Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

I've been through the dotcom slaughter of 2000-2002 as a new grad (undergrad) and the comparatively small slowdown of 2008 (grad school new grad). Get ready to hit the Submit button... a lot. The stories of "getting three job offers after four interviews at five companies" are no longer reality. My application:interview:offer ratio has always varied from 50:5:1 to 100:10:1, and I would expect something like that or worse for the next ~12 months or however long it takes for tech CEOs to stop cargo culting each other's panic. Unlike some advice you're likely going to get in this thread, I'd highly recommend shotgunning your resume to as many viable tech companies as you can, and even looking at line-of-business programming at non-tech companies. Now is not really the time to be picky, especially if you're on your own and have rent/bills to pay or support your family.

I ended up close to insolvent during the 2008 recession, and I bit the bullet and took a terrible job just to get by. Be willing to swallow your pride and do the same if that's what it takes. That little voice in the back of your head that says "Well I just graduated from Stanford! Surely I can do better than this!" Ignore it for now.

I graduated in 2001, the dot com bust, took a year and a half to get a job, and that was partially based on a previous degree in biology. This advice is based on my experience from 20 years ago, so I hope it is still relevant.

I was sending out a lot of CVs treating it more or less as a full time job. In the UK at the time the job center would pay for postage for applications, though these days paper applications are a lot less common.

Places that accepted CVs got a lot lower responses than big corporations with their long winded online forms that took a couple of hours or more to fill out, with the usual crappy questions of "give an example e of when you displayed leadership qualities" and the likes. Keep a note of your responses, as after a few, it becomes a lot less effort, as you have probably answered a similar question in a previous one, and can just copy paste with a little adjustment.

Get some interview practice and get good at that. Looking back I was pretty down after a while saying things like "I'll take anything at this point" when I asked why I wanted the job. True, but not what potential employers want to hear. Think of it from the employers point of view and what they want to hear. Again, practice helps and you get better with time.

I got a couple of temporary jobs one for pretty minimal wage but that made a huge difference actually having some real world experience on my CV in terms of getting invited for interviews.

Have some code that you can show people. Build some example projects. I would advise spending some time building a more comprehensive project one time to show that rather than doing a crappy throwaway project from scratch for each interview - something I still seem expected to do after 20 years of experience. The hiring process in this industry sucks and is very exploitative in this way, happy to waste candidates time like this.

But you're out of the new grad hiring pipeline. It's probably different in 2022 than it was in 2002, but in 2002 when companies wanted to hire new grads they posted jobs at Universities and did job fairs at Universities. So if you weren't at a University it was harder to get a new grad job.

And you have a hole in your resume you have to explain.

I would give different advice to someone getting a Bachelors vs someone getting a PhD.

For BS CS/EE (or any engineering field): do not overthink the "recession is coming" news. US employers always want young engineers, as they consider them energetic, willing to learn and work for less salary than late career staff. Look up and polish the in demand skills. Brush up on the basics (Python, databases, git) at least to the extent of being able to solve "one step up from fizzbuzz" problems. And apply. You might get less generous terms and no sign-up bonus, but you are almost certain to still land something that you can use as a springboard 2-3 years later.

For PhD in AI: I would apply to good companies only and consider deferring graduation for a year if your fishing turns up nothing. This requires both your mental readiness and your advisor's physical/financial one, but in general your advisor should be thrilled to have you work for him another year for a relative pittance of a graduate stipend. It should not come to this (the market is not dead), but I would personally take it easy and focus on the job search for another year in grad school over taking some soul-sucking job at a company no one has heard of.

My 2c. And good luck!

You must have been in the industry for the same time as me. Your ratio of interviews to offers is kind of encouraging, and at the same time depressing - I have just changed jobs and got a number of rejections. What bothers me most is the time wasted on throwaway "technical challenges" where the reasons for rejection are mostly outside of the specification, and a perfect solution would be in the order of a weeks work, not the few hours that they said it should take. I have a full time job and limited free time to put into these things.