Ask HN: MIT grad, junior dev layoffs – watching my daughter lose faith in merit

First off sorry to hear about your daughter's situation and how it seems to be affecting every aspect of your family life. Without telling my life story, a lot of us were in a similar situation in the early 2000’s (Graduated in 2000 and laid off from my intern job in 2001, where I worked for 3 years). As others have said luck and who you know are 50%, right place / right time are another 50% (75% luck IDK). Programming jobs are not going away (think legacy systems / retirements). Will all new jobs be the same as the old jobs, probably not. It might be 5 – 10 years before many new grads find great jobs (to answer your question on how long it lasts). They should, however, be able to find ‘jobs’ (today). Will these be the high pay WFH? Probably not. My advice would be this:

    Start an LLC in your state.  Normally a couple hundred dollars and some paperwork. 

    Create a bank account for the LLC and put a couple hundred dollars in the account. 

    Contribute to Open Source or make an open-source project 

    Make ‘free’ software for yourself, friends and family – something is better than nothing – show and tell 

    Make ‘free as in beer’ software for local business or non-profits 

    Get a job at a local mom and pop outfit, do the job you are hired to do, but also become the ‘IT’ person.  Install software / hardware, do backups, make helpful ‘apps’, automate and innovate 

    All of these will count towards experience when you do get a ‘real’ job, increasing pay range and giving ‘experience’ with ‘x’ technology. 

    Host on a cheap VPS to learn about Linux / system admin, install something like Dokploy (PaaS), configure Traefik (Reverse Proxy / Load Balancing / HTTPS / DNS), then build your own SaaS apps.  Full Stack? 

    CERTS – GCP ACE, CISSP, Azure AI, ChatGPT, etc.... 

    With the help of a good LLM there is no better time to build something when you really have nothing to lose and no family to support, no house payment, etc... 

 

Do this for 5 – 10 years as projects under the LLC umbrella. Most start-ups do not make money; it's ok to show a loss. On the resume you focus on the tech portion leaving out the parts you do not want to focus on. Who knows, maybe one of these projects even makes a few hundred a month's side money. The best time to find a job is when you have a job (any job). Sitting around looking for a ‘great’ job is going to leave gaps in your resume. Any job can teach you about problem solving, working with others (conflict and how did you resolve the conflict), leadership, in the end a programmer is hired to help make the business money learning how businesses work in general will lead to new insights that a fresh grad (most likely) does not have. There are lots of smaller software shops no one has ever heard of that are also entry level options for new grads. It's ok to live at home making less money and saving it, sometimes we need to lower our expectations on what we are worth money wise. It's not easy out there right now, and I will not pretend that it is. For some (like me), it never was easy, but you need to keep up on the latest tech and have something to show / talk about.

Everyone knows someone who went to school for ‘x’ who is the local bartender or barista. If the new grads decide money now is more important than gaining ‘tech’ experience any way they can then they may never get that job in the ‘x’ degree. Tech includes everything from hardware to software, with more jobs being ‘full stack’ the more you know about the better.

Hoping you and your family the best. There is still time to celebrate Christmas even if dinner is Chinese food and the only gifts are each other.

Maybe because I grew up as an Asian immigrant in America during the 80’s (during the Japan scare), but I was never fed the lie that effort means success,

My parents would tell us kids to expect discrimination, so no matter how good you are, sometimes it doesn’t even matter.

They also told us how important building connections are, and it was one of the main reasons we were able to immigrate to America in the first place. That and luck.

I find myself telling my kids similar things, but in a slightly lighter manner.