I always find personal stories and quotes a weird way to tell these kinds of stories. Someone is always frustrated trying to find a job, right? Every field has ups and downs over time, and I know people whose fields were having a down turn in 2021 when tech was hotter than ever.
AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?
It's in a slump if you are a junior. You see these stories about experienced guys getting ridiculous comp packages, but if you are fresh out of undergrad getting especially a researcher position at a top outfit is very difficult.
> The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday.
I had graduated in 1984 and the market had dried up significantly until 1985, then it was booming. But, that year I searched for employment (crickets) and getting engaged in eventual very high tech, it was a great time, and I look back fondly at the personal journey. I dug ditches, painted apartments, and advanced myself. And I still tell people out of school and searching, enjoy the time to be un-interrupted as you will get fully engaged at some point and find yourself busy for the next 40 years.
I graduated in 2004 with a BS in computer science from CMU. I was always told I hadn't worked hard enough to become a software developer, even though that's what I was doing in minimum wage jobs where my title was DBA. Finally gave up after 12 years of searching. YMMV. It was weird when all my professors who said they'd help me find a job if I couldn't find one suddenly didn't have any time for me. Start your life now don't wait just because society tells you that's what you're supposed to do.
I know a dozen of those, and most of them are "starting their own company (stealth)" - aka they're unemployed for many months. It's all very weird (despite people saying "it's going to start improving" for 2 years now)
I think people have exceedingly high-expectations due to make-believe social-media content.
What I see amongst all the people is that both skill and the quality of work decreasing. Which is why, arguably, AI _is_ taking over entry-level jobs.
High percentage of new generation spend their time on TikTok & Instagram, watching reels & stories of some popular/famous people, who tend to have some money (high chance of inheritance or rich family), posing as a "regular" person on the street.
Take this quote for example;
“I told myself, by 26, I’d have my own house, I’d have my own family, I’d have my nice little luxury car. That hasn’t happened.”
This is an unrealistic by definition. I don't know what sort of thing a person needs to smoke to come to a conclusion that having _all_ of these, including a luxury car, is a norm for a 26 year old. By definition, if everyone has that _luxury car_, that car would not be a luxury item in the first place. Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one. One can probably buy/lease a car, probably second hand, but that's unlikely to be a `luxury` vehicle.
Another point is, while some people had adequate pictures/images posted, some did not even bother to put an effort to give a proper picture to the newspaper article. I am not a "wear a suit" person at all, but this attitude clearly shows how much care certain people put into actual work. Would you hire a such person who does sloppy job even at the job application? I would certainly not.
Sorry but the down turn in the job market is real and absolutely worst then people on this website want to realize. most are struggling, juniors especially.
The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.
Owning a home at 26 wasn’t unusual in the 80s. It is now. The average age of a first time homebuyer in that time has slipped by nearly a decade.
Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.
Part of the reason Boomers had it so easy was that they weren't all Psychology and English majors. They worked in hospitals, they worked in manufacturing, they worked trades - industries that are all facing labor shortages today because people consider it beneath them.
Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.
Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.
Funny thing is I am in my thirties and both my grandparents, who started as lower middle class to lower class backgrounds had all those things by 26 except maybe the luxury car but one of my grand parents had a bulldozer around the same age. My grandparents house cost $4000 to build in 1956 on two acres of land. It is worth in the neighborhood of $300k today. In their fifties another grandparent had a private airplane and multiple properties and comercial real estate. My parents went to college and got cushy middle class jobs and had houses that they paid off early. My generation has had it harder. But mind you my grandfather on one side grew up in the depression and lived in a rural house without running water or electricity for a time. My feeling is these kind of opportunities for intelligent Americans to build a successful life and enter the upper middle class or upper class are structurally less available today. I think that it has to do with credentialism and inflation of the costs of living and litigiousness and over regulation.
In 1956 you could build a decent house for the price of a year's income. Not that it was paid off in a year. But now to build a house may be 2-3+ years income depending on the size.
There are exceedingly high expectations on the employer side as well. Companies want to do more with very less. Sometimes you can find really under paying job adverts like beginner positions asking people to know front end, back end and everything else under the sun. It is no wonder there are issues like Soham Parekh when everyone wants that 1% engineer.
It is not reasonable to accept this narrative when the jobs report which should be straight up objective has been revised down by several orders of magnitude for more than a couple instances after-the-fact, where even the people who have a decade of direct experience are unable to find work.
What you call unrealistic by definition is realistically necessary in all but the little luxury car part, and its assumed you don't have a fully paid off mortgage either. The fact that its not should scare everyone because what that means is the resources required to produce children aren't available anymore, and that is just another sequential pipeline failure whose results will become evident with time and hysteresis with no solution due to mathematical chaos (non-determinism).
The primary issue is communication is jammed. AI imposes costs on the job seeker as much as the employer that requires labor to the point where matches aren't happening and the Shannon limit has likely been reached resulting in similar system behavior we typically attribute to the label RNA Interference (in cellular networks), but in communication networks.
If you can't notice there is a problem, how can you ever take any action to fix a problem you can't see. This is really disingenuous of the reality.
Career Development is another pipeline, if the first rung is gone, how do you get reinforcements that are competent? You've got a narrow lag period of time before the only candidates left are burnouts and those aging out, and eventually lost knowledge with no one able to do the job.
Because their unemployment rates specifically are catastrophic levels. I’ve seen reports as high as 19%. Fortunately, other demographics simply aren’t experiencing difficulties at this level.
As an aside, I personally noticed the market pick up hard in the last few weeks. I work in a niche industry, but get ads for software dev jobs regularly and they’ve really surged lately. The past year truly was a difficult time to find a job.
The fact that pretty much all new grads are having a more difficult time finding employment than in the past makes it harder to dismiss. If you write a story about 10% of experienced workers being un/underemployed, it's easy for readers to say "oh, that's just structural unemployment" or "they must not be that good at their job," even if someone paying attention to the numbers would know that it used to be 5% (or whatever).
And the running discussion over there is that Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics so they expect all their jobs to be replaced by either AI or Robots in the coming years.
So, my son just graduated at the start of the summer with a dual degree in Math and Computer Science. He would like to find an entry level job in software engineering. Does anyone have any advice to give him?
I know a lot of junior developers who just gave up on that industry over the last 2 years. It seems truly rough for them. But also that's comparing it to the general boom over the previous 10-15 years.
I have about 10 yrs experience, and just conducted my first job hunt in 5 years (I was with one company for a long time, then took a sabbatical for half a year after our dev team was off-shored). I was pretty concerned that it could take 6 months or more to find a gig. But I found myself interviewing with 6 or 7 companies within two weeks, and had 2 offers by the end of week 3 (I'm starting the new gig tomorrow). I consider myself a pretty average full-stack rails/react dev. I don't even bother applying to FANG (or whatever the acronym is now) jobs. So... I don't know if I just got lucky, but the job market felt pretty good when looking for senior roles. My interviews were a mix of referrals from previous coworkers, a couple recruiters reaching out, and (the job I accepted) from reaching out on LinkedIn to hiring managers posting jobs.
It feels like the AI wave is killing junior jobs, but driving demand for experienced developers to harness it, even if just harnessing it as a tool to speed up coding.
Most everyone I know, at all skill levels, go hundreds of applications deep before finally landing a real interview let alone a job these days (in far more than just tech, too). Their unemployment runs out and they can't even get in as a bartender or at a gas station. I used to love helping people find jobs they want, my own way of paying it forward from the people who did that for me, now nothing seems to work.
I interview extremely well, until 2022 I typically got the job I wanted on the first try, they used to find me! Now direct referrals to CEOs or founders from investors or employees result in them ghosting. I've also paradoxically been told that I'm overqualified and should be applying for eng lead/principal/cto positions... and that I don't have enough experience to apply for those roles when I do.
I've just been stringing together small bullshit contracts to pay for vices in the meantime, halfway coasting off passive income. Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.
I really do not think it's offshoring, either. The crews I have contracted work out to in the past (Eastern Europe, South Korea, Japan) are asking me if I've got anything for them, they've never done that before.
Why is there no feedback mechanism on the number of H1Bs issued each year? If American citizens are graduating and can’t find a job, certainly we don’t need as many H1Bs.
Junior jobs will come back when blitz-pricing of AI coding products end.
Current bosses think these prices with 200/mo to "leave it and auto-code for the whole month, day and night" will stay like this. Of course it won't.
Typical startup play but in massive scale.
Junior jobs might come back but not in bulk, still selective, very slowly.
It is so strange... around me in the Netherlands, the fresh graduates (kids of friends, cousins, nephews) cannot stop the inflow of job offers. The ones that graduated this summer all have jobs lined up for september. Wonder what's happening.
My biggest mistake was doing a MSc in AI. In hindsight it was a massive waste of time and I should have just aggressively mass applied to jobs and practiced for interviews as much as possible. After getting my BSc the rest meant nothing, portfolio / side projects, self-study, MSc, going to a high ranked university. All meant nothing, it comes down to applying / interviewing using maximum brute force. The rest in hindsight was largely irrelevant.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadAI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?
It's in a slump if you are a junior. You see these stories about experienced guys getting ridiculous comp packages, but if you are fresh out of undergrad getting especially a researcher position at a top outfit is very difficult.
What I see amongst all the people is that both skill and the quality of work decreasing. Which is why, arguably, AI _is_ taking over entry-level jobs.
High percentage of new generation spend their time on TikTok & Instagram, watching reels & stories of some popular/famous people, who tend to have some money (high chance of inheritance or rich family), posing as a "regular" person on the street.
Take this quote for example; “I told myself, by 26, I’d have my own house, I’d have my own family, I’d have my nice little luxury car. That hasn’t happened.”
This is an unrealistic by definition. I don't know what sort of thing a person needs to smoke to come to a conclusion that having _all_ of these, including a luxury car, is a norm for a 26 year old. By definition, if everyone has that _luxury car_, that car would not be a luxury item in the first place. Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one. One can probably buy/lease a car, probably second hand, but that's unlikely to be a `luxury` vehicle.
Another point is, while some people had adequate pictures/images posted, some did not even bother to put an effort to give a proper picture to the newspaper article. I am not a "wear a suit" person at all, but this attitude clearly shows how much care certain people put into actual work. Would you hire a such person who does sloppy job even at the job application? I would certainly not.
Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.
It feels like that’s less common now.
The other things (home, family, decent job) certainly don't seem unreasonable if we weren't living in a late stage capitalism dystopia.
No it isn't, this used to be the norm.
Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.
Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.
In 1956 you could build a decent house for the price of a year's income. Not that it was paid off in a year. But now to build a house may be 2-3+ years income depending on the size.
What you call unrealistic by definition is realistically necessary in all but the little luxury car part, and its assumed you don't have a fully paid off mortgage either. The fact that its not should scare everyone because what that means is the resources required to produce children aren't available anymore, and that is just another sequential pipeline failure whose results will become evident with time and hysteresis with no solution due to mathematical chaos (non-determinism).
The primary issue is communication is jammed. AI imposes costs on the job seeker as much as the employer that requires labor to the point where matches aren't happening and the Shannon limit has likely been reached resulting in similar system behavior we typically attribute to the label RNA Interference (in cellular networks), but in communication networks.
If you can't notice there is a problem, how can you ever take any action to fix a problem you can't see. This is really disingenuous of the reality.
Career Development is another pipeline, if the first rung is gone, how do you get reinforcements that are competent? You've got a narrow lag period of time before the only candidates left are burnouts and those aging out, and eventually lost knowledge with no one able to do the job.
Nothing into a pipeline, nothing out.
As an aside, I personally noticed the market pick up hard in the last few weeks. I work in a niche industry, but get ads for software dev jobs regularly and they’ve really surged lately. The past year truly was a difficult time to find a job.
And the running discussion over there is that Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics so they expect all their jobs to be replaced by either AI or Robots in the coming years.
I have about 10 yrs experience, and just conducted my first job hunt in 5 years (I was with one company for a long time, then took a sabbatical for half a year after our dev team was off-shored). I was pretty concerned that it could take 6 months or more to find a gig. But I found myself interviewing with 6 or 7 companies within two weeks, and had 2 offers by the end of week 3 (I'm starting the new gig tomorrow). I consider myself a pretty average full-stack rails/react dev. I don't even bother applying to FANG (or whatever the acronym is now) jobs. So... I don't know if I just got lucky, but the job market felt pretty good when looking for senior roles. My interviews were a mix of referrals from previous coworkers, a couple recruiters reaching out, and (the job I accepted) from reaching out on LinkedIn to hiring managers posting jobs.
It feels like the AI wave is killing junior jobs, but driving demand for experienced developers to harness it, even if just harnessing it as a tool to speed up coding.
Last I checked a year has 12 months so that should easily work no?
Most everyone I know, at all skill levels, go hundreds of applications deep before finally landing a real interview let alone a job these days (in far more than just tech, too). Their unemployment runs out and they can't even get in as a bartender or at a gas station. I used to love helping people find jobs they want, my own way of paying it forward from the people who did that for me, now nothing seems to work.
I interview extremely well, until 2022 I typically got the job I wanted on the first try, they used to find me! Now direct referrals to CEOs or founders from investors or employees result in them ghosting. I've also paradoxically been told that I'm overqualified and should be applying for eng lead/principal/cto positions... and that I don't have enough experience to apply for those roles when I do.
I've just been stringing together small bullshit contracts to pay for vices in the meantime, halfway coasting off passive income. Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.
I really do not think it's offshoring, either. The crews I have contracted work out to in the past (Eastern Europe, South Korea, Japan) are asking me if I've got anything for them, they've never done that before.
Typical startup play but in massive scale. Junior jobs might come back but not in bulk, still selective, very slowly.