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

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

#201

Post by cruffle_duffle »

It’s not popular to say in these parts, but societies insane covid reaction fucked over the younger generation so, so, so bad. Our kids are gonna be paying for that nonsense for their entire lives. We stole so much from them it isn’t even funny.

And I say “not popular” because so many tech people directly benefited from perpetuating and supporting those harmful policies. We were one of the primary beneficiaries of the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” and all that… As long as the massive paychecks kept coming and the work remained at home… we had no reason to question any of it.

Sadly the chickens are finally coming home to roost and it’s our kids that are fucked the most.

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

#202

Post by m0llusk »

This seems badly supported, likely entirely wrong. There is a lot of hype about automation, but hiring has all but stopped before without any automation revolutions being needed. If automation were driving this then there would be a shape to things with the most readily automated tasks sticking out, but what the labor market is showing is an extreme slowdown across all sectors broadly.

An alternative explanation is that this is an unusually ugly correction brought about by a combination of factors including but not limited to a prolonged period of essentially zero interest rates and a long time since the last real correction.

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

#203

Post by knappe »

ericpauley wrote: post #176

My two cents: As someone who is actively hiring and looking at a lot of résumés from fresh grads (albeit looking for more systems programming experience), I would personally not move forward with an interview for this CV. Red flags for me: * Talks a big talk on AI but it’s inscrutable if any of it goes beyond “I installed PyTorch and ran example code/prompted an API” * Multiple projects but from demos it’s very uncle…

>I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together

They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. But perhaps my expectation of "real systems" is different than yours.

To put this into perspective, I mentor and have mentored lots of juniors from code schools and traditional, four year university computer science majors in web dev. Having some concept of both the web stack/language and a basic understanding of good coding practices is about the most I'd expect. All thing things that sit on top of it, like scaling the stack, performance optimizations and the like are things I wouldn't even come close to expecting a junior to know. Those are things I'd expect to have to coach on.

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

#204

Post by coolThingsFirst »

CrazyStat wrote: post #19
nine_zeros wrote: post #3

> 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 pedophile…

Hmm, I'm not sure about the link to lower birth rates. Birth rates have been falling in e.g. Western and Northern Europe for a long time, despite strong social safety nets.

Young people can’t afford life bringing kids isn’t a smart idea. So the link is definitely there.

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

#205

Post by disambiguation »

gruez wrote: post #157
disambiguation wrote: post #117

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024 With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.

>nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick. I'm not really seeing it aside from "there's a large uptick because there's eventually a recession".

To rephrase, the start of a large uptick looks like a small one in real time - like we see now.

Further, the graph is otherwise smooth. We don't really see small bumps - 1 or 2 exceptions not reassuring.

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

#206

Post by yadaeno »

Buttons840 wrote: post #37
margorczynski wrote: post #8

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?

I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benef…

A much better solution is something like the hire act.

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

#207

Post by nradov »

accurrent wrote: post #25
GianFabien wrote: post #2

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.

Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing. I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terri…

The wages for skilled trades are enough to pay for housing outside of HCOL areas like New York City and the SF Bay Area. People may need to move to restart their careers. There is high demand for electricians in Plano, TX. I understand that making that kind of move is difficult and highly disruptive but at some point workers have to face reality. Regardless of whether the root cause is AI or offshoring or higher interest rates, a lot of the old tech industry jobs are gone forever.

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

#208

Post by vee-kay »

lisbbb wrote: post #181
nradov wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood. It's a bad situation for both employers and candidates but there doesn't seem to be any practical alternative.

There has to be a way to limit the flood--someone has to pay a fee someplace.

The only fee will be a subscription to AI LLM.

AI will do a cheap job of automatically filtering the potential candidates for a hire.

A suitable AI LLM can even be leveraged as automation that calls up the filtered candidates and evaluates them for the basics.

So that would filter the wheat from the chaff.

And then the humans can take the process further to interview and select the candidates for the hire.

So yeah, AI will replace the HR recruiters at least for the mundane tasks.

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

#209

Post by dmoy »

ghaff wrote: post #88
tayo42 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job markets are bad for everyone though

From what I've seen, CS/programming job growth is significantly worse than in other comparable fields. Though my guess is that's a retrenchment from overhiring and overpaying.

The data I've seen on under& unemployment for recent grads from the federal reserve bank puts comp sci kinda middle of the pack of other science & engineering majors.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

It's bad across the board - 20%+ under & unemployment for basically everyone.

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

#210

Post by terminalshort »

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…

It's not the world of tiktok. Resumes have always needed to be like that.
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