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

urlahmed.com

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

#261

Post by Aeolun »

windowshopping wrote: post #145
alyxya wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

Something like bottom line up front would work for resumes as well.

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

#262

Post by lacker »

blackjack_ wrote: post #45
lacker wrote: post #28

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…

That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years. It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.

I don't intend to say the author is "bad", I'm just trying to follow up on this reasoning:

I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.

The rules are, do well at your internship, and you'll probably get a job offer.

The author also seems to be saying that they are getting interviews, but no job offers. ("The interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections.") Another rule is, if you do well at interviews, you will get a job offer.

So, without putting any value judgment on anyone, this is what's happening. The author isn't doing well enough on internships and interviews.

So my advice is not "just apply to more places", but to do that and also practice programming in order to interview better.

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

#263

Post by ludicrousdispla »

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…

a good first step would be just formatting it to a standard page size

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

#264

Post by necubi »

yesimahuman wrote: post #27

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 t…

It was the same for me growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley in the early aughts, post dot com crash. Even when I went to college in 2008 the conventional wisdom was that there weren’t going to be any jobs in software, it was all being outsourced. I studied CS anyways, because I loved it. It was still very hard to get my first job out of college in 2012.

But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.

I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.

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

#265

Post by smnrchrds »

urlahmed wrote: post #175

Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ). I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion. Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques. I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and researc…

Thank you for writing this post. Your writing is insightful and thought-provoking. I would love to follow your blog to read your future posts as well, but I could not find an RSS feed or an email newsletter option. Is there any chance that you would add RSS to your blog in the future?

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

#267

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by harvey9 »

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.

Maybe only accept applications by post.

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

#269

Post by brendoelfrendo »

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…

When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).

I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).

Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.

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

#270

Post by visarga »

mike_hearn wrote: post #47

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…

> Great article, well written.

>> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models.

>> 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.

Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well.

The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM

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