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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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...