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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

#461

Post by ghaff »

tavavex wrote: post #295
necubi wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warra…

2012 was also on the tail end of the Great Recession. I actually somewhat reluctantly hung on where I was for an extra year or two because I didn’t want to play my connections cards in a tough market. As it turned out it basically took one email but I didn’t know that would be the case.

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

#462

Post by nradov »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #459
nradov wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

If i have two kids to support, how am i going to afford a) cost of relocating to LCOL b) cost of supporting family on lower wage c) while going through a multi year retraining program and d) paying for the training?

It's going to be rough for a lot of workers caught out in this structural labor market shift. I sympathize with them and there are no easy answers. People are just going to be forced to figure it out in order to survive.

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

#463

Post by ghaff »

platevoltage wrote: post #81
andy99 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.

This was my experience after I did an internship in 2024.

During that period a lot of companies had hiring freezes and even internal transfers were basically impossible. They may still have had limited intern programs but hiring those interns could be very challenging.

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

#464

Post by EchoReflection »

the book "Ultraltralearning" by Scott Young was/is a useful resource for people who want to "open their minds" to different perspectives on finding work, imo:

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/

https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/r81s4t/

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ultralearnin...

https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competi...

https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Scott-Young-audiobook/d...

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

#465

Post by ghaff »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #459
nradov wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

If i have two kids to support, how am i going to afford a) cost of relocating to LCOL b) cost of supporting family on lower wage c) while going through a multi year retraining program and d) paying for the training?

I think most tradespeople live where they grew up which may not be LCOL but not high either. May need some certifications/formal training but is mostly an internship situation.

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

#466

Post by ghaff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #7
spencerflem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The housing crisis isn’t solved by more tradespeople. I know an electrician who’s having trouble finding work because there’s no funding for new construction

Which is both odd and market dependent. I have an electrician I partner with for some work in the Midwest, and his book of work is a year out (commercial and industrial, not new resi).

Yeah. My contractors seem pretty busy in the Northeast. Too busy for my taste :-/

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

#467

Post by toomuchtodo »

jackvalentine wrote: post #55
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good callout. Also important to note that ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month. There will be jobs, but also, it might take more time and energy to find them (~12 months vs ~6 months historically). Plan accordingly (structural living expenses, cash on han…

While ‘only’ twice as long to find a job, I get the feeling that it’s almost exponential in its impact the longer you stay unemployed. Anyone got a way of characterising that?

Compounding despair.

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

#468

Post by selimthegrim »

tavavex wrote: post #457
selimthegrim wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a long time in grad school and I’m totally running into this.

Did you manage to get out of it? Do you have any advice? I just finished my undergrad recently, and I'm scared of aging out of the relevance of my degree if I don't manage to secure a "real" job in a year or two. At that point, my options will be to continue desperately trying to get into absolutely anything in tech, or get some other job while pivoting from CS entirely.

Check back in a couple months but my teaching experience is really saving my bacon, I’ll say that much.

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

#469

Post by ghaff »

TrackerFF wrote: post #390

The hard truth is that companies overhired the year after COVID hit, and have spent the last year or two laying off those. If you look at any graph showing job listings, one will see that during COVID year (back to ZIRP), the numbers exploded. In the year prior to that, from '18 to '20, the numbers of job listings had started to flat out. Remember that the interest rates were going up back then, until COVID hit. Righ…

Yep. Go back in time to read accounts of aerospace engineers driving cabs in Seattle or chemical engineer—-and drilling employment—-during oil industry downturns.

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

#470

Post by ineedasername »

gruez wrote: post #398
ineedasername wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t happen instantly. Wages for jobs like nurses: Yes. Conversely, as the labor market adjusted and everyone’s expectations were adjusted towards shorter work weeks, people would begin going in to something like nursing for the salary, labor supply would gradually equalize in line with new work week expectations and salary. None of this is radical, it happens on a small scale constantly. Happening at this scal…

>But there has to be some change in things. There is no equilibrium possible in having the world produce the same amount of stuff but half the population has zero money or everyone has half as much— and can’t afford that stuff so then it just wouldn’t be produced, but that isn’t the way the economy has ever gone either. How is AI different than the agricultural revolution, which allowed us to make the same amount of…

Sure: if there are enough service industry jobs, and I’m sure there will be lots of new ones to come, but this isn’t an a or b thing, over the centuries the overall move has been both away from less skilled work and reduction in time spend working. And so unless the demand for service workers skyrockets, or nurses or wherever there is a need for non automatable work skyrockets to require so many more people, the amount of time worked will need to be reduced.
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