Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break • Hacker News Board

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#141

Post by gedy » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:21 AM UTC

calepayson wrote: post #137

windowshopping wrote: post #62

Two initial thoughts: 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…

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good. > 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous. I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job m…

In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#142

Post by windowshopping » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:21 AM UTC

calepayson wrote: post #137

windowshopping wrote: post #62

Two initial thoughts: 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…

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good. > 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous. I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job m…

Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.

Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#143

Post by ivape » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:22 AM UTC

calepayson wrote: post #137

windowshopping wrote: post #62

Two initial thoughts: 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…

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good. > 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous. I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job m…

Why do you think any of that has to do with being a good programmer?

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#144

Post by windowshopping » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:23 AM UTC

bern4444 wrote: post #104

windowshopping wrote: post #62

Two initial thoughts: 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…

He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary. In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.

True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#145

Post by windowshopping » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

alyxya wrote: post #115

pizlonator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His resume is designed poorly. Yeah. OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.

There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.

It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#146

Post by ares623 » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #93

trentnix wrote: post #67

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. B…

C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s. They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind. So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next. We'll keep heading tow…

Steve Ballmer keeps them up night.

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#147

Post by rudedogg » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #86

Great essay. This part seems particularly astute: “Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. ... Models feast on that part of the curve. ... The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. ... An out of distribution human, in my head, i…

All of this started before ChatGPT. There are graphics showing it, sorry I can’t remember the source.

I guess I’m just annoyed that everyone in the comments is reaffirming the AI is stealing jobs narrative, but half the studies coming out say it’s actually wasting peoples time and they are poor judges of their own productivity.

It just feels like AI is a convenient excuse for businesses to cut costs since the economy is crap, but no one wants to admit it for fear of driving their stock price down.

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#148

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

alyxya wrote: post #42

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…

[deleted]

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#149

Post by linkregister » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #102

Interesting to see that the answers to his problems are literally embedded in the intro and outro : what you were “told” by adults was 100% B.S. (adults has no idea what the world was going to be like and what was the “right” path) and he was probably intelligent enough (as we can see by the writing of this article) to realize this by himself (simply questioning the culture around him is enough, what’s teenage years…

What is your recommendation for the young author beyond questioning culture?

Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

#150

Post by CosmicNomad » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

I appreciate the authors points here. There are definitely large swaths of interns/juniors who are going through this pain.

That being said, it is also true that the quality of graduates we are seeing has dropped dramatically in the last 2-3 years. We have really been struggling to hire competent juniors. Most bomb their interviews, and with coding tools many have not actually had to learn fundamentals at university.

Computer science has exploded in popularity because of the money that can be made in the industry and the distribution of people who enter the field has changed significantly. I do wonder about the signal to noise ratio here from people who maybe should not have entered the industry.