with monologues about "I don't even know why you show up, none of you will have jobs after graduation, good luck out there." (quote from my DS professor) A lot of my peers are looking to move out of the US and look for jobs elsewhere, or perhaps jump straight into graduate school to ride it out.
On the Computer Engineering side, the faculty seems a lot happier, and the students also seem to be better off. But I don't think this will last however, I have noticed a steady decline in the businesses that have been searching for Computer Engineering in our career fairs. When I enrolled there were about two dozen "Computer Engineering Wanted" posters at the fair, and the last one in Feb 2025 I only counted one.
I'm honestly thinking that if this continues I'll be looking at the military, right now I'm trying to work on side projects in the meantime.
My department at the place I work is actively hiring Software Engineers. We have nine open requisitions for any seniority level and are regularly conducting interviews, but the new-grad candidates this year have been... disappointing.
I've conducted two phone screens this month and asked each candidate to implement FizzBuzz in their language of choice after giving them an explanation of the problem. Both took more than ten minutes to write out a solution and we don't even require them to run it; I'll excuse trivial syntax errors in an interview setting if I can tell what you meant.
When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
I also tutor students in the entry level C++ and Python courses (which are taken during your first two semesters as a CS student), and I must agree that a large cohort of my class is only able to program if they have ChatGPT/Claude open on one half of their screen. I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.
I honestly think that doing an in person fake technical interview with a few easy Leetcode questions at the end of your education would be a good way to weed out those that have failed to even learn the basics of the trade.
I'm so old I remember when calculators started appearing in general people's hands. Schools first banned them (what da ya mean you can't add a column of numbers by eye?) But gradually we switched over. We had a flirting interaction with log tables, and never did get to use a slide rule. I've no doubt old-school businesses were aghast at our ineptitude.
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
> College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
At least with a calculator, people still had to know the difference between addition and multiplication, in order to use the calculator correctly
> You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
Driving an LLM properly requires knowing to evaluate if the results are correct. People can certainly try to pass generated code over for PR. But even just one code feedback or debugging should uncover if the person understood what they were doing.
What if driving an LLM well is actually a desirable skill?
What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill?
What if the next generation of programmers is not focused on the creation of new code, but rather the improvement of existing code?
What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality (something we dont especially prioritize at the moment?)
I'd argue that we're asking the current generation to be massively adaptable in terms of what was expected of us 10 (or 30) years ago, as to what will be required of them 5 years from now.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that LLMs will teach them to be adaptable. I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
> What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill
I don't believe you can do this if you can't write code, but sure. Maybe
> What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality
LLMs seem more likely to increase the value of quantity and decrease the value of quality. That's playing out in front of us right now, with people "vibecoding"
> I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
And ones who can't adapt will be ground to mulch to fuel the LLM power plants no doubt
Your response just triggered a deja-vu from back when scaffolding tools were the new hot thing, now everyone and their dog was able to spin up that todo application within one CLI command.
Except the generated code was mostly boilerplate that had to be heavily adapted for any real life use case, unveiling all the ignorance that could be covered up to that point.
It's the same with vibe code. Looks fun until you throw it into reality - and then you're on your own and better know how to deal with stuff.
A calculator will always give you correct result as long as you give it correct input. This is not the case with LLM. No matter how good your prompt is, there always a chance the output is completely garbage.
did you ever consider the idea that AI is not the same as a calculator? or consider the fact that there is no reason why there couldnt be another quantum leap next year? and another one after that?
I teach computer science at a community college in Silicon Valley. Even before generative AI became available to the general public, cheating has been an issue with CS programming assignments.
One way I try to disincentivize cheating on projects is by having in-class paper exams, including weekly quizzes, as well as in-class paper assignments, and making sure that these in-class assessments are weighted significantly (roughly 60% of the overall grade). No electronic devices are allowed for these assignments. This forces my students to be able to write code without being able look up things online or consult an AI tool.
I still assign take-home programming projects that take 1-2 weeks to complete; students submit compilable source code. Practical hands-on programming experience is still vital, and even though cheating is possible, the vast majority of my students want to learn and are honest.
Still, for in-person assessments, if I had the budget, I’d prefer to hand out laptops with no Internet connection and a spartan selection of software, just a text editor and the relevant compiler/interpreter. It would making grading in-class submissions easier. But since we don’t have this budget, in-class exams and exercises are the next best solution I could think of.
This reply will likely sound disrespectful, but I post it not to be so, but rather to perhaps spark an alternate path.
As the world changes, education can be slowest to adapt. My father did his math on a slide rule. I was in high school as we transitioned to using calculators.
My personal take on your approach is that you're seeing this from the wrong side. Creating an artificial environment for testing suggests to me you're testing the wrong thing.
Of course most school, and college, classes devolve to testing memory. "Here's the stuff to learn, remember it enough to pass the exam." And I get it, this is the way it's always been, regardless of the uselessness of the information. Who can remember when Charles 1st was beheaded? Who can't Google it in an instant?
Programing on paper without online reference tools isn't a measure of anything, because in the real world those tools exist.
Indeed, the very notion that we should even be testing "ability to write code" is outdated. That the student can create code should be a given.
Rather an exam should test understanding, not facts. Here's 2 blocks of code, which is better and why? Here's some code, what are the things about it that concern you?
Instead of treating the use of AI (or Google, or online help, or that giant C reference book I had) as "cheating", perhaps teach and assess in a world where AI exists.
I truly do get it. Testing comprehension is hard. Testing understanding is hard. Testing to sift wheat from chaff is hard. But, and I'm being harsh here i know, testing memory as a proxy for intelligence or testing hand-code-output as a proxy for understanding code is borderline meaningless.
Perhaps in the age of AI the focus switches from 'writing code' to 'reading code'. From the ability to write to the ability to prompt, review, evaluate and so on.
Perhaps the skill that needs to be taught (to the degree that community college seeks to teach skills) needs to be programing with AI, not against it.
I say all this with respect for how hard your job is, and with my thanks that you do it at all. I also say it understanding that it's a huge burden on you that you didn't necessarily sign up for.
The problem is that tools like AI are useful if and only if you have the prerequisite knowledge, otherwise they are self-destructive.
It's similar to a calculator. We give student graphing calculators, but ONLY after they have already graphed by-hand hundreds of times. Why? Because education does not work like other things.
Efficiency, in education, is bad. We don't want to solve problems as fast as possible, we want to form the best understanding of problems possible. When I, say, want to book an airplane ticket, I want to do that in the fastest way possible. The most efficient manner. I care not about how an airport works, or how flight numbers are decided, or how planes work.
But efficient education is bad education. We can skip 99% of education, if we wanted. We can have, say, the SAT - and spend 1 year studying only for the SAT. Don't bother with the other 12 years of schooling.
Will you get an acceptable score on the SAT this way? Maybe. Will you be intelligent? No, you will be functionally illiterate.
If we use AI for programming before we can program, then we will be bad programmers. Yes, we can pass a test. Yes, we can pass a quiz. But we don't know what we're doing, because education is cumulative. If we skip steps, we lose. If we cut corners, we lose. It's like trying to put a roof on a house when the foundation isn't even poured.
I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.
Don't lock down the computer unless you are hiring people to work in a SCIF. Instead, give candidates a brutally hard/weird problem and tell them to use any resources they can get their hands on, by fair means or foul. (They will do that anyway if you hire them.) Then watch how they deal with it.
Do they just give up and stalk off in a huff?
If they Google for answers, do they use sensible queries?
If they use AI, do their prompts show skill at getting ideas, avoiding blind alleys, and creating effective tests?
If they call their friends, see how effective they are at communicating the requirements and turning the answers into a solution. Might be management material.
I’ll second this, and we had enough resumes to only interview those with a relevant Master’s degree. I was shocked and I still don’t have a full explanation. I don’t doubt that it’s also hard out there, but on the hiring side we also did far more interviews than we wanted. (And yes the salary is >>100k, full remote, benefits etc)
> When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
I feel like this doesn't get said enough, but I'm almost certain your issue is happening during filtering prior to even getting to the interview stage. Companies are straight up choosing (the wrong) applicants to interview, the applicant fails the interview, the company does not move forward with them, and then the companies does not go back and and consider the people they originally filtered out.
I know companies get swamped with tons of applications, and filtering is basically an impossible problem since anyone can make their resume look good, but every applicant that applied can't be that bad.
Bad applicant filtering at the first step is hurting both companies and applicants.
2 data points and you're drawing a conclusion about an entire graduating class? For all we know, you might be experiencing a reality that you're company isn't able to attract great young talent.
FizzBuzz was always a great filter. Even in the pre-LLM days. Many people can code for years and never once use the modulo operator. Solving the problem gets a lot more clunky without it and they get rejected.
Yes but also it is one of the most common programming questions for non-FAANG companies. Are grads not preparing for interviews? It is one google search to Jeff Atwood’s blog.
When I was in school in the early 2010s I was working in a professor's lab and overheard conversations that the administration was telling profs/TAs to pass kids who profs/TA's thought should have failed. I've since seen the required coursework to graduate become less rigorous. There were students I worked with personally I graduated with who were very bad. I'm sure there still great students who care about learning but I cannot imagine how bad the average student is with ChatGPT being able to do student's assignments.
My experience is that this problem significantly predates AI. Not that AI won't make it worse, but pre-2020 the majority of entry level developer applicants I interviewed could not write a basic for loop in their choice of language, never mind the modulo operator.
There's setting expectations, but saying "none of you will have jobs after graduation" feels criminally cynical and counter productive, especially coming from a teacher.
In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, one of my commencement speakers (and the recipient of an honorary doctorate) was Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express. I don't remember his exact words, but his message to the graduating class was, we have a different perspective on the world and different values— thriftier ones, necessarily— and if we stay true to them, the world will reflect them when we succeed.
"Maybe instead of having a car, like your parents' generation, your first big purchase may be a bike. Times change." Something like that.
Four days later, he laid off four thousand workers from AmEx, just a smidge more people than the graduating class.
Edit: according to Wikipedia, that year he took home $16.6 million.
I'll roll back the clock somewhat to 1992 when I graduated. A different time, but also a challenging one. (As with all reminiscing context matters, and those elsewhere likely have a different history. )
I graduated into a world without internet (we had it at university, hosted on Unix and Vax machines, but it wasn't available commercially. )
People who had computers were running DOS. Most businesses had no computers at all.
So the job market was both good and bad. We graduated with skills that were hard to find. But we graduated into a world where big companies had computers, small companies had paper.
So huge market opportunity, but also huge challenges. We'd either graduate into big business (banking, insurance, etc) or start something new.
I joined a person doing custom software development. We'd sell both the need, the software, and usually the hardware. ) When we didn't have work we'd work on our own stuff, eventually switching from custom development to products.
We had to bootstrap, there was no investment money in our neck of the woods.
I won't pretend the job market is the same (or even vaguely similar) now, but it seems to me that opportunities for self-employment still exist. Software is still something you can build with basically zero capital.
Ultimately a job is just someone else finding a way to add value to society. Software us one of the few ways you can do that yourself, skipping the employer.
95% of people see "a job" as the goal. I get that. My own kids are like that (zero interest in starting something new.) But there are opportunities for the other 5%. Yes, it's lot more than just coding, and yes it's a lot more risky, but the opportunities are there.
As for me, I'm closing in on retirement, but at the same time building a new (not tech) business from scratch, because there's still value I can add, and a niche I can service.
I say this all to encourage current students. You can see the world as "done" or you can see it as an infant just waiting for you to come and add your unique value. And in 35 year's time feel free to encourage the next generation with your story.
At my company, we have increasingly been experiencing interns reneging on their offers. Students will accept multiple offers and then bail on the one they don't want last minute which prevents us from replacing them with someone else. We bring in hundreds of interns every summer and the reneg rate is approaching 20%. It sucks because it prevents people from getting an internship(and us getting the intern).
Low trust society. Due to how recruiting works nowadays I guess what they are doing is rational. Do they fear their main choice of employer bailing on their offer?
It sounds like they are using a smart strategy for their outcome optimization: Not putting all eggs in one basket, or staking all hopes on one employer.
You do the same by accepting a bigger pool of applicants than you plan to hire - so what makes you feel entitled to a privileged position in such negotiations?
Graduate employment crises happen at least once every decade (initial covid, 2008 crisis, dotcom bust, early 90s recession etc). What I could argue is more unusual are those bubble times when getting a great job right out of college is easy. And then how quickly those expectations are taken for granted...
GenX'ers will remember the days of 'Slackers' 'Reality Bites' and the malaise of those who graduated with fancy degrees in the early 90's but stuck in barista jobs etc.
Anecdata: Recently spoke with a friend's son who graduated compsci a year-ish ago, he reckons none of his year got jobs, now working in a kitchen. (in australia for context). Very sad. For comparison, I graduated just after the dot-com crash, and our year mostly found jobs, just not very good ones, so maybe they're doing worse than we did. Good luck convincing anyone to study compsci any more.
As an Aussie computer science student, I do wonder what they are actually looking for. I know full well that uni isn’t teaching anything useful (heck my uni doesn’t even allow compsci students to take C programming) so I try and extend my knowledge by working on projects in my own time. Recently I’ve been getting into reverse engineering, before that I was writing my own shell from scratch in C. Is this good stuff to do job-wise?
Sure. Contributing to open-source, releasing and maintaining independent projects, is also good because it shows you can work with others and finish things on your own. Looking for internships is good if there are any.
You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.
You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains in Australia unless they're in a self-managed superannuation fund and you have over $2 million. Regular investments outside of super are only taxed when you realize the gains. Superannuation is your retirement funds, doesn't seem that relevant to the start-up ecosystem.
I've noticed some folks, seemingly on principle say that older folks should keep working, basically until they die, presumably because they don't want them to collect social security or other entitlements, but does that end up having the negative economic impact of making it harder for young folks to find jobs?
Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.
Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.
"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"
So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?
Housing has perverse economic incentives, mucking it up.
It is also, obviously, a limited resource that doesn't compound directly. Although its usefulness could compound in terms of density and vertical use increasing housing.
The problem that slows that:
In almost all areas, "property taxes" actually tax both the land (the exclusionary resource that should be taxed since its use reduces land available for others) and the property on it (a wealth tax).
The result of it being a combination tax, is that increasing the value of property on land increases its tax as well. So there is a strong disincentive undercurrent reducing investments in increasing housing on property. It isn't as profitable as it should be.
Even worse, land which is underused, is only taxed as land. Basically getting a tax break relative to the same land nearby which has been developed for maximum use. Meanwhile, the land value goes up parasitically, if while holding but not improving land, neighbors invest in their properties.
The result makes owning land a very good passive parasitical value-growing investment.
Which makes it useful for rich people to store vast sums of money in. Driving prices way above the market value that simple housing should have.
Until the tax issue is fixed, housing can't be fixed. Other changes may be needed to, but just that would make a big difference to everyone's incentives.
(It does happen - but rarely. In 2002, Altoona, Pennsylvania adopted a pure land-value tax, meaning they taxed only the value of the land, not the structures. By 2011, this system fully replaced their traditional property tax, renormalizing so the total tax remained stable. I.e. land was taxed more, improvements none. The effect: owners of productive, developed parcels (homes, businesses) paid less tax, while holders of undeveloped or underused land, such as mansions rarely visited with lots of open acreage, paid more—effectively removing the financial instrument advantage, and turning them into money pits. Land prices declined, development increased, and affordability improved for locals. -- Unfortunately, in 2016 the property tax was reinstated as before.)
"More people working" merely contributes to growth and innovation. You need other inputs as well. The number of people working may or may not be a bottleneck.
But once you do have growth and innovation going one way or another, then that leads to more jobs.
That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.
anyone in corporate america in a hiring position knows the prevailing trend -- you either hire h1b (for maximum leverage) or overseas (for cost savings). we've been told to hire h1b ONLY.
I work at a Fortune 100 and for the most part, we can ONLY hire citizens and do not use H1Bs without a particularly strong reason. Curiously, I'd estimate we still hire 80% naturalized citizens.
I'm not blaming this on "old people", and certainly not "old people" who want to work, I'm blaming it on a government that artificially deflates the retirement rate.
Treason is a strong word. It is a knowingly detrimental action against American workers and companies to dodge requirements for hiring skilled foreign workers.
The focus and the main point remains: It's unethical, it's illegal, and I wish punishment on the companies and the individuals who fraudulently scam American workers out of jobs.
Treason isn't even a legal concept. Who cares about any given meaning without that? If it strikes you as treason, that's as good a reason to call it treason as any.
Personally, I think there's lots of treason that pervades our life. Hell you could argue the meaning of "national interest" used by our state department is itself treasonous.
Any definition of the word will come down to what you perceive as in our interests. For easy examples, see Snowden and Manning.
Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Even things that are treasonous in a colloquial sense are still pretty narrow, and tend to refer to other specific forms of betraying your country, that just happen to be other crimes -- like espionage, or insurrection.
I think it is anti-American to discriminate on the basis of origin. Where you are from has no bearing on many if not most jobs. I may not be making the point you think I’m making, I’m making a nuanced point that we have a duty to report treason, and we have a duty to report whatever it is when you have an ongoing state of affairs in which there exists a stated or effective policy of only (or never) hiring a certain group of people.
> Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Adversary to the people, or the state? These are wildly different concepts. Just because my state has beef with China doesn't mean they can't convince me that my life is better with China in it. Sometimes states just misrepresent the people.
Right, but in the same vein, the British crown has a documented history of applying that label to dissidents. It was part of why were revolted in the first place.
Our definition for what constitutes treason is purposely narrow specifically due to the abuse potential.
Report what? They say everything verbally in a closed office. There is no paper trail. Even if there was, the entire industry and current administration are in complete alignment on this issue. They want to reduce labor costs.
I actually do blame this on old people. The reason jobs are being shipped overseas is because western workers are not productive enough to justify their premium. Work culture is part of that, but stuff like zoning and the welfare state is the main culprit.
People who worked in the USA are entitled to collect Social Security once they are old enough. This applies regardless of whether they are still working. In other words, current income doesn't reduce Social Security benefits.
The social security taxes you pay are used to buy credits. You can buy a maximum of 4 credits per year. Once you have 40 credits you are allowed to draw benefits from the system - when you are old enough. If you only have 39 credits, you don’t get social security.
When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.
I never looked at it like that. Perhaps allowing folks to work after retirement age is a form of age discrimination to a certain reading. Social Security should be sufficient for everyone’s retirement. If it isn’t, that’s a separate issue, and is also effectively another form of age discrimination, promising a funded retirement and the other party not upholding their end of the bargain.
Interestingly you can trace the establishment of the retirement age, and of social security, directly to the frustration that younger people can't easily compete with lifelong workers.
This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.
There is no credible evidence that reasonable minimum wages have lowered employment in practice[0], and there are theoretical reason to believe it can increase it[1].
That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.
[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.
[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.
Curious what you think about the UK, then. A software engineer in the UK makes 45k GBP on average. A minimum wage salary there (at 12.21 GBP per hour) is ~22k a year. The wage squeeze between skilled professional and minimum wage surely lowers the amount of people entering skilled professions
Well it doesn't matter what I think, just what empirical evidence says.
That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.
Personal question, but I had to drop out a couple years ago as a Math/CS senior. I felt like the clock was really ticking back then to get my foot in the door. I'm considering re-enrolling (only two terms remaining), would it be better to wait until if/when the market has recovered so I can enter the market with a fresh degree? I worry a downside of completing it now would be a stale degree by the time the job market recovers. Assuming equal job experience, employers seem to prefer fresh graduates. But you know what they say about time in the market vs timing the market..
How much would it cost to complete your degree? Could you take online or CC courses that you could transfer to your old program?
While having no degree hasn't historically been much of a blocker, during a weaker job market credentials can and do play a role in tie breaking during hiring.
Honestly, even a WGU style bachelors degree can be enough depending on years of experience.
Not much given that it's a state school and I only have two terms (6-8 courses) remaining. I'll probably re-enroll this fall, perhaps I've been too negative. Thanks for the input.
That said, be strategic when re-enrolling - if you have a job today, hold on to it tightly and try to finish your program remotely and/or via transfer credits. Finishing a degree at the expense of having a job today is really dumb given the current market.
If you can take low cost and/or remote offerings from a CC or normal college, you can continue to hold a job. Also, most colleges now offer their courses online for credit - even Stanford and Harvard type programs. I'm sure your original program offers a significant portion of it's coursework online for credit.
Finally, Ds get degrees. You can skirt with the bare minimum and you'll be fine. If you are mid-career and kept your day job, no one will ask about your GPA.
Yeah, I have to keep my job or I can't afford to live (non-CS/blue collar job however). I'm done with CC, I only have two terms remaining to get a CS or Math degree now (was double majoring prior but life got in the way and will likely only complete one now). I'm unsure whether at this junction it'd be better to complete a math degree or CS degree, tbh.
My uni's online offerings drop off like a stone after a students sophomore year. Very little online classes for seniors, which has been a big problem for me as I work full time and live over an hour from campus. If I get a schedule change mid-term, I just have to drop out. It drive me nuts as this policy disproportionately impacts the lower income / higher expense students who can't afford to live in the city and need to work full time (i.e, we get 3/4 of the way through our degree via online classes and debt, then it becomes inaccessible as in-person requirements are required for completion). It's especially ironic as a CS major!
But anyway, I'll probably wrap it up this academic year if things remain stable for me, it's just a questionable time to complete a degree now more than ever. I just want to work on a team doing interesting, challenging work. If I could I'd go to grad school.
You are over analyzing this. It doesn’t matter. No one cares about when you graduated. You are going to need to hustle. If you are truly passionate about this industry you will make it work. Trying to fit some ideal on paper with timing is impossible
Thanks, you're probably right. I do feel that letting the dust settle on the AI layoff hype train might be prudent, but getting it done sooner is likely best.
Pursue a degree now to get you foot it the door sooner. I went back to school after a few year break. I also worked nights and weekends full time in the restaurant industry. It took sweat, tears, and burn out but over a decade later it’s 100% worth it.
I get unemployment being high for office-based jobs right now, companies think they can slap AI onto everything and get rid of employees, but what’s the reason for min wage jobs? Are they suddenly overflowing with applicants?
I believe the changes have more to do with US tax laws which have made it harder for companies to write off R&D. Companies might say it’s due to AI to put an investor-friendly spin on it.
I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.
It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).
The problem is code is a lot more context sensitive than most capital expenditures. If I pay for a machine that makes really good chalk, then when my company eventually folds that machine is still probably worth a fair amount to my competitors. In contrast, the code I wrote today which probably is going to save my company ~200 man/hours a year is almost certainly completely and utterly worthless to literally anyone else, because it automates a hyperspecific piece of a company-specific workflow.
Min wage jobs are in the service industry which will take a hit from people pulling back on discretionary spending. Is it one of those "because people think there might be a recession, they manifest one" things?
Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.
Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.
Supply and demand. Too many people crashing into the world. Businesses are better at running with fewer people and successful businesses prevent conpetitors from getting very far, that's why they are successful.
Do not forget that while number of graduates is at historically high levels, the economy hasn't adapted to it. Still needs drivers, bakers, plumbers, etc.
I've read that since then 70s the ratio of blue vs white collar in US has shifted by few % digits, but the number of graduates has boomed in the meantime.
This means that now jobs that never required a degree require one and titles are inflated to make people feel better.
We actually have more than enough jobs for graduates, they are just being outsourced to india/manila. We really don't need more bakers, Wonderbread saw to that. Why drive when uber destroyed the taxis and trucking companies barely pay their drivers? You are living in a wishful world that will not align with reality.
This is history repeating itself and it will only get worse.
We saw this in 2008 post-GFC where entry-level white collar jobs just completely disappeared. It was really the start of millenials graduating with a ton of debt, possibly postgrad degrees, and working at Starbucks. Not because their degrees are useless. Their entry-level jobs just disappeared.
This has never recovered.
So you don't have to search long to find now 40 year olds who are permanent renters, have barely enough in their bank account to pay this month's bills, definitely don't own their own house, still have a ton of student debt they're unlikely to ever be able to repay and realizing they have no hope and they have no choice but to work 3 jobs until they die.
Yet those who believe in the myth of meritocracy just write this off as a personal moral failure or getting "philosophy degrees". At the older end, boomers simply have no idea because they bought their $2 million house for $11,000 in 1976.
Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose.
Gen-Z is now going through this exact same thing. Many don't yet understand they're looking at their future when they see a 40 year old barista or DoorDash driver.
All while the ultra-wealthy continue to get even wealthier at an extraordinary rate. We will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes.
There are parts I agree with when it comes to older people being out of touch - but I'm going to go a bit against the grain here even if some don't like it.
I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.
It is not unreasonable to say that some degrees are not as valuable as others and will be more likely to struggle financially. Its a game of statistics. You are more likely to struggle financially with a degree in philosophy than a degree in engineering. Because even companies themselves when hiring for completely unrelated positions to a persons degree will take into account the fact that the engineering graduate probably worked a lot harder than the philosophy graduate.
But I do agree that the average non-degree or "less valuable" degree holder from the past had a much larger chance of making it out okay than nowadays.
> I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.
I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?
I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.
philosophy is probably a bad example to use because i think it's actually one of the "liberal arts" majors that's actually very applicable to skills you need in the corporate world.
the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.
Democracy and equality is crumbling in front of our eyes. Epstein's client list has disappeared in full public view, his footage is doctored in full public view and no one can do anything besides write angry comments or shuffle around legal paper that won't amount to anything. Everything just looks like a meaningless TV show, whatever new horrific thing happens it'll be on the news for a while and disappear - no one will face any consequences, all of us will just click the next article. We are serfs and no one wants to admit it, and we love individuality and isolation too much to have the kind of class-consciousness it would take to actually create change.
Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.
At what point did equality and democracy ever exist? The only things that substantially changed were who the lords were, the method of gaining power, and what shape the power structure took. At no point was there ever meaningful equality, not even before the law.
I think that's an overly simplified view of 2000 years of history. We've never had a utopia, but its safe to say we have more democracy now than in the feudal ages. There have been periods of greater concentration of unchecked power and lesser in history, some periods where government was stronger and wasn't captured as much by private interests.
The USA is currently a “democracy” and the government of the USA is the single largest human organization in history, and has powers that monarchs could only ever have dreamed of. Surely, you are correct that governments have had varying levels of power, but they were at all times comprised of or bought by oligarchs.
I agree with your point. I'll just add that in my country, at least, the facade of democracy seemed to provide society with infectious glimmers of hope. The hope is fading quickly, and the general mood is both sour and bitter, straining interpersonal relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure how democracy can really work in huge super-complex societies. This is why we have the "iron law of oligarchy".
Democracy in the sense of representative majoritarianism cannot work as the representatives will be bought, coerced, or murdered. In an absolute democracy, when the majority cease to be useful the powerful will launch propaganda campaigns and/or manipulate the vote outcome.
Have you ever stopped and thought maybe there really is no Epstein client list and maybe he really did commit suicide?
Maybe the Epstein client list is the propaganda?
Why would Epstein keep a "client" list? What criminal goes out of their way to document their crimes? What service was he even offering? I don't think even the local drug dealer is stupid enough to keep a written list of clients.
If some shady forces killed Epstein in prison why didn't they just kill him before he got to prison? The shady forces can get to him in federal prison but don't know he is being investigated to go back to prison? Why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell die in a mysterious car accident?
Why do people care about a client list that makes no sense and not all this supposed video evidence?
Your post just shows you spend too much time on social media reading bullshit that you think is real and it is not.
"The list" is really a catch all to all sorts of Epstein-related information.
Even when you fly private, you need to provide a manifest of who is on the plane. There were hundreds of flights. The FAA has that information. One can argue it's not evidence of malfeasance and by itself it's probably not but there's also a difference once sharing a flight and, for example, visiting the island 60 times.
There are also documented connections to all sorts of people including Prince Andrew, the Clintons, RFK Jr (which he voluntarily disclosed [1]), former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, etc.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was a known Mossad asset, so much so that he essentially got a state funeral in Israel [2]. He also mysteriously died (drowned) on a yacht.
Ghislaine herself was herself convicted of sex trafficking. To whom? Nobody in particular. She has remained steadfastly silent on the issue.
It's also documented fact he got the plea deal of the century in 2008 that even allowed him to travel from jail anywhere he liked as long as he was back within 24 hours, even when there was grand jury testimony of SA of a 14 year old. The US attorney who authorized the deal, Alexander Acosta, became Trump's Labor Secretary until he resigned after details came to light following Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Between the home in NYC, the home in Palm Beach and the island there were hidden cameras everywhere. There are multiple, credible accounts of tapes that went missing following the 2019 arrest.
Nobody has ever really accounted for where his money came from and what services he actually provided.
Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.
But there is absolutely information the government is sitting on and tons of evidence that he (or Ghislaine) are linked to 3 letter agencies in a blackmail operation (as a so-called "access agent").
This isn't even a partisan issue: the current administration has zero interest in releasing more information about this (and is trying to downplay it, even though Epstein is core foundational mythology for the MAGA cult) but we had 4 years of the Biden administration who didn't release it either.
> Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.
The failed security camera pointed down the hall Epstein's cell was in. No guard stations would have been visible from it. The security footage they did finally release was pointing directly at the guard station.
Also, that footage combined with the map shows if you entered the floor and went straight to Epstein's cell without going to the guard station, you wouldn't have been visible on the camera. So it doesn't even show what they wanted it to show by releasing it.
gen z is not going to college like millennials did. and i do think it was a moral failure for everyone to jump on an unsustainable bandwagon... they paid too much for a degree in the humanities and when asked about it they would say "well... its just what everyone does." mindless behavior hurts people and the economy so how is this not a moral failing? people should have stuck up for what they knew was right. everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless) and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason. people were intellectually lazy and they got scraped. big fucking deal.
> people should have stuck up for what they knew was right.
> everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)
> and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason
These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.
"Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose."
Sure, a few more poor people voted for trump and a few more rich people voted for Harris, but it basically rounded to 50-50. Rich people want to tear down the system too.
In fact, I think I'd want to see a breakdown by belief system. My gut is that generally speaking working class people believe in meritocracy more than rich people, and that is in fact why they voted for Trump. To not be lumped in with the 'DEI hires'(their perspective, not mine).
The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.
Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).
And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.
The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.
Well, I look at the inflation numbers, and then I look at the prices, and I notice that prices consistently rise faster than inflation. And I think that observed reality outweighs any vague theoretical justification. But I'm not an economist. I notice that economics seems to be the only "science" where if the theory and reality disagree, it means the reality is wrong.
Well that's one interpretation of those charts. Here's another:
Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.
You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).
Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).
It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].
Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.
Real median household income is up over 36% since 1984 (the furthest back the linked chart goes: 1984 was in the middle of an economic expansion, so you’d expect a comparison with four years earlier to look even better).
And CPI has just as many potential substitution issues the other way: Hedonic adjustments are made, but it’s effectively impossible to quantify the value of decades worth of novel and improved goods that simply didn’t exist decades earlier.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience.
I linked decades of numbers about the median household, which you then numerically misrepresented. Bubble, pop thyself.
Offshore tax havens is the usual one. Panama papers put only a small dent in that. All sorts of stuff that's been cracked down on in recent years, like "take your salary through a one person company as dividends".
UK had a scheme where people would take out ""loans"" from their employer that would then be "forgiven". I believe this one blew up Rangers football club.
Fun UK example from the 70s: the tax on car parts was much lower than the luxury tax on cars, so people invented the "kit car" which you assembled yourself: the Caterham 7. Still niche popularity today.
Well, for one, people who owned small/medium sized businesses would put effectively their entire family on payroll to cut the businesses’ earnings and lower their tax bill.
I've thankfully avoided the worst of the GFC graduate syndrome myself but 50-55k in 2008 dollars is a very generous estimation of earnings for someone with no job experience trying to get a first job during a recession. 20-30k is more realistic if you could find work at all. The best I could do was about 20k substitute teaching, and that was very uneven income. If I hadn't been able to live with my parents for three years before scoring a Linux admin job halfway across the country (in a much higher CoL area) for ~48k (and crucially including health insurance so I could get off my parents' plan), I would have been on the street. It's almost impossible to get off the street once you're there.
In short, have some empathy. Bad things do happen to good people, and even bad people deserve some dignity in life.
> Even if you had a meager income of $50-$55k a year this whole time, you would have produced nearly $1 million dollars worth of income before taxes by now.
And how much was rent, and food, and car insurance? It's easy to multiply a salary by 20 and conclude that they fucked up. It's a lot harder to actually live on $50k/year when the system, owned and run by extraordinarily rich people, is trying to extract money from you with every dark pattern at its disposal. Car broke down? Credit card debt, 18% APR. Delay in paycheck deposit? Overdraft fees. Kindly old landlord decides to sell? Rent +20%.
When I was 18 I got a tech job with a top ten tech company (no FAANG at the time) right out of high school having only completed half a tech trade school. Home price to median income ratio was under 3.
exactly correct. millennials decided to sleepwalk forward and ignore reality. millennials are not out there solving societal problems even today. millennials also benefit from being raised in one of the most prosperous and nurturing environments that has ever existed. the only thing millennials ever did was spawn AI in a completely irresponsible and regrettable way. now our kids have to grow up not even knowing whether or not they will make it.
maybe not true for all of us but by 2008 i was done developing. 0-12 is basically when you are created as a person -- molded by your environment. crime may have been higher back then but it was a much better environment to be raised in. society has waned quite a bit since then. public schools have waned a lot. all of our institutions. nobody feels like they can speak candidly or help another person without risking being taken to trial. yes, xkcd make a comic where he makes fun of people who say that things have gotten worse. but the crazy, unbelievable reality is that xkcd was wrong shock horror!
Anyone else interested in generations and eras? When did the "knowledge economy" begin in the West, late 60's? Anyway I imagine LLM's are in the process of killing off the knowledge economy. Personal computers expanded it.
The way we cheered on remote work is really biting us in the ass. It's scary how many people I know or accounts I've read about all new hiring in their department just being Indian remote employees.
If they’re talking about this now, it’s been going on for a while. Just finally reaching the public consciousness now where it’s a common subject on the news.
Or, alternatively, the crop of current grads education is abysmal compared to past graduates, and companies are reluctant to hire them.
This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.
Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.
idk why this was downvoted but anyway:
the educational fallout from covid affected all ages, so the effect really is going to last for the next decade at least, with fading effects towards the younger generations as the educational system hopefully will be able to patch up the gaps somewhat.
And if you grant that the negative effects will last much longer than 2 years, it doesn't make a lot of sense business wise to hold off new hires for that long
I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not that the economy is bad, it's that there's a mismatch. We have tons of graduates who just finished with a degree in X, but we need people for job with skills Y
It's unclear from the article, I'm just saying this is what the data shows. The economy is strong, and young people can find jobs, but the findings in the article suggest young people with degrees are having trouble getting jobs.
The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".
Honestly, I think the impact of AI on jobs at all levels is being understated by folks here, as insane as that is.
Oh, I don't mean because it is actually doing people's jobs, or even because it is making people more productive (though it certainly is doing that in some cases).
I mean because management has bought into a lot of strange and misleading ideas about where it is right now. They think that you get a 10x engineer by using AI IDEs and other tools. If it fails with their existing tech, that clearly means it wasn't trained on their current tech stack so they should switch!
There are a lot of sales opportunities, but the reality and the things that non-practitioners and practitioners are seeing are far apart.
Expanded you mean? Wouldn’t that be nice if companies could buy and sell h1b workers? They are not citizens anyway and the Constitution doesn’t give em any rights even if they think they are white
https://archive.is/41JyI
My experience graduating right into the dot-bomb was it absolutely sucked. I, a fresh-faced grad, was competing against experienced engineers who were laid off after Y2K, Cosmo, Yahoo, and other dotcoms for entry-level jobs. I wasn't very bitter then, but now when I meet mid-20s developer with "senior" or "director" titles, it hurts knowing that 3-5 years of my career was wasted trying to string together credible work history portfolio.
The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.
Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.
Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.
Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
It's as much a response to regulatory stuff as it is a marketing and perception thing.
All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.
But it is not related to customer feelings nowadays. A lead of a small team of engineers has director title.
Maybe at an early stage startup.
Nobody takes such people seriously unless that startup later has a successful exit.
And by successful I mean a big exit. Like IPO or high 9 figure or bigger acquisition.
Imagine working somewhere and then walking away with peanuts and calling yourself a “director”. Of what? You got played lmfao.
>Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.
Didn't all the characters in American Psycho had the title VP on their business cards?
Also “Head of X” which often means the titleholder is practically the only person doing X at the company, and/or has no actual power.
Usually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
As a former Head of Mobile, I agree.
Oh, that explains the Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer. No power.
Isn’t Microsoft pretty great with accessibility?
It seems like a weird choice, I would expect that person to have quite a bit of power.
They've been slipping, especially on Windows.
I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.
After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
One of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
>such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.
Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.
Good times. Sigh.
Dey don't make em like dat no more.
Grrr.
:)
I've met a few people who have spent time in prison and developed the same habit of always sitting so they're facing the door. One of them told me he just can't feel comfortable otherwise.
That does sound like a nice perk!
I thought this was well-known, that everyone's a VP in the financial sector because a lot of contracts required a VP or higher to sign off on a lot of things and it was easier to make everyone a VP. Sort of like giving everyone sudo access.
> lot of contracts required a VP
That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.
I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.
It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
Our VP Mario had 5 of us plus a contractor.
Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.
I was a Petroleum Transfer Engineer when I was sixteen. Then everything went self serve. History repeats I fear.
More like appeasing their workers with worthless titles instead of money.
my mothers first title was inexperienced assistant in her public accounting firm
I can't wait to see a Vice President of Helm Charts
Graduating in a recession is really unfair to the graduate. Economists have looked at the effects on lifetime wages and it's estimated that recession kids lose in aggregate about 20% in lost lifetime wages, and to no fault of their own.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
Life’s not fair in general. Personally though I have no regrets starting my career in 2001. Sure it was harder to get a job and it paid less, but it made me more willing to join a startup which gave me experience and skills that opened more leadership doors later.
By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.
Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.
>I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.
People are as ignorant and stupid as their experience in life permits.
This is why highly imperfect messages about privilege resonate despite being imperfect (which they must be to resonate, perversely).
a mid 20s person with "director" in their title sounds good on paper but there is no credible replacement for experience.
I have a former coworker in their early 20s who left a startup as Senior (they were 1 year out from graduating) to become a "Director" at another startup. Their first job was implementing the control law for the robot's wheels. In this case (and perhaps many others), "Director" just meant "Only person we have".
It can also mean that on the way down. At a private unix software company in 1994, the rise of Linux destroying our business led to firing nearly everyone in support except the cheapest person (me). As I was the only person left in tech support, I became Director of Tech Support by default.
I actually told a startup o joined a few years back that was 5 people that I wanted a more junior title. Because cod it didn’t make it off the ground I didn’t want folks rejecting me as overqualified for roles I was well suited for and under-skilled for ones say my title
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case of title inflation.
Can confirm, I myself was a one person support desk (for a restaurant chain) and just never officially had a title. The internal moniker of "the IT guru" was fine for an email signature, but certainly not for a resume. (I've since made other retroactive edits to that, both for something more sensible and to better represent years of scope creep.)
Startups are weird though, new college grads can be (inexperienced) CTOs & CEOs if they start a company together
If you don't mind sharing, what would be the things that a person should think about it before doing the same action that you did? I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
Not OP but same experience. If you're not overly concerned about a certain quality of life, number of cars, square footage of house, etc., then there's nothing to think about. Engineering is a fine career (granted, AI takeover notwithstanding) and a few-year gap isn't going to leave you on the street. Being a few years behind your peers in your 30's may gnaw at you a bit, but by your 40's things will have reasonably equalized. My "wealthier" friends have some nicer things, go on more lavish vacations, but it's never really bothered us. And they generally got that way because they're type-A personalities to begin with. So they're not the type of people who would even ask the question about taking time off. Maybe one downside is they can also afford private schools and tutors etc for their kids, though, IDK, we could afford to do the same (though it would be more than a blip in our finances), but they seem to be doing well and happy where they are.
So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.
[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.
Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I've been thinking about it for some time and your answer puts the "life after" in perspective. I don't have big plans for life, but the financial aspect is something that worries me, though.
Actually, a further thought about my higher-wealth friends. About half of them got there by a good mix of ability and determination, but half of them just seemed to be in the right place at the right time (early engineers at Facebook, engineers at NVidia just as it exploded, etc).
The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.
I'm not the guy you asked, but given the way that things are going right now, if you're currently gainfully employed and not miserable, then you should continue banking money for as long as you can.
For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.
Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.
Admittedly there can be some survivorship bias in the stories one hears about, but anecdotally I know several people who have taken time off from their careers and zero have regretted it. On the converse side, I know lots of people who never took time off but wish they had. (I also know plenty of people who never took time off because "time off" isn't in their DNA, but they're not the ones who are considering the option).
Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.
I feel that young people having a Big Adventure Before Settling Down is very traditional, the sort of thing that adds "life experience" even if (especially if) some of the experiences are difficult. But it does need to be cheap. And the 21st century crackdown on worker mobility has made it much harder to have a proper international adventure.
Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.
Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.
> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
I know someone at a growing division of a FAANG who has not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now. They're critically understaffed but the screws only tighten with each year.
When I was last in tech research we were prevented from working in new interesting areas as that work was being handed over to the China branch. I think we’re entering the looting stage of empire collapse. A hyper focus on short term gains to the detriment of long term gains.
"Looting" is an apt description of the short-termism we're seeing in the tech industry.
These companies that have been built on the backs of US infrastructure that now don’t want to hire Americans should be razed to the ground. Fuck them, let them try to operate in Indias fucked up business environment.
This is pretty standard in corporate world. Our Bangalore office is now bigger than any of the US ones.
> not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
People who still think FANG is some flex are lame. I just see expense line items when I talk to any current or recent FANG employee.
As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.
As a FAANGer, I'm acutely aware that I'm an expense line item whose days are numbered. Do people still think it's a flex? There are hundreds of thousands of us. Working for an AI unicorn is the new flex.
Do AI unicorns only hire ex-FAANG and Stanford grads once they run of folks in their personal network?
I haven’t paid much attention.
I think it's more of a shorthand for general mega cap tech companies
Labor tariffs, anyone? Might even give the Dems some ideas!
Second 174 changes from BBB pretty much are for the tech industry - dropped the prior 5 year depreciation schedule to immediate, and foreign depreciation is now 15 years (!!!).
I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.
> I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
GCC?
Global Capability Center - basically offshored offices that also own product decisions and roadmap.
This is increasingly the norm - for example, entire product lines in GCP are owned by their Warsaw and Bangalore office (especially K8s side).
Sure, as long as the corp is big enough they don’t need to write it off against US revenue eh?
Otherwise the BBB just shot all that in the head.
Pre-BBB, the tax rules favored that kind of outsourcing.
Yea, GCC style optimizations don't work until your company hit the 150-200 headcount mark.
But it is those sized organizations that tend to represent the majority of hiring.
A company with 100 or fewer employees tends to be much more hard pressed with hiring, as revenue for these sized orgs also tends to be lower.
The Section 174 changes didn't have much of an impact one way or the other for larger companies and organizations.
The expectation for output has largely been set now, and even with the current changes I don't see much of an impact on hiring trends.
This also doesn't include the impact that AI productivity tools like Cursor is starting to have on AoPs. It's already the halfway point and I myself am starting to see increased proposals from Engineering leadership to leverage Cursor style tooling wherever possible. And a number of the seed and Series A companies I've funded over the past 2-3 years have largely kept headcount below 100 and heavily utilizing automation where possible, and are on track to hit Series B style FCF metrics with a much leaner workflow.
Section 174 changes absolutely have an impact on all sizes of orgs. It’s been a major downward pressure for the last several years on the US market, and causing a major outsourcing push. It’s likely to do the opposite now.
That said, larger orgs can weather it better - but it’s a fundamental change.
And my point is that the outward trend for offshoring (along with the increased feasibility of AI Productivity tools) has been occuring irrespective of the Section 174 change, and this assumption that it's change will suddenly restart hiring just isn't going to pan out.
It sped it up immensely - and the tide may start to reverse, especially with the radical changes in US labor market conditions.
On the contrary we found that GCC was able to optimize things just fine at our small startup too.
certain domestic market protections would be wise for any politician to support, unfortunately the craziness of this administration smothers the conversation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
> Labor tariffs, anyone?
Interesting phrasing, but how do you actually make it work? What does it look like on paper? Taxing ""imports"" of services is really, really tricky.
I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few years. This feels much worse than 2008 and 2008 was bad. At least back then there was hope that things would recover, now it feels like a permanent malaise has set in.
I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it.
The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute.
I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.
Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.
I’d like to think this will leads to a new wave of startups and innovation.
Hope I’m right?
I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent.
For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
Are you Steve Balmer?
Steve Balmer is a hype-guy
Lots of assertions in the article, but the only fact I see is that new college grads looking for work had a 6.6% unemployment rate over the last 12 months, along with a hand-wavey
> about the highest level in a decade—excluding the pandemic unemployment spike
Why "about"? What was this number 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? During the dotcom bubble? The housing crisis? An actual recent crisis (the pandemic) is conveniently excluded from the comparison for some reason.
Weird for the WSJ to declare an "unemployment crisis" based on a handful of anecdotes and no actual data.
I think the thing that’s unusual and backed up by data is that being a college grad right now has higher unemployment rate than the total average unemployment rate. This has never been the case in history until recently.
well according to the article: "Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis."
Interesting to read this from the other side of the border on the Canadian side. Our numbers definitely support the anecdotes that suggest youth unemployment rates are terrible, but if anything I think they obfuscate how bad the problem might be. Lived experience and the real anecdotes from people I know in the cohort lead me to believe there's going to be major downstream economic breaking points some time in the next few years.
Additionally it's funny to see the term "housing crisis" be applied to the past rather than the present. If that means 2008, we tend to call it the 2008 financial collapse, but our response to it created the current conditions of what Canadians would now call the "housing crisis"
The housing affordability crisis isn’t a crisis if you own a home you bought in 1980, and older homeowners vote in much higher numbers.
>and older homeowners vote in much higher numbers.
Because they're stuck with this fairly illiquid asset and therefore have a very big incentive to exert their inconsequential shred of control over the institutions that more or less unilaterally control their experience owning that asset.
Something I’ve recently started to consider is how an aging population will impact this over time.
Unlike the 60s and 70s the number of people coming of age now and in the years to come is smaller than older people (unless we get liberal with immigration). How will that impact the future direction of society?
In Canada, the working age population is massively subsidizing the older generation already, while getting fucked by them on the cost of shelter, and from every direction on the cost of basic necessities compared to income. There's fewer working age people per old age security and CPP recipient than ever, and it's our federal government's largest line items. An average 30 y.o in a population centre probably makes substantially less then the average retiree would have ever made, pays them more rent they'd ever have imagined, and pays most of their taxes directly into that hypothetical landlord's pocket. It's crazy and idk wth is going to happen because also there's almost no jobs available or clear upward mobility/stability, all of that shit went out the window long ago unless you're in a trade union already with a decade of experience, or just lucky.
[0] https://www.gensqueeze.ca/analysis_2023_federal_budget
This will keep getting worse if birth rates remain low. It’s one of the biggest negative social consequences from a far below replacement rate birth rate. Immigration can make up some of it but there are limits to immigration rate before it causes other problems and provokes a generally very right wing populist backlash.
It's also a circular negative feedback loop until it gets balanced out. Imo, below replacement birthrates can be thought of as "getting worse", but they're skewed by a narrow window of immense prosperity and wealth that was basically fabricated, and could thus be the rebalancing, of governments let them. Less prosperity for a whole generation of people that effectively make up the future market for overvalued static assets, means there is hypothetically a ceiling, likewise if the population is only inflated by economically low-value immigration; if systems are working,(they're not) then there simply won't be enough domestic money flowing around to keep supporting that type of hockey stick growth. That's my theory anyway
>> The housing affordability crisis isn’t a crisis if you own a home you bought in 1980
It isn't a crisis for them now. It was a crisis for them in 1980, someone buying a home in 1980 would have had an interest rate of around 14% on their mortgage.
Yes but that was a temporary response to inflation caused by multiple back to back recessions in that time. Those interest rates eventually cooled off, and salaries caught up.
I met an old timer a few days ago with a beautiful garden, who bought their house in Vancouver, BC for $24,000 in 1972. Checking the tax assessment data now, the land underneath the house is worth $1.6m, while the building is assessed at $40k. Based on recent sales nearby, his property is realistically worth (on the market, maybe with some renos) 100x what he originally borrowed to buy it in absolute dollar amounts, about 20x accounting for inflation, or about 2x a conservative compounding investment. The guy was pleasant to chat with, and sympathized, because he knew his son-in-law who's probably my age won't be able to set up even close to the same sort of shelter without some very high incomes coming in, and he can see the future not looking so great for people in his life.
But that's a modest, old, not that nice detached home. If I were to shoot for a small ~800sq ft 2 bdr condo built in the last 20 years, it would be require $120k down, $20k just in transfer taxes, and $7k a month to service the debt.
Yes, 1980 sucked, money lost a huge amount of value relatively speaking, but what are we talking about here.
Maybe it'll become a crisis as they (or their estates) all go to sell the homes at once :).
Looks like when you set the graph to annual average (which you have to do to avoid spikes each year when everyone graduates), the new college grad unemployment rate is in fact the highest it's been since 2014 when you take out 2020 and 2021. It's higher than it was in 2002, but lower than it was during the housing crisis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGBD2024#
Unemployment is a loaded statistic anyway. I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job. They're likely working in a restaurant or in retail which is technically employed.
My qualitative view on the job market right now is this line holds true
> But it is a bad time to be a job seeker—especially if you are young.
Unemployment comes from surveys (the CPS) where they call people and ask if they're employed. So the answer to questions like "do Uber drivers count as employed" is, it's up to them.
There's other questions about full-time or part-time, or multiple jobs.
(Multiple jobs are interesting because you'd think they'd belong to overworked underpaid poor people. But they're not really associated with that, and they go down in recessions since that's when you have no jobs.)
If they’re working at a restaurant or retail, they’re not counted as unemployed? Unless they’re working under the table.
They're underemployed, but employed. So unemployment remains rosy.
> I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job
This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.
I'm not making blind assumptions. I've studies unemployment statistics and aware of how they exclude things and can lag and generally are kind of rig the calculation. I'm just here making a passing comment, so I'm not going to lay all the evidence out there with citations, but feel free to have a LLM tell you all about it. I'm also aware there is another statistic called underemployment which is what I described, so no, I did not replace anything with my imagination. I just don't have any source of data to say exactly what is what right now, but based on a lot of signals I'm seeing (knowing a few recent grads, knowing how many of my mid-career peers are not hiring and actually looking for additional efficiencies, having a few friends finding it impossible to find work even with experience, etc) - I feel/assume the stat as reported is not telling the whole story and the original article was trying to shed light on what's going on. Sometimes boots on the ground conversations is the best way to know the truth today versus just looking at data/stats.
Unemployment here is being used in its capacity as a trend line. It’s not loaded in the sense you are considering. From what I recall, recent graduates would not be working in retail, but currently looking for roles.
I can only say that this direclty matches the experience of my two college graduates.
First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.
Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.
Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.
I’ve worked with a bunch of Nuke Es. Smart, interesting people with strong technical skills. They’re not working in the field though. If you really want to be around nuclear reactors, you’re much more likely to get there if you join the navy.
Nuclear engineers don't work around nuclear reactors, they work in offices.
Bear in mind they've already lost 4 years of employment by taking the degree.
The numbers are being cooked
This is what I would say to my younger self if I was starting out today: This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway. In the meantime, create your own job. Youthful flexibility is your biggest asset. Be helpful and you will succeed. Oh, and stay away from social media. It is the cigarette of the day - you don't need to smoke because everyone else is doing it.
> This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
This feels a bit unwarranted. There doesn't need to be some major new paradigm shift for things to get bad from an employment perspective. All that needs to happen is for this creative destruction rate to slightly exceed the new job creation rate, and there's your tipping point. I certainly feel that your average grad today doesn't have the same opportunities I did in the late 90s.
> New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?
If you frame it like a farmer back in the day hearing there will be more jobs because of the industrial revolution so they conclude that means there will be more farmers but just doing a new type of farming, that would obviously be wrong.
To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
Not OP, but of course they can’t be sure. No one can but if it doesn’t come along we will just be kind of screwed.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
> Can you be surely something else will come along?
something has come along - the new fangled AI stuff.
People back then also didnt think the internet would amount to much when it first came out, and people also thought mobile phones were for business users not casual consumers.
I'm at the point where I hope AI doesn't catch on long term. At least how it currently is, it seems like a societal downgrade.
Of the many good comments, this is the one that IMHO is the most helpful.
I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.
My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.
Pleasantly optimistic sentiments, but if you want to get certain kinds of job you benefit from being on LinkedIn, and if you want a "be your own boss" job it's almost mandatory to have a social media presence so that you can find customers. It's like being in the phone book used to be.
It took me way too long in life to realize that you can do whatever gives you money, at the end of the day. Like it doesn’t have to be a job, just anything that gets cash to you.
Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!
I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.
I'm trying to work out the theory behind this, but the rough metric is that it's due to increased transportation, automation, and consolidation. As businesses expand they leave less opportunity for those local to do something meaningful while those who run the companies are rich beyond measure. Students cram into college for the hopes of being on the other side, not the "below the API" side.
Measurement then becomes graded upon standard features as differentiation becomes harder: GPA, test scores, essay rubrics, etc. Combined with increased communication, online portals become spammed within minutes.
All this leads to quite a difficult time for the young. Inequality likely ends up being a function of the country size. It explains the USA, PRC, India, but not sure about places like Pakistan, Brazil, or Indonesia.
Still draft, but wrote a bit here about the roles in society: https://bedouin-attitude-green-fire-6608.fly.dev/writing/a-d...
I was a recent grad (2023) too but now I think that expecting a job solely with a bachelors isn't realistic anymore. Standards are being raised and it's even more "who you know not what you know" than it used to be. The only thing advice i can give to grads right now is work on what you are passionate about and take care of your health.
If you're young and reading this and having feelings of fear and dread, I can sympathize. When I graduated with an engineering degree the industry was saying that there would be no jobs for us because all of the engineering was either being done elsewhere or that our skills wouldn't translate to what engineers needed to know. There were bits of truth in that, hardware was moving off shore, software was still very much local, and new tools and techniques were sprouting up.
But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed. What they are spending their "cleverness beans" doing (as an early mentor of mine once called the propensity for humans to innovate) is always in demand. And no matter what you have heard, there has yet to be invented any replacement for either human intuition or creativity.
> But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed.
Not exactly. I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise. Moreover, even if what you say is true, it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
I appreciate your insight, it did make me wonder.
> I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise.
I would be interested to hear how you reason to that. What is your definition of "success" and what is your definition of "cog wheel"?
Here is why I ask, I know hundreds of engineers who consider themselves "successful" because they have accumulated enough wealth to not ever have to work again if they choose not to. Recent data[1] shows there are over 342 thousand millionaires in the Bay Area alone. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that they were all 'corporate cogwheels' (which sounds a bit pejorative but again, I don't know how you define it).
> it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
Again, I really would be interested to hear more about this. I find it trivially easy to tell who is "smart" and who isn't. But I will grant you that it is a skill that is enhanced by a lot of exposure to people who aren't smart but would like you to believe they are. They are a LOT of those types around. There is also a nuance between "smart" and "lazy" in that I know some really smart people who are also incredibly lazy, avoiding actually learning things if they can get by with faking it or cheating.
Your comment also made me realize that I have a working definition of 'smart' that is different than 'book learning' smart, it is more a mixture of a willingness to learn, the humility to learn from anyone, and the fortitude to put effort into seeking out new information. That is different than what some people call 'smart' and I might call 'quick' in that they can make up a plausible answer quickly so it sounds like they are speaking from understanding not just bullshitting you. My wife used to call that 'Male Answer Syndrome' :-). The idea that one must never say "I don't know" or "I have no idea."
[1] https://www.alonereaders.com/article/details/3057/top-10-cit...
1. What I'm talking about is that most companies that grow beyond startup phase create an environment where a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket. Programming has become a blue-collar job except in front of a PC. As an individual programmer, you typically have very little saying in what exactly you're doing and why. Even matters strictly related to engineering end up "I'm doing this because my manager wants it". Here intelligence is a negative trait, because if you question your superiors, you'll be labeled "problematic" and "not a team-player". This holds true too for situations where a group of engineers is left alone to figure out a solution - if you're smarter than the rest, your idea will simply be rejected because others don't understand it, and don't support your view of assumptions that are difficult to quantify. During a discussion, genius is often indistinguishable from stupidity.
2. Sure, you in particular can sense who is smart and who isn't according to some arbitrary definition that you have. The problem is, this doesn't scale. There's no process that allows ten recruiters to recruit fifty smart programmers efficiently. For a while we had Leetcode, until it turned into a memorization contest, and in my opinion, memorization is a different skill from intelligence. We rejected Leetcode without pointing to any alternative. And now in the age of LLMs and international jobs, cheating is rampant. If you apply to 500 jobs using automated scripts, there's decent chance that at least one company won't notice that "PhD in Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" is a problem rather than an asset. They have 50 000 applicants anyway, so they just use LLM to go though the resumes. And then you use LLM to answer whatever questions they have.
Thanks for the extended explanation.
"... a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket."
In your first bullet there, you describe what I think of as CRUD jobs, and I agree with you that not only are they more 'assembly line' than art, a lot of them will be eliminated by the ability of LLMs to synthesize common solutions. Typically if the company's business is extractive[1] rather than value producing then much of the company's work will be to revitalize its novelty rather than actually achieve anything. Value producing companies however typically both value innovation and creativity more and they generally create durable net wealth growth over time (they are valued more for their core competencies than their monthly recurring revenue or daily active users). Having some of your compensation in equity in the latter is valuable, equity in extractive companies evaporates when the company's herd of data cows moves on to other pastures.
But your examples speak more to poor management and training than to the job quality. Yes, there are managers who are so unsure of themselves that they cannot tolerate having their decisions questioned, and yes there are developers for whom their managers haven't helped them develop the ability to lead and lift up others to their level of understanding. And that makes for a shitty work environment.
When a developer questions their manager with regard to the assignment it is on the manager's shoulders to help them understand the constraints and to listen to the questions. If they can't share some of the non-public parameters that are affecting the available choices, they can say ask for the developer's patience until those things come out which will answer the questions. And of course good questions can open up even better solutions so should be entertained and explored. Too many managers however are already suffering from imposter syndrome and that makes them really resistant to questions. If you're manager is bristles at your questions, that's something to work on in itself. Learning to 'manage up' as they say is just as important as learning the best way to update a database with the current transaction.
"Figuring out a solution when left alone" is a leadership test. If no one else understands your suggestion, you can work back from first principles and see where you diverge, when they ask questions you have to listen and teach rather than listen and correct. No one will listen to someone, no matter how smart, if they aren't willing to listen themselves. Further, even the most ignorant and 'stupid' person has something to teach. There is tremendous value in 'helping' someone develop their 'stupid' idea. Both parties get a better appreciation for how the other one thinks about things.
I agree 100% that hiring is broken. It was funny because when I was at Google and part of the hiring process they did lots of data analysis and discovered that no matter how they selected, 10% of the people they hired did well, 50% were average, and 40% ended up getting laid off within a year or so. They pushed and pushed to have people submit the resumes of people they knew because Google knew that this was a much better selector than recruiters or head hunters. I've been at companies where another factor would hold, managers would get '1' requisition to fill, so they wanted a superstar, but it is impossible to know if someone is a superstar because there is so much entanglement between what the person likes, the environment they work in, and the management style that works best for them. I knew people who were superstars where I was working, got recruited out to a different company and failed miserably. Similarly people who came in as 'just get someone' and rose to the occasion to become really great.
Hacker rank, leetcode, others, all were great at figuring out that someone could write code creatively and actually understood it, but said nothing about whether or not that person could be civil with others who were there to help. You need both for success.
Thanks for adding the additional information. I agree that it sucks that there are a lot of 'job slots' that fit your descriptions well and and it doesn't help that the managers are under trained as well. I'd also agree that those jobs are set up, intentionally or not, to make long term success in them unlikely. And given how little capital it takes to start up an extractive business there are more of those jobs in the pool than the ones where the company is making products of intrinsic value. My unpopular opinion is that licensed software products fill that gap, but that is a different discussion.
[1] The 'web 2' business where a company creates an website that attracts humans for the purpose of extracting data about those humans for re-sale to third parties. The websites come in many flavors 'games', 'news', 'fashion', 'recipes', but have in common that they need to maintain novelty to prevent boredom and their users 'leaving', so they essentially rewrite themselves over and over and over again, and work on ways of trying to extract more kinds of data from their users. Every one of those I've seen up close has been run by someone who sees exploiting people for personal benefit as a 'business model' so workers there are just as exploited as the users their code is exploiting, just along a different vector.
Some relevant data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
Thanks, probably better than TFA. The under-employment numbers are always telling, anyone who talks about employment without mentioning this is running a scam. Sobering to see that only elementary ed and nursing are really doing ok, fields where we're always chronically short. And even while everyone's talking about demographic bombs and aging populations, nurse-adjacent med-tech is still sitting at 57.9%.
Even so, computer science is still among the fields with the lowest reported underemployment rate. It's essentially tied for second place, after nursing, with a much higher salary.
I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
Well, these numbers _are_ from 2023. Things seem to have shifted (especially for the new grads) in the past 2 years...
(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)
> I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.
> companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years
Might have something to do with the appalling employee retention numbers in today’s tech scene.
Why bother spending six months, and five figures, training someone, only to have them hop to another company in 18 months?
It's easier to keep employees when you adjust their compensation to remain at the market rate.
It’s more than just money, though. It’s just that companies are using that as their only variable, so the results are inevitable.
For some reason, companies would rather pay insane salaries, than treat employees well enough to encourage them to stay.
Huh, TIL that around 50% of college grads go on to get some Graduate degree. Much higher than I expected.
Would be interesting to break that out by industry.
Who knew, art history is more employable than finance.
You apparently didn't look at the underemployment and median early career wage data.
I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...
Or perhaps its a vanity degree? Or its pursued by people with family wealth and good connections, the sort that an auction house or high-end gallery would want to hire.
Some more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGMD25OM
Interesting how approximately 6-7% unemployment rate among new SWE graduates translates to such gloomy anecdotes going around in this post.
6-7% of 1+ million software engineers (according to BLS) is a lot of actual people.
Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.
I remember well early 1986 when I was applying for jobs. Experience required, but no way to get experience. Frustrating as hell, especially since I had no peers around and had no BA (I left college a semester early cuz I had enough credits but didn't graduate for months). I ended up getting a cool job for $11,000/year and cobbled together a stable work life. It took another 5+ years to finally get my shit together.
Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.
A non-insignificant portion of HNers found jobs during one of the last 3-4 economic downturns. They seem to happen frequently.
In truth it’s always a crisis mode. Build your networks and demonstrate value and competence such that when people leave your company they’ll regret not having you on their team. This is the right way to stay employed once you land your first gig.
7% unemployment means 93% are employed. So it's really not that bleak.
Referenced unemployed new grad here! I think a lot of what contributes to this is the thought that a degree=employment for college students. We feel scammed, confused, and quite frankly just angry that this was the timing to graduate into.
As a CS student I have many thoughts around the reasoning for this (AI reducing need for junior engineers, oversaturated market from COVID bubble, opaque job requirements/too low of bar). As much as I'd like to believe it's just a skill difference on my side, it's hard to deny my peers' and friends' struggle around me. I don't want my livelyhood to come down to a numbers/chance game. But sadly, that's what it is looking like right now.
This is maybe kind of rude, and hopefully it doesn't come off this way, but where were you still getting the message that degree = job? Not that a degree doesn't help, but I graduated 10 years ago and the message was already pretty clear across the media I interacted with that that was no longer the lived experience / that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.
> that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.
A CS degree was the major people "should have been thinking about" until recently.
This was my experience.
We never really recovered from the 08 crash imo. That was a changing point I think that doesn't get enough attention.
We did recover, in 2019 and then again in 2024.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Literally nobody noticed because everyone had covid trauma the second time, so we had a "vibecession" where everyone felt like there was a recession because they wanted there to be one.
11 years later. I know the numbers say we recovered. It took so long I think people mostly forgot what pre 08 life was like
2008/9 was a change in the expectations of college degrees. Going into 2008, we all got the advice to get degrees and jobs will just show up. After the crash we never got back to that point. Common knowledge ever since 08 has been college doesn't ensure a job at the end and your stuck doing unpaid internships and dealing with a competitive job market
11 years is a blip in society, but at least 20% of most people’s working years.
Not wrong! The degree was always the stepping stone, and even for me I was always told work experience would make the difference. But now having graduated college 2 years early, with 2 high quality internships under my belt, my options are slim. Thankfully, I love what I do and don’t plan to ever stop doing it, but I feel bad for the people that “did everything right” and still aren’t landing jobs.
It’s not AI, It’s offshoring and H1B. Accepting that won’t make you friends at parties in some circles, but it’s true and you should all be furious about it
Good luck out there from a millennial that's been through a couple "once in a lifetime" crashes, a global pandemic, decades of unending war, and a reduction in labor protections that appear to be just getting started.
My only advice is to keep costs low, don't give up, and find work where you can. It seems to cycle around so hopefully you'll end up ok but the days where degree=job were dying when I graduated 20 years ago so I assume there is left of that by now.
Yea my year entered the job market from college in 2008 - pretty much the worst time ever at that time. It sounds very similar. I think, if I look at my more successful peers including myself, many of us hunkered down and took whatever jobs we could get, many of us went back to school and got second "useful" degrees such as CS/nursing/etc.
My career path is so bizarre I don't really ever talk about it in great detail because it is so unique I think it identifies me and me exactly. Lots of others I know with similar stories. I would not want to go through it again.
> the days where degree=job were dying
To be fair, the previous iteration of "degree=job" that was dying 20 years ago was the older definition - broad enough to include "degree in literally anything", which was closer to how it operated say 50 years ago.
GP looks to have gone with the newer advice of "get a more useful degree = job". That wasn't really dying 20 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.
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Definitely agree about keeping costs low. Even if you do get a good job, if you keep costs low for long enough, it compounds like crazy.
At some point mother is the necessity of invention which is a shift in perspective. You may have to make a market for yourself basically. It's not easy. This being a YC site, I would go through and apply to all of the interesting YC work at a startup places. There is an opportunity right now to understand AI and how to apply it to the digital workplace. Anyway, it is not easy and I wish you the best of luck!
Out of curiosity, what tier school is you degree from?
If it’s not an ivy league American or something very noted in its niche I don’t think it’s been worth it for a while.
It’s not the degree, it’s the relationships you build along the way and how much it makes you think is possibly within your reach.
> degree=employment
I also don't understand this. For years now, social media has been flooded with objections that this is not the case. Where were these people who didn't hear this message?
But it goes further: the young people around me who are brand new to fairly fresh into the job market - who must have heard of the problem - are still coasting probably scared but as far as I can tell not doing anything about it. Where are efforts at building references? At buidling networks? Some education streams have been (for years also) very much about building networks: THEY understood (and in the case of MBAs, to the point that everybody complains about them.)
And still further, this applies to more senior people also! It feels like many people with years of experience also have little network to show for it. It's not for lack of opportunity. And go through interviewing on (self-destructive) auto-pilot when they might have enough experience with that for significant statistical results just from their own experience.
I'm way at the front when it comes to arguing that schools do not teach fundamental skills like career development, business (/real) world awareness, or even basic reasoning skills, intro law, etc. But there may also be a question of passivity, obliviousness, wishful thinking.
Blaming the victim? Yes but I also blame the schools. Perhaps there is plenty of blame to go around. And not much of it is about the latest AI nonsense.
(And historically this can go pretty far: In the US there is a background of fast food jobs as entry level youth jobs. Whyyyy? Plenty of the high school and college students around me are plenty qualified enough to fulfill the duties of much more responsible and higher paying jobs. But they don't look for them.)
Why not do a startup?
Dumb, this is a lie people tell themselves to feel better. I heard this crap since 2005 and it was never true.
To all the naysayers here denying that an employment crisis for STEM graduates exists... I didn't believe it either until it happened to my kid. He is a top notch software developer, far better than I was at his age, problem solving comes naturally for him.
And yet, he can't even get an interview. He worked at Dropbox for a year as a contractor right out of school, until they did a huge layoff and hasn't been able to find anything in 6 months. Real interviews are super rare - most of it just recruiters fishing for stuff.
So that is the reality that he and his peers are facing.
My experience is that there is an AI war going on right now. Employers are deluged with AI-augmented/generated resumes that make candidate seem perfect (but then they flop in an in-person interview), so employers are now filtering said AI-augmented resumes with AI to even determine who to advance in the pipeline. It's a viscous arms race and if you aren't playing the game it's really hard to get an "in" without knowing someone on the inside already.
Yes, I've seen that. But I am not sure how to even play this AI game. My kid is trying various methods but none of them are very successful.
If you're on here, there's a good chance you have more connections in the industry than you realize. The best way to avoid being AI-filtered is never have your resume get fed to the AI in the first place, which means applying through back channels.
Recommendations from trusted employees are valuable not out of nepotism or some other sinister force, they're valuable because it acts a pre-filter for the kinds of fuckups that no one would be willing to recommend.
Yep, market for lemons, sadly
Recruiting, as a whole, has been extremely harmed by technology and has therefore become an incredibly low-trust game.
There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.
For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.
Invest in airlines, job fairs are coming back.
Did he use an LLM to write the bullshit parts of his resumé? It's mandatory. Companies are running LLMs to look for a certain kind of bullshit and you're supposed to use an LLM to write it. I got more interviews after asking ChatGPT to write my "professional summary" saying I have a proven track record of building reliable applications with a strong understanding of software architecture, blah blah blah. Nobody mentioned this section, even the ones who wanted to talk about the rest of my resumé. But I got more interviews.
It’s the ATS more than anything
Two big problems:
1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.
2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.
We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.
Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:
1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project
2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.
3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing
4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you
5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting
6. Highly specialized and targeted education
And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.
Having a highly educated population is a major competitive advantage for a society that materializes itself in more ways than I could ever hope to enumerate. We need to bring tuition down closer to what the educational portion of it actually costs and pump as many able people through college as possible. Engineers, waiters, cops, everyone.
All we need is an ultra cheap online accredited option. We can easily mass produce education at this point for almost nothing.
This would be hugely beneficial to society but there is obviously a lot of rent seeking and cartel like behavior by some in the network or we would already have something this obvious.
College grads average IQ had dropped from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022. For many jobs an IQ test would be sufficient to determine expected likelihood for long term success. College still teaches domain expertise but to a larger and less intelligent cohort - so I would attribute the lower value of degrees more to it's decreased relevance to general intelligence. Which would suggest the very thing to fix it would be through the use of IQ tests, but we're not allowed to do that.
IQ scoring is routinely adjusted so that 100 represents the mean. It should be expected that IQ scores for college grads trend towards 100 as higher percentages of the population go to college. University is also not designed to maximize standardized test scores the same way that public high school is. I would expect recency and intensity of math education to play a higher role in IQ scores than the specialized knowledge and exposure to the arts that comes from a college education.
Certainly expanding the cohort alone is sufficient to cause a drop in average IQ scores - which is exactly what I said. College is no longer a useful proxy for IQ score. I made no claim that college would cause IQ scores to increase and if they do play a role I don't think it is a very large one. Raw scores are fitted to a normal distribution but the IQ scores are normalized across time by comparing that distribution to other distributions. Certainly some processes for obtaining IQ scores can be more flawed than others.
There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.
I see what you are saying, thank you. Personally, I would not rely on IQ scores for much, mainly because people have become increasingly specialized and I wouldn't expect specialized knowledge to translate well to a general intelligence test. It also does not seem as though other general forms of intelligence map well to IQ and it may even be arguably one of the less useful measures of intelligence outside of the extremes. e.g., I would expect a high school student in Calc 2 to crush me in a math test, but I would never go to them seeking life advice. I'm not married to this belief and could probably be swayed, but that is my current impression.
By my observation IQ correlates to anxiety disorders so often people with high IQs tend adopt risk adverse behaviors to minimize that anxiety and that undermines opportunities for success. People with really high IQs tend to end up on the spectrum and regularly burnout. Extremely gifted youngsters tend to end up with similar and often pretty severe health problems. So while I do agree that in general past success is a good indicator for future success and IQ is not the be all and end all, I would suggest that many high IQ people can be properly medicated to lead much more productive lives than currently do. And this difference would explain much of the residual lack of expected success.
So much of my growth and maturity came from University. It gives you the time, resources, and space to learn and unlearn in a supportive community environment. Provides a structured environment to meet others on a similar path. So many people that start work after highschool end up in a career track of life where work is the only thing they can imagine in life. It's hard to break out of that.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...
If you want college degrees to not mean something, you'd need to stop paying people with college degrees more.
Note the high paying no-college jobs may also have filters like apprenticeships.
where I'm from, apprenticeships are not seen as a gatekeeping mechanism, but instead as an opportunity to learn something "useful" (aka some trade or craft) and get started with low or no pre-training - typically apprenticeships will start at age ~15 and take 3 years. Businesses are supported by state subsidies for educating apprentices.
It's not all rose petals but overall seems like a valid option for someone who can't/doesn't want to pursue a higher education career.
I think Americans are culturally afraid other people will take their jobs, so they love industry barriers to entry. Even when this means the only people working in a given field are all about to retire.
The hardcore version of this is labor unions of course, but the small version is occupational licensing for all kinds of small-time occupations like hairdressing.
They shouldn't worry so much, since Americans are also culturally afraid of any kind of job where you have to do X if they think they aren't an "X person", to the point they won't apply to do it for any amount of money. Applies to physical labor (farmworkers) as much as mental (anything where you have to do math).
I did go to work after high school, as a software engineer in fact.
Now I can't get a job, so I'm going to university.
Anyways, you don't get to tell me how valuable I am to society, that's disgusting behavior.
I'm currently a senior in university (Dual CS and Computer Engineering), and I can say that it looks unbelievably grim in the Computer Science side of things.
In my classes there is hardly anyone that has been able to get their hands on an internship, and even the professors have started their classes with monologues about "I don't even know why you show up, none of you will have jobs after graduation, good luck out there." (quote from my DS professor) A lot of my peers are looking to move out of the US and look for jobs elsewhere, or perhaps jump straight into graduate school to ride it out.
On the Computer Engineering side, the faculty seems a lot happier, and the students also seem to be better off. But I don't think this will last however, I have noticed a steady decline in the businesses that have been searching for Computer Engineering in our career fairs. When I enrolled there were about two dozen "Computer Engineering Wanted" posters at the fair, and the last one in Feb 2025 I only counted one.
I'm honestly thinking that if this continues I'll be looking at the military, right now I'm trying to work on side projects in the meantime.
My department at the place I work is actively hiring Software Engineers. We have nine open requisitions for any seniority level and are regularly conducting interviews, but the new-grad candidates this year have been... disappointing.
I've conducted two phone screens this month and asked each candidate to implement FizzBuzz in their language of choice after giving them an explanation of the problem. Both took more than ten minutes to write out a solution and we don't even require them to run it; I'll excuse trivial syntax errors in an interview setting if I can tell what you meant.
When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
I also tutor students in the entry level C++ and Python courses (which are taken during your first two semesters as a CS student), and I must agree that a large cohort of my class is only able to program if they have ChatGPT/Claude open on one half of their screen. I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.
I honestly think that doing an in person fake technical interview with a few easy Leetcode questions at the end of your education would be a good way to weed out those that have failed to even learn the basics of the trade.
I'm so old I remember when calculators started appearing in general people's hands. Schools first banned them (what da ya mean you can't add a column of numbers by eye?) But gradually we switched over. We had a flirting interaction with log tables, and never did get to use a slide rule. I've no doubt old-school businesses were aghast at our ineptitude.
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
> College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
At least with a calculator, people still had to know the difference between addition and multiplication, in order to use the calculator correctly
> You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
Driving an LLM properly requires knowing to evaluate if the results are correct. People can certainly try to pass generated code over for PR. But even just one code feedback or debugging should uncover if the person understood what they were doing.
What if driving an LLM well is actually a desirable skill?
What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill?
What if the next generation of programmers is not focused on the creation of new code, but rather the improvement of existing code?
What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality (something we dont especially prioritize at the moment?)
I'd argue that we're asking the current generation to be massively adaptable in terms of what was expected of us 10 (or 30) years ago, as to what will be required of them 5 years from now.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that LLMs will teach them to be adaptable. I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
> What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill
I don't believe you can do this if you can't write code, but sure. Maybe
> What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality
LLMs seem more likely to increase the value of quantity and decrease the value of quality. That's playing out in front of us right now, with people "vibecoding"
> I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
And ones who can't adapt will be ground to mulch to fuel the LLM power plants no doubt
Your response just triggered a deja-vu from back when scaffolding tools were the new hot thing, now everyone and their dog was able to spin up that todo application within one CLI command. Except the generated code was mostly boilerplate that had to be heavily adapted for any real life use case, unveiling all the ignorance that could be covered up to that point. It's the same with vibe code. Looks fun until you throw it into reality - and then you're on your own and better know how to deal with stuff.
i don't think you can compare Calculator to LLM.
A calculator will always give you correct result as long as you give it correct input. This is not the case with LLM. No matter how good your prompt is, there always a chance the output is completely garbage.
did you ever consider the idea that AI is not the same as a calculator? or consider the fact that there is no reason why there couldnt be another quantum leap next year? and another one after that?
One big problem from the hiring side is the time to evaluate someone once complex tools are involved.
I teach computer science at a community college in Silicon Valley. Even before generative AI became available to the general public, cheating has been an issue with CS programming assignments.
One way I try to disincentivize cheating on projects is by having in-class paper exams, including weekly quizzes, as well as in-class paper assignments, and making sure that these in-class assessments are weighted significantly (roughly 60% of the overall grade). No electronic devices are allowed for these assignments. This forces my students to be able to write code without being able look up things online or consult an AI tool.
I still assign take-home programming projects that take 1-2 weeks to complete; students submit compilable source code. Practical hands-on programming experience is still vital, and even though cheating is possible, the vast majority of my students want to learn and are honest.
Still, for in-person assessments, if I had the budget, I’d prefer to hand out laptops with no Internet connection and a spartan selection of software, just a text editor and the relevant compiler/interpreter. It would making grading in-class submissions easier. But since we don’t have this budget, in-class exams and exercises are the next best solution I could think of.
This reply will likely sound disrespectful, but I post it not to be so, but rather to perhaps spark an alternate path.
As the world changes, education can be slowest to adapt. My father did his math on a slide rule. I was in high school as we transitioned to using calculators.
My personal take on your approach is that you're seeing this from the wrong side. Creating an artificial environment for testing suggests to me you're testing the wrong thing.
Of course most school, and college, classes devolve to testing memory. "Here's the stuff to learn, remember it enough to pass the exam." And I get it, this is the way it's always been, regardless of the uselessness of the information. Who can remember when Charles 1st was beheaded? Who can't Google it in an instant?
Programing on paper without online reference tools isn't a measure of anything, because in the real world those tools exist.
Indeed, the very notion that we should even be testing "ability to write code" is outdated. That the student can create code should be a given.
Rather an exam should test understanding, not facts. Here's 2 blocks of code, which is better and why? Here's some code, what are the things about it that concern you?
Instead of treating the use of AI (or Google, or online help, or that giant C reference book I had) as "cheating", perhaps teach and assess in a world where AI exists.
I truly do get it. Testing comprehension is hard. Testing understanding is hard. Testing to sift wheat from chaff is hard. But, and I'm being harsh here i know, testing memory as a proxy for intelligence or testing hand-code-output as a proxy for understanding code is borderline meaningless.
Perhaps in the age of AI the focus switches from 'writing code' to 'reading code'. From the ability to write to the ability to prompt, review, evaluate and so on.
Perhaps the skill that needs to be taught (to the degree that community college seeks to teach skills) needs to be programing with AI, not against it.
I say all this with respect for how hard your job is, and with my thanks that you do it at all. I also say it understanding that it's a huge burden on you that you didn't necessarily sign up for.
The problem is that tools like AI are useful if and only if you have the prerequisite knowledge, otherwise they are self-destructive.
It's similar to a calculator. We give student graphing calculators, but ONLY after they have already graphed by-hand hundreds of times. Why? Because education does not work like other things.
Efficiency, in education, is bad. We don't want to solve problems as fast as possible, we want to form the best understanding of problems possible. When I, say, want to book an airplane ticket, I want to do that in the fastest way possible. The most efficient manner. I care not about how an airport works, or how flight numbers are decided, or how planes work.
But efficient education is bad education. We can skip 99% of education, if we wanted. We can have, say, the SAT - and spend 1 year studying only for the SAT. Don't bother with the other 12 years of schooling.
Will you get an acceptable score on the SAT this way? Maybe. Will you be intelligent? No, you will be functionally illiterate.
If we use AI for programming before we can program, then we will be bad programmers. Yes, we can pass a test. Yes, we can pass a quiz. But we don't know what we're doing, because education is cumulative. If we skip steps, we lose. If we cut corners, we lose. It's like trying to put a roof on a house when the foundation isn't even poured.
I wish I could have gone to these schools where testing is just memorization. Everything would have been so easy
I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.
Don't lock down the computer unless you are hiring people to work in a SCIF. Instead, give candidates a brutally hard/weird problem and tell them to use any resources they can get their hands on, by fair means or foul. (They will do that anyway if you hire them.) Then watch how they deal with it.
Do they just give up and stalk off in a huff?
If they Google for answers, do they use sensible queries?
If they use AI, do their prompts show skill at getting ideas, avoiding blind alleys, and creating effective tests?
If they call their friends, see how effective they are at communicating the requirements and turning the answers into a solution. Might be management material.
I’ll second this, and we had enough resumes to only interview those with a relevant Master’s degree. I was shocked and I still don’t have a full explanation. I don’t doubt that it’s also hard out there, but on the hiring side we also did far more interviews than we wanted. (And yes the salary is >>100k, full remote, benefits etc)
> When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
I feel like this doesn't get said enough, but I'm almost certain your issue is happening during filtering prior to even getting to the interview stage. Companies are straight up choosing (the wrong) applicants to interview, the applicant fails the interview, the company does not move forward with them, and then the companies does not go back and and consider the people they originally filtered out.
I know companies get swamped with tons of applications, and filtering is basically an impossible problem since anyone can make their resume look good, but every applicant that applied can't be that bad.
Bad applicant filtering at the first step is hurting both companies and applicants.
2 data points and you're drawing a conclusion about an entire graduating class? For all we know, you might be experiencing a reality that you're company isn't able to attract great young talent.
FizzBuzz was always a great filter. Even in the pre-LLM days. Many people can code for years and never once use the modulo operator. Solving the problem gets a lot more clunky without it and they get rejected.
Yes but also it is one of the most common programming questions for non-FAANG companies. Are grads not preparing for interviews? It is one google search to Jeff Atwood’s blog.
When I was in school in the early 2010s I was working in a professor's lab and overheard conversations that the administration was telling profs/TAs to pass kids who profs/TA's thought should have failed. I've since seen the required coursework to graduate become less rigorous. There were students I worked with personally I graduated with who were very bad. I'm sure there still great students who care about learning but I cannot imagine how bad the average student is with ChatGPT being able to do student's assignments.
Are you offering enough pay that competent people would want to work there?
We're in the greater Seattle area and I make north of $200k, so I feel like yes :shrug:
My experience is that this problem significantly predates AI. Not that AI won't make it worse, but pre-2020 the majority of entry level developer applicants I interviewed could not write a basic for loop in their choice of language, never mind the modulo operator.
There's setting expectations, but saying "none of you will have jobs after graduation" feels criminally cynical and counter productive, especially coming from a teacher.
What do y'all think of this one?
In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, one of my commencement speakers (and the recipient of an honorary doctorate) was Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express. I don't remember his exact words, but his message to the graduating class was, we have a different perspective on the world and different values— thriftier ones, necessarily— and if we stay true to them, the world will reflect them when we succeed.
"Maybe instead of having a car, like your parents' generation, your first big purchase may be a bike. Times change." Something like that.
Four days later, he laid off four thousand workers from AmEx, just a smidge more people than the graduating class.
Edit: according to Wikipedia, that year he took home $16.6 million.
There’s a huge difference between “a bad job market for new grads“ and “none of you will have jobs next year“
I'll roll back the clock somewhat to 1992 when I graduated. A different time, but also a challenging one. (As with all reminiscing context matters, and those elsewhere likely have a different history. )
I graduated into a world without internet (we had it at university, hosted on Unix and Vax machines, but it wasn't available commercially. ) People who had computers were running DOS. Most businesses had no computers at all.
So the job market was both good and bad. We graduated with skills that were hard to find. But we graduated into a world where big companies had computers, small companies had paper.
So huge market opportunity, but also huge challenges. We'd either graduate into big business (banking, insurance, etc) or start something new.
I joined a person doing custom software development. We'd sell both the need, the software, and usually the hardware. ) When we didn't have work we'd work on our own stuff, eventually switching from custom development to products.
We had to bootstrap, there was no investment money in our neck of the woods.
I won't pretend the job market is the same (or even vaguely similar) now, but it seems to me that opportunities for self-employment still exist. Software is still something you can build with basically zero capital.
Ultimately a job is just someone else finding a way to add value to society. Software us one of the few ways you can do that yourself, skipping the employer.
95% of people see "a job" as the goal. I get that. My own kids are like that (zero interest in starting something new.) But there are opportunities for the other 5%. Yes, it's lot more than just coding, and yes it's a lot more risky, but the opportunities are there.
As for me, I'm closing in on retirement, but at the same time building a new (not tech) business from scratch, because there's still value I can add, and a niche I can service.
I say this all to encourage current students. You can see the world as "done" or you can see it as an infant just waiting for you to come and add your unique value. And in 35 year's time feel free to encourage the next generation with your story.
This is the correct philosophy.
At my company, we have increasingly been experiencing interns reneging on their offers. Students will accept multiple offers and then bail on the one they don't want last minute which prevents us from replacing them with someone else. We bring in hundreds of interns every summer and the reneg rate is approaching 20%. It sucks because it prevents people from getting an internship(and us getting the intern).
Low trust society. Due to how recruiting works nowadays I guess what they are doing is rational. Do they fear their main choice of employer bailing on their offer?
It sounds like they are using a smart strategy for their outcome optimization: Not putting all eggs in one basket, or staking all hopes on one employer. You do the same by accepting a bigger pool of applicants than you plan to hire - so what makes you feel entitled to a privileged position in such negotiations?
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there is certainly no shortage of tech capital flowing right now... where is the corresponding burst in hiring? is this economic or AI?
Graduate employment crises happen at least once every decade (initial covid, 2008 crisis, dotcom bust, early 90s recession etc). What I could argue is more unusual are those bubble times when getting a great job right out of college is easy. And then how quickly those expectations are taken for granted...
GenX'ers will remember the days of 'Slackers' 'Reality Bites' and the malaise of those who graduated with fancy degrees in the early 90's but stuck in barista jobs etc.
Anecdata: Recently spoke with a friend's son who graduated compsci a year-ish ago, he reckons none of his year got jobs, now working in a kitchen. (in australia for context). Very sad. For comparison, I graduated just after the dot-com crash, and our year mostly found jobs, just not very good ones, so maybe they're doing worse than we did. Good luck convincing anyone to study compsci any more.
As an Aussie computer science student, I do wonder what they are actually looking for. I know full well that uni isn’t teaching anything useful (heck my uni doesn’t even allow compsci students to take C programming) so I try and extend my knowledge by working on projects in my own time. Recently I’ve been getting into reverse engineering, before that I was writing my own shell from scratch in C. Is this good stuff to do job-wise?
Sure. Contributing to open-source, releasing and maintaining independent projects, is also good because it shows you can work with others and finish things on your own. Looking for internships is good if there are any.
You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.
They’re just looking for Indians
Slightly off topic, did Australia ever fix the laws around stock options that meant you paid taxes on unrealized gains?
I always wonder about things like that stifling the start-up ecosystem and lower numbers of jobs
You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains in Australia unless they're in a self-managed superannuation fund and you have over $2 million. Regular investments outside of super are only taxed when you realize the gains. Superannuation is your retirement funds, doesn't seem that relevant to the start-up ecosystem.
I've noticed some folks, seemingly on principle say that older folks should keep working, basically until they die, presumably because they don't want them to collect social security or other entitlements, but does that end up having the negative economic impact of making it harder for young folks to find jobs?
This is a common misconception about the economy. There is not a fixed pie of jobs to be distributed.
Rather, the opposite is generally true, the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment.
Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.
Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.
"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"
So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?
Next they will be telling us about their new perpetual motion machine.
While a pure perpetual motion machine isn't possible, "life", "economy", "knowledge" are all things that not only strongly tend to grow but compound.
More people working doesn't just mean more jobs filled. It means more people making money and spending it, so more people needed on the supply side.
The fact that it sounds circular doesn't make it bad logic in this case. It's actually a magnitude increasing spiral. All funded by the Sun.
Has this happened with housing?
Housing has perverse economic incentives, mucking it up.
It is also, obviously, a limited resource that doesn't compound directly. Although its usefulness could compound in terms of density and vertical use increasing housing.
The problem that slows that:
In almost all areas, "property taxes" actually tax both the land (the exclusionary resource that should be taxed since its use reduces land available for others) and the property on it (a wealth tax).
The result of it being a combination tax, is that increasing the value of property on land increases its tax as well. So there is a strong disincentive undercurrent reducing investments in increasing housing on property. It isn't as profitable as it should be.
Even worse, land which is underused, is only taxed as land. Basically getting a tax break relative to the same land nearby which has been developed for maximum use. Meanwhile, the land value goes up parasitically, if while holding but not improving land, neighbors invest in their properties.
The result makes owning land a very good passive parasitical value-growing investment.
Which makes it useful for rich people to store vast sums of money in. Driving prices way above the market value that simple housing should have.
Until the tax issue is fixed, housing can't be fixed. Other changes may be needed to, but just that would make a big difference to everyone's incentives.
(It does happen - but rarely. In 2002, Altoona, Pennsylvania adopted a pure land-value tax, meaning they taxed only the value of the land, not the structures. By 2011, this system fully replaced their traditional property tax, renormalizing so the total tax remained stable. I.e. land was taxed more, improvements none. The effect: owners of productive, developed parcels (homes, businesses) paid less tax, while holders of undeveloped or underused land, such as mansions rarely visited with lots of open acreage, paid more—effectively removing the financial instrument advantage, and turning them into money pits. Land prices declined, development increased, and affordability improved for locals. -- Unfortunately, in 2016 the property tax was reinstated as before.)
"More people working" merely contributes to growth and innovation. You need other inputs as well. The number of people working may or may not be a bottleneck.
But once you do have growth and innovation going one way or another, then that leads to more jobs.
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Also, he taking inspiration from Indiana and putting a 4.5% tariff on all imported circles.
That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.
please do not blame this on "old people"
anyone in corporate america in a hiring position knows the prevailing trend -- you either hire h1b (for maximum leverage) or overseas (for cost savings). we've been told to hire h1b ONLY.
> we've been told to hire h1b ONLY
If you’re not being hyperbolic, this seems like fraud on the part of whoever is submitting visa applications for your company.
Which doesn't mean it isn't common.
Sounds about right.
Ya welcome to reality
yep. H1B needs a major reform. Unfortunately both the democratic party and the GOP is against reforming it.
stoph1b.com
I work at a Fortune 100 and for the most part, we can ONLY hire citizens and do not use H1Bs without a particularly strong reason. Curiously, I'd estimate we still hire 80% naturalized citizens.
I'm not blaming this on "old people", and certainly not "old people" who want to work, I'm blaming it on a government that artificially deflates the retirement rate.
You have a moral duty to report your employer for this. Frankly it should be treated the same as treason.
> it should be treated the same as treason
No, it shouldn’t. Treason has a specific meaning.
Treason is a strong word. It is a knowingly detrimental action against American workers and companies to dodge requirements for hiring skilled foreign workers.
The focus and the main point remains: It's unethical, it's illegal, and I wish punishment on the companies and the individuals who fraudulently scam American workers out of jobs.
stoph1b.com, we have a sub lets organize.
Treason isn't even a legal concept. Who cares about any given meaning without that? If it strikes you as treason, that's as good a reason to call it treason as any.
Personally, I think there's lots of treason that pervades our life. Hell you could argue the meaning of "national interest" used by our state department is itself treasonous.
Any definition of the word will come down to what you perceive as in our interests. For easy examples, see Snowden and Manning.
> Treason isn't even a legal concept.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-3/section-3...
Sorry, perhaps I should have said "not a well-defined legal concept", or else we would surely all be enemies of the state.
It’s anti-American behavior against a person in America as opposed to against the nation specifically. An attack on one is an attack on us all.
Lots of things are anti-American behavior.
Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Even things that are treasonous in a colloquial sense are still pretty narrow, and tend to refer to other specific forms of betraying your country, that just happen to be other crimes -- like espionage, or insurrection.
I think it is anti-American to discriminate on the basis of origin. Where you are from has no bearing on many if not most jobs. I may not be making the point you think I’m making, I’m making a nuanced point that we have a duty to report treason, and we have a duty to report whatever it is when you have an ongoing state of affairs in which there exists a stated or effective policy of only (or never) hiring a certain group of people.
Is it anti American to favor Americans for jobs?
I’m not sure, can you make an argument for why it should be?
> Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Adversary to the people, or the state? These are wildly different concepts. Just because my state has beef with China doesn't mean they can't convince me that my life is better with China in it. Sometimes states just misrepresent the people.
Right, but in the same vein, the British crown has a documented history of applying that label to dissidents. It was part of why were revolted in the first place.
Our definition for what constitutes treason is purposely narrow specifically due to the abuse potential.
It’s just the free market. It it with a big spoon, you asked for it
Free market isn’t a pass to do illegal things. There are many free market things that are illegal. Some would even be considered treasonous.
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Report what? They say everything verbally in a closed office. There is no paper trail. Even if there was, the entire industry and current administration are in complete alignment on this issue. They want to reduce labor costs.
I actually do blame this on old people. The reason jobs are being shipped overseas is because western workers are not productive enough to justify their premium. Work culture is part of that, but stuff like zoning and the welfare state is the main culprit.
This is actually not at all correct. US productivity per worker has gone up for a very long time.
https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/in-brief-u...
People who worked in the USA are entitled to collect Social Security once they are old enough. This applies regardless of whether they are still working. In other words, current income doesn't reduce Social Security benefits.
It would help, because they’d be paying payroll taxes into the system even as they were collecting benefits.
The social security taxes you pay are used to buy credits. You can buy a maximum of 4 credits per year. Once you have 40 credits you are allowed to draw benefits from the system - when you are old enough. If you only have 39 credits, you don’t get social security.
When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.
There are tax disincentives to working while collecting social security.
Sure, but there’s similar tax disincentives to seeking more gainful employment as well.
I never looked at it like that. Perhaps allowing folks to work after retirement age is a form of age discrimination to a certain reading. Social Security should be sufficient for everyone’s retirement. If it isn’t, that’s a separate issue, and is also effectively another form of age discrimination, promising a funded retirement and the other party not upholding their end of the bargain.
Interestingly you can trace the establishment of the retirement age, and of social security, directly to the frustration that younger people can't easily compete with lifelong workers.
There's infinite potential jobs. Doing anything useful is a job.
No, doing something people are willing to pay for is a job.
This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.
The minimum wage isn't the problem, it's wage stickiness generally. Also, unemployment predates minimum wage laws.
But wave stickiness is sorta just part of human nature.
The minimum wage makes it illegal to work if you don't have the skills for minimum wage work. I wish more people understood this
There is no credible evidence that reasonable minimum wages have lowered employment in practice[0], and there are theoretical reason to believe it can increase it[1].
That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.
[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.
[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.
Curious what you think about the UK, then. A software engineer in the UK makes 45k GBP on average. A minimum wage salary there (at 12.21 GBP per hour) is ~22k a year. The wage squeeze between skilled professional and minimum wage surely lowers the amount of people entering skilled professions
Well it doesn't matter what I think, just what empirical evidence says.
That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.
That’s un-American!
Personal question, but I had to drop out a couple years ago as a Math/CS senior. I felt like the clock was really ticking back then to get my foot in the door. I'm considering re-enrolling (only two terms remaining), would it be better to wait until if/when the market has recovered so I can enter the market with a fresh degree? I worry a downside of completing it now would be a stale degree by the time the job market recovers. Assuming equal job experience, employers seem to prefer fresh graduates. But you know what they say about time in the market vs timing the market..
How much would it cost to complete your degree? Could you take online or CC courses that you could transfer to your old program?
While having no degree hasn't historically been much of a blocker, during a weaker job market credentials can and do play a role in tie breaking during hiring.
Honestly, even a WGU style bachelors degree can be enough depending on years of experience.
Not much given that it's a state school and I only have two terms (6-8 courses) remaining. I'll probably re-enroll this fall, perhaps I've been too negative. Thanks for the input.
Cool!
That said, be strategic when re-enrolling - if you have a job today, hold on to it tightly and try to finish your program remotely and/or via transfer credits. Finishing a degree at the expense of having a job today is really dumb given the current market.
If you can take low cost and/or remote offerings from a CC or normal college, you can continue to hold a job. Also, most colleges now offer their courses online for credit - even Stanford and Harvard type programs. I'm sure your original program offers a significant portion of it's coursework online for credit.
Finally, Ds get degrees. You can skirt with the bare minimum and you'll be fine. If you are mid-career and kept your day job, no one will ask about your GPA.
Yeah, I have to keep my job or I can't afford to live (non-CS/blue collar job however). I'm done with CC, I only have two terms remaining to get a CS or Math degree now (was double majoring prior but life got in the way and will likely only complete one now). I'm unsure whether at this junction it'd be better to complete a math degree or CS degree, tbh.
My uni's online offerings drop off like a stone after a students sophomore year. Very little online classes for seniors, which has been a big problem for me as I work full time and live over an hour from campus. If I get a schedule change mid-term, I just have to drop out. It drive me nuts as this policy disproportionately impacts the lower income / higher expense students who can't afford to live in the city and need to work full time (i.e, we get 3/4 of the way through our degree via online classes and debt, then it becomes inaccessible as in-person requirements are required for completion). It's especially ironic as a CS major!
But anyway, I'll probably wrap it up this academic year if things remain stable for me, it's just a questionable time to complete a degree now more than ever. I just want to work on a team doing interesting, challenging work. If I could I'd go to grad school.
You are over analyzing this. It doesn’t matter. No one cares about when you graduated. You are going to need to hustle. If you are truly passionate about this industry you will make it work. Trying to fit some ideal on paper with timing is impossible
Thanks, you're probably right. I do feel that letting the dust settle on the AI layoff hype train might be prudent, but getting it done sooner is likely best.
Pursue a degree now to get you foot it the door sooner. I went back to school after a few year break. I also worked nights and weekends full time in the restaurant industry. It took sweat, tears, and burn out but over a decade later it’s 100% worth it.
Don’t worry about timing at all.
Thanks for the input, I'll aim to wrap it up promptly then.
I get unemployment being high for office-based jobs right now, companies think they can slap AI onto everything and get rid of employees, but what’s the reason for min wage jobs? Are they suddenly overflowing with applicants?
I believe the changes have more to do with US tax laws which have made it harder for companies to write off R&D. Companies might say it’s due to AI to put an investor-friendly spin on it.
I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.
That U.S. tax law change was reversed in the BBB that just passed.
The big beautiful bill addressed that r&d issue.
It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).
The problem is code is a lot more context sensitive than most capital expenditures. If I pay for a machine that makes really good chalk, then when my company eventually folds that machine is still probably worth a fair amount to my competitors. In contrast, the code I wrote today which probably is going to save my company ~200 man/hours a year is almost certainly completely and utterly worthless to literally anyone else, because it automates a hyperspecific piece of a company-specific workflow.
The economy is in a general downturn, so it's not all attributable to AI.
Min wage jobs are in the service industry which will take a hit from people pulling back on discretionary spending. Is it one of those "because people think there might be a recession, they manifest one" things?
Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.
Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.
Min-wage jobs normally have a lot more applicants than skilled/office-based jobs. Every skill is a barrier.
Who says unemployment in min wage jobs is high?
Supply and demand. Too many people crashing into the world. Businesses are better at running with fewer people and successful businesses prevent conpetitors from getting very far, that's why they are successful.
I don't think that's it at all. It feels a lot more like a large scale coordination problem to me.
The market is 100% efficient with everyone investing in index funds.
/s
Do not forget that while number of graduates is at historically high levels, the economy hasn't adapted to it. Still needs drivers, bakers, plumbers, etc.
I've read that since then 70s the ratio of blue vs white collar in US has shifted by few % digits, but the number of graduates has boomed in the meantime.
This means that now jobs that never required a degree require one and titles are inflated to make people feel better.
We actually have more than enough jobs for graduates, they are just being outsourced to india/manila. We really don't need more bakers, Wonderbread saw to that. Why drive when uber destroyed the taxis and trucking companies barely pay their drivers? You are living in a wishful world that will not align with reality.
Which one are you? Driver, baker, or plumber?
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This is history repeating itself and it will only get worse.
We saw this in 2008 post-GFC where entry-level white collar jobs just completely disappeared. It was really the start of millenials graduating with a ton of debt, possibly postgrad degrees, and working at Starbucks. Not because their degrees are useless. Their entry-level jobs just disappeared.
This has never recovered.
So you don't have to search long to find now 40 year olds who are permanent renters, have barely enough in their bank account to pay this month's bills, definitely don't own their own house, still have a ton of student debt they're unlikely to ever be able to repay and realizing they have no hope and they have no choice but to work 3 jobs until they die.
Yet those who believe in the myth of meritocracy just write this off as a personal moral failure or getting "philosophy degrees". At the older end, boomers simply have no idea because they bought their $2 million house for $11,000 in 1976.
Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose.
Gen-Z is now going through this exact same thing. Many don't yet understand they're looking at their future when they see a 40 year old barista or DoorDash driver.
All while the ultra-wealthy continue to get even wealthier at an extraordinary rate. We will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes.
This cannot and should not continue.
There are parts I agree with when it comes to older people being out of touch - but I'm going to go a bit against the grain here even if some don't like it.
I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.
It is not unreasonable to say that some degrees are not as valuable as others and will be more likely to struggle financially. Its a game of statistics. You are more likely to struggle financially with a degree in philosophy than a degree in engineering. Because even companies themselves when hiring for completely unrelated positions to a persons degree will take into account the fact that the engineering graduate probably worked a lot harder than the philosophy graduate.
But I do agree that the average non-degree or "less valuable" degree holder from the past had a much larger chance of making it out okay than nowadays.
> I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.
I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?
I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.
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philosophy is probably a bad example to use because i think it's actually one of the "liberal arts" majors that's actually very applicable to skills you need in the corporate world.
the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.
Democracy and equality is crumbling in front of our eyes. Epstein's client list has disappeared in full public view, his footage is doctored in full public view and no one can do anything besides write angry comments or shuffle around legal paper that won't amount to anything. Everything just looks like a meaningless TV show, whatever new horrific thing happens it'll be on the news for a while and disappear - no one will face any consequences, all of us will just click the next article. We are serfs and no one wants to admit it, and we love individuality and isolation too much to have the kind of class-consciousness it would take to actually create change.
Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.
At what point did equality and democracy ever exist? The only things that substantially changed were who the lords were, the method of gaining power, and what shape the power structure took. At no point was there ever meaningful equality, not even before the law.
I think that's an overly simplified view of 2000 years of history. We've never had a utopia, but its safe to say we have more democracy now than in the feudal ages. There have been periods of greater concentration of unchecked power and lesser in history, some periods where government was stronger and wasn't captured as much by private interests.
The USA is currently a “democracy” and the government of the USA is the single largest human organization in history, and has powers that monarchs could only ever have dreamed of. Surely, you are correct that governments have had varying levels of power, but they were at all times comprised of or bought by oligarchs.
I agree with your point. I'll just add that in my country, at least, the facade of democracy seemed to provide society with infectious glimmers of hope. The hope is fading quickly, and the general mood is both sour and bitter, straining interpersonal relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure how democracy can really work in huge super-complex societies. This is why we have the "iron law of oligarchy".
Democracy in the sense of representative majoritarianism cannot work as the representatives will be bought, coerced, or murdered. In an absolute democracy, when the majority cease to be useful the powerful will launch propaganda campaigns and/or manipulate the vote outcome.
Have you ever stopped and thought maybe there really is no Epstein client list and maybe he really did commit suicide?
Maybe the Epstein client list is the propaganda?
Why would Epstein keep a "client" list? What criminal goes out of their way to document their crimes? What service was he even offering? I don't think even the local drug dealer is stupid enough to keep a written list of clients.
If some shady forces killed Epstein in prison why didn't they just kill him before he got to prison? The shady forces can get to him in federal prison but don't know he is being investigated to go back to prison? Why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell die in a mysterious car accident?
Why do people care about a client list that makes no sense and not all this supposed video evidence?
Your post just shows you spend too much time on social media reading bullshit that you think is real and it is not.
"The list" is really a catch all to all sorts of Epstein-related information.
Even when you fly private, you need to provide a manifest of who is on the plane. There were hundreds of flights. The FAA has that information. One can argue it's not evidence of malfeasance and by itself it's probably not but there's also a difference once sharing a flight and, for example, visiting the island 60 times.
There are also documented connections to all sorts of people including Prince Andrew, the Clintons, RFK Jr (which he voluntarily disclosed [1]), former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, etc.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was a known Mossad asset, so much so that he essentially got a state funeral in Israel [2]. He also mysteriously died (drowned) on a yacht.
Ghislaine herself was herself convicted of sex trafficking. To whom? Nobody in particular. She has remained steadfastly silent on the issue.
It's also documented fact he got the plea deal of the century in 2008 that even allowed him to travel from jail anywhere he liked as long as he was back within 24 hours, even when there was grand jury testimony of SA of a 14 year old. The US attorney who authorized the deal, Alexander Acosta, became Trump's Labor Secretary until he resigned after details came to light following Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Between the home in NYC, the home in Palm Beach and the island there were hidden cameras everywhere. There are multiple, credible accounts of tapes that went missing following the 2019 arrest.
Nobody has ever really accounted for where his money came from and what services he actually provided.
Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.
But there is absolutely information the government is sitting on and tons of evidence that he (or Ghislaine) are linked to 3 letter agencies in a blackmail operation (as a so-called "access agent").
This isn't even a partisan issue: the current administration has zero interest in releasing more information about this (and is trying to downplay it, even though Epstein is core foundational mythology for the MAGA cult) but we had 4 years of the Biden administration who didn't release it either.
[1]: https://front.moveon.org/rfk-jr-s-troubling-patterns-continu...
[2]: https://archive.ph/BVWjz
> Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.
The failed security camera pointed down the hall Epstein's cell was in. No guard stations would have been visible from it. The security footage they did finally release was pointing directly at the guard station.
Also, that footage combined with the map shows if you entered the floor and went straight to Epstein's cell without going to the guard station, you wouldn't have been visible on the camera. So it doesn't even show what they wanted it to show by releasing it.
gen z is not going to college like millennials did. and i do think it was a moral failure for everyone to jump on an unsustainable bandwagon... they paid too much for a degree in the humanities and when asked about it they would say "well... its just what everyone does." mindless behavior hurts people and the economy so how is this not a moral failing? people should have stuck up for what they knew was right. everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless) and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason. people were intellectually lazy and they got scraped. big fucking deal.
> people should have stuck up for what they knew was right.
> everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)
> and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason
These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.
"Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose."
Sure, a few more poor people voted for trump and a few more rich people voted for Harris, but it basically rounded to 50-50. Rich people want to tear down the system too.
In fact, I think I'd want to see a breakdown by belief system. My gut is that generally speaking working class people believe in meritocracy more than rich people, and that is in fact why they voted for Trump. To not be lumped in with the 'DEI hires'(their perspective, not mine).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12930#...
The above research suggests that poor people living with high inequality are more likely to believe in meritocracy.
The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.
Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).
And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.
The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.
The current economic order is good.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
You're using inflation-adjusted metrics, but prices keep rising faster than inflation, and wages keep rising slower than inflation.
(Personally, my preferred measurement of inflation is "how much prices go up", but economists don't agree with me)
Prices cannot rise faster than inflation by the same metric. By definition the rise of prices—by whatever debatable metric—is inflation.
Wages have been rising faster than inflation, that’s link #2.
Well, I look at the inflation numbers, and then I look at the prices, and I notice that prices consistently rise faster than inflation. And I think that observed reality outweighs any vague theoretical justification. But I'm not an economist. I notice that economics seems to be the only "science" where if the theory and reality disagree, it means the reality is wrong.
Go look at the labor participation chart. It's bad enough people are giving up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Minus the Covid blip, not lately!
That's a result of secular growth in female participation. If you remove that it's almost monotonically declining.
“If you remove the workers who are showing increasing participation, the labor force participation rate is declining.”
Sure.
Well that's one interpretation of those charts. Here's another:
Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.
You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).
Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).
It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].
[1]: https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...
Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.
Real median household income is up over 36% since 1984 (the furthest back the linked chart goes: 1984 was in the middle of an economic expansion, so you’d expect a comparison with four years earlier to look even better).
And CPI has just as many potential substitution issues the other way: Hedonic adjustments are made, but it’s effectively impossible to quantify the value of decades worth of novel and improved goods that simply didn’t exist decades earlier.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience.
I linked decades of numbers about the median household, which you then numerically misrepresented. Bubble, pop thyself.
"And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%."
Don't forget that it also had the highest level of tax dodging available through various mechanisms.
If you think the lengths people go to now are extreme to avoid taxes-- think about what they did were willing to do then.
As a non American I’d love to hear about this, any leads I can explore?
Offshore tax havens is the usual one. Panama papers put only a small dent in that. All sorts of stuff that's been cracked down on in recent years, like "take your salary through a one person company as dividends".
UK had a scheme where people would take out ""loans"" from their employer that would then be "forgiven". I believe this one blew up Rangers football club.
Fun UK example from the 70s: the tax on car parts was much lower than the luxury tax on cars, so people invented the "kit car" which you assembled yourself: the Caterham 7. Still niche popularity today.
Well, for one, people who owned small/medium sized businesses would put effectively their entire family on payroll to cut the businesses’ earnings and lower their tax bill.
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I've thankfully avoided the worst of the GFC graduate syndrome myself but 50-55k in 2008 dollars is a very generous estimation of earnings for someone with no job experience trying to get a first job during a recession. 20-30k is more realistic if you could find work at all. The best I could do was about 20k substitute teaching, and that was very uneven income. If I hadn't been able to live with my parents for three years before scoring a Linux admin job halfway across the country (in a much higher CoL area) for ~48k (and crucially including health insurance so I could get off my parents' plan), I would have been on the street. It's almost impossible to get off the street once you're there.
In short, have some empathy. Bad things do happen to good people, and even bad people deserve some dignity in life.
> Even if you had a meager income of $50-$55k a year this whole time, you would have produced nearly $1 million dollars worth of income before taxes by now.
And how much was rent, and food, and car insurance? It's easy to multiply a salary by 20 and conclude that they fucked up. It's a lot harder to actually live on $50k/year when the system, owned and run by extraordinarily rich people, is trying to extract money from you with every dark pattern at its disposal. Car broke down? Credit card debt, 18% APR. Delay in paycheck deposit? Overdraft fees. Kindly old landlord decides to sell? Rent +20%.
When I was 18 I got a tech job with a top ten tech company (no FAANG at the time) right out of high school having only completed half a tech trade school. Home price to median income ratio was under 3.
Few talk about the fact that many companies will only hire at the rate you currently make plus 15 percent. Start low and never catch up.
In California and possibly elsewhere, asking for previous salary is now illegal.
Lie about the amount you currently make.
You do realize there are parts of this country with a labor market beyond your comprehension, right?
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exactly correct. millennials decided to sleepwalk forward and ignore reality. millennials are not out there solving societal problems even today. millennials also benefit from being raised in one of the most prosperous and nurturing environments that has ever existed. the only thing millennials ever did was spawn AI in a completely irresponsible and regrettable way. now our kids have to grow up not even knowing whether or not they will make it.
> millennials also benefit from being raised in one of the most prosperous and nurturing environments that has ever existed
Ah yes, the financial crisis that was literally feared as the end of western capitalism was the most prosperous time ever.
maybe not true for all of us but by 2008 i was done developing. 0-12 is basically when you are created as a person -- molded by your environment. crime may have been higher back then but it was a much better environment to be raised in. society has waned quite a bit since then. public schools have waned a lot. all of our institutions. nobody feels like they can speak candidly or help another person without risking being taken to trial. yes, xkcd make a comic where he makes fun of people who say that things have gotten worse. but the crazy, unbelievable reality is that xkcd was wrong shock horror!
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We are closer to the end of western capitalism today than we ever were before.
> the groundswell to Trump
Thankfully that went so well!
Anyone else interested in generations and eras? When did the "knowledge economy" begin in the West, late 60's? Anyway I imagine LLM's are in the process of killing off the knowledge economy. Personal computers expanded it.
The way we cheered on remote work is really biting us in the ass. It's scary how many people I know or accounts I've read about all new hiring in their department just being Indian remote employees.
I’ve faced this since 2020. ATS are the true gatekeepers. Someone finally sued
Thread from 30 days ago (albeit without much discussion at the time) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294488
If they’re talking about this now, it’s been going on for a while. Just finally reaching the public consciousness now where it’s a common subject on the news.
Or, alternatively, the crop of current grads education is abysmal compared to past graduates, and companies are reluctant to hire them.
This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.
Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.
idk why this was downvoted but anyway: the educational fallout from covid affected all ages, so the effect really is going to last for the next decade at least, with fading effects towards the younger generations as the educational system hopefully will be able to patch up the gaps somewhat. And if you grant that the negative effects will last much longer than 2 years, it doesn't make a lot of sense business wise to hold off new hires for that long
I had to completely abandon my 5 year 2 degree studies and get a job in enterprise it transformation.
It has been like this since 2012
I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not that the economy is bad, it's that there's a mismatch. We have tons of graduates who just finished with a degree in X, but we need people for job with skills Y
What is X and Y?
X is useful things like construction and computer science. Y is how to make people give you more of their money.
It's unclear from the article, I'm just saying this is what the data shows. The economy is strong, and young people can find jobs, but the findings in the article suggest young people with degrees are having trouble getting jobs.
The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".
Honestly, I think the impact of AI on jobs at all levels is being understated by folks here, as insane as that is.
Oh, I don't mean because it is actually doing people's jobs, or even because it is making people more productive (though it certainly is doing that in some cases).
I mean because management has bought into a lot of strange and misleading ideas about where it is right now. They think that you get a 10x engineer by using AI IDEs and other tools. If it fails with their existing tech, that clearly means it wasn't trained on their current tech stack so they should switch!
There are a lot of sales opportunities, but the reality and the things that non-practitioners and practitioners are seeing are far apart.
Which is fine. If they’re right they’re right.
2008 all over again
Stay hungry
Does this mean the H1B visa program will be curtailed? /s
Expanded you mean? Wouldn’t that be nice if companies could buy and sell h1b workers? They are not citizens anyway and the Constitution doesn’t give em any rights even if they think they are white
Non-citizens still have rights
I believe there was an implicit /s at the end of that comment. At least, I really hope so.
stoph1b.com lets organize and bring positive change.
Lets hope so. But looks like the current admin hasn’t done much to restrict it. Other than raise filing fees, which is usually paid by the employer.
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