When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities.
For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
> The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.
It is easier to start your own business than to get a job for a certain class of people in our industry. There is just not enough supply of jobs for people who “did everything right.” It’s a painful economic signal that US economy has run out of cushy Big Tech jobs and now needs an influx of innovative firms. This is difficult to explain to your relatives over Thanksgiving turkey but it is nonetheless the truth in my experience. If I could go back in time I would have gone to an Ivy League, gotten the proper internships, moved straight to the Bay during ZIRP, but alas I don’t have a Time Machine.
The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
First, I'm sorry you're having problems finding a job -- that sucks.
Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.
Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.
Not understanding the 'I did everything right and look what happened' intro, though certainly not a unique feeling. Tech hiring slowed at the tail end of 21 and the mass layoffs started in 22, 4 and 3 years ago respectively. Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results. Not that you should give up, but it's going to be switch majors or ride out the downturn. And that's not unique to now or even computer science(remember the MBA glut from the early 2000s?).
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
Honestly I think "applying for jobs" is becoming a thing of the past.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?
What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
I don't know why we need to be so dramatic about AI and automation. The reason you're not getting hired is because there's not enough positions and we have a huge amount of people in the industry. Tech is not exploding like it was in the 2000s and 2010s. It is a mature industry. That comes with mature industry issues like when the economy sucks, it doesn't grow anymore.
Have you noticed how we're still in a trade war? What about the government shutdown? The high interest rates? All time highs for cost of living? Wages not keeping up with costs at all for practically any profession? Dang, it's almost like if all the money going to AI stonkz wasn't happening... we'd be in a recession... hmmmm
Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
Depressing article but it really captures the zeitgeist among recent tech grads.
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things:
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
> The British economy is in the toilet at the moment.
I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.
Came out right after dotcom bust. It was really disappointing when I learned that corporate America simply moves on to the next graduating class. All the recruiting mechanisms in place means you’re going to get burned pretty bad if you miss that hiring wave. Some of my classmates took years to find something long term. You’re so much better off taking a year off from school to reset. As most things in life, timing is everything.
> For most of the industrial era, you could assume that any large physical operation, like a warehouse, would need a certain number of human bodies to move boxes and drive forklifts.
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
I’m not saying people should get jobs they are way overqualified for, but I believe there are many in these situations who choose to be unemployed rather than work in jobs that they could do in their industry.
Where I work we desperately need two new graduates for embedded controls dev jobs on-site in the US. We're very picky, looking for attitude and aptitude rather than super-specific skill sets. But over the next year we definitely need two and our preference is new graduates.
82 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadFor example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.
You’d very quickly rise to the top of the public sector
My brother in law is only in his mid 20s and is in charge of half a dozen engineers
No nepotism (we honestly know no one) just leaping from the right firm to the public sector at the right time
Look for government consultant jobs or even better straight engineering roles
Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.
Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
I don't know why we need to be so dramatic about AI and automation. The reason you're not getting hired is because there's not enough positions and we have a huge amount of people in the industry. Tech is not exploding like it was in the 2000s and 2010s. It is a mature industry. That comes with mature industry issues like when the economy sucks, it doesn't grow anymore.
Have you noticed how we're still in a trade war? What about the government shutdown? The high interest rates? All time highs for cost of living? Wages not keeping up with costs at all for practically any profession? Dang, it's almost like if all the money going to AI stonkz wasn't happening... we'd be in a recession... hmmmm
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
- Just another recession, nothing to do with AI or automation. It'll pass and things will be back to normal.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs away from western countries.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs to automation and AI.
What an "exciting" time to be alive