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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

#431

Post by x0x0 »

soerxpso wrote: post #422
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…

> 2 I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's t…

People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were.

As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.

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

#432

Post by subarctic »

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…

This rant is inspiring, it makes me want to find, or be, that company that is putting the accelerator down and building things instead of focusing on limiting costs and replacing people with AI.

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

#433

Post by adammarples »

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…

I see the problem, he went to UWE. You were not told to do that! You were told to go to Bristol!

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

#434

Post by adammarples »

This guy is in the UK, like me. The UK hiring market is freezing up, and has been since reeves et al raised employer taxes on hiring employees. They also just added some more legislation to make them harder to dismiss, and increased minimum wage, fueling wage compression. Now everyone is waiting for the budget in November to see what will happen next. I'm pretty sure most of this guy's problems are related to that, not AI. I work as a contractor in tech and bounce around different businesses. A lot of them are encouraging/using AI in some form but there are always new hires, whole functions aren't being replaced. People are on boarded every week. This is more science fiction than reality at the moment. The problem is taxes and regulations.

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

#435

Post by kjkjadksj »

tdb7893 wrote: post #250
kjkjadksj wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People I know in academia are also having a terrible time. Grant funding is in the toilet. The focus is on providing for current staff not hiring. No one is leaving because no one has anywhere to go.

My guess is I'll end up in government or an NGO but I'm probably going to do a PhD before that so getting a real job is at least 5 years away. The previous grad students for my advisor are all employed with decent jobs so I'm not worried, especially since I have a pretty unique skill set for the field and strong stats fundamentals. Edit: engineers are always skeptical of my career change but my friends actually in th…

The previous grad students came out in a different economic context. Things have changed remarkably for the sciences in just this year alone. Grad schools have actually rescinded offers because they no longer have funding for first years and faculty don’t have funding for taking on students. No one has seen anything like this before.

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

#436

Post by tavavex »

exe34 wrote: post #380
tavavex wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above. As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a rando…

I think you need to find one of those people collectors. I know one of them, and I could ask him to introduce me to somebody with and he'll know somebody within a hundred miles.

I hope I eventually manage to stumble into one of these. I honestly didn't know they had matchmakers for the corporate world. Since most of my connections are within my age group, most people I know are in a similar situation to me and also have most of their network feed back inward to other similar people. Finding someone like this seems pretty unlikely.

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

#437

Post by saulpw »

throwaway-0001 wrote: post #337
lacker wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 getti…

I have to agree with you. Companies don’t waste time on interviews if they don’t really want to hire. And if they didn’t hire him, maybe is because was not a good fit, and probably hired someone else. So the job was probably filled — by someone more competent?

Companies do waste time on interviews when they don't really want to hire, for numerous reasons. 1) To test the labor wage pricing of the market, 2) for legal or tax or optics reasons (in order to get cheaper H1B labor you have to have been trying to hire domestically for the role), 3) to placate someone internal (cheaper to perpetually pretend to be hiring than to actually hire).

I'd bet there are others. It's easy to imagine that "companies don't waste time" but companies waste time and money all the time. The bigger the company, the more waste.

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

#438

Post by tavavex »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #350

> young person complains about jobs because automation, outsourcing and immigration > looks at resume > garbage formatting that only AI would love, with little substantial content beyond the sea of candidates would offer. All the talk about humans and yet producing a piece of paper that doesnt respect human time.

> garbage formatting that only AI would love

If AI would truly love it, then that seems like the best-case ATS-optimized resume to me. The right tool for the job. Imagine using real people to review applicants - what is this, the 1800s?

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

#439

Post by tavavex »

eduction wrote: post #248

In the boom times people get too cocky and in the retrenchment they get too pessimistic. Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well. Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will…

Where the "panic" part starts to set in is that the people who are educated in the discipline aren't going anywhere. Suppose the trend does eventually reverse. In 5 years you will still be competing with the people who graduated alongside you today, most people who graduated over the last few years, and people who will graduate in 2030. The supply side will continue overflowing with candidates, so anyone who graduated a long time ago and has no job experience after that will be left behind - this is the group that's graduating today. It truly feels like not being able to find a job under a certain time limit will basically make your education irrelevant for hiring purposes.

And even if you manage to find a job after that indeterminate amount of time, it seems like anything but a blessing in disguise. Putting everything you've worked for on hold to work some soul-crushing, minimum-wage, abusive job while the rest of the world moves on without you. Even if you find a job in your field after this, you would've missed out on years of development that people who graduated during a boom would have acquired by now.

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

#440

Post by k1rd »

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…

yeah, but move the distribution a bit and your spot on the the tail disappears.
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