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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

#481

Post by exe34 »

tavavex wrote: post #436
exe34 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

he's a lot younger than me, and he was doing it as soon as he started uni. I think it's a personality trait, although of course he spent time on improving the skill.

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

#482

Post by mecHacker »

Similar situation (in some sense, an entry level entrepreneur here) Except, I have a decade plus experience. Yet find your situation relatable. After graduating with an engineering degree from a not so bad college in India, all my job applications were going in an abysmal pit. Even the 18 call centers I applied to rejected me (despite being told of having reasonably good English language skills). What worked was relocating to a metropolitan town and literally going door to door in person and show up at companies and walk-ins, and I got an engineering job (btw, I'm at that exact stage now - will get to it later). Few years later, went to US for MS, spent a year after graduating in applying for jobs - stopped counting applications after 2250th application. Didn't even get a single interview. Out of desperation, did a site-wide search for some niche enterprise software name I knew about on craigslist, landed a craigslist subdomain page for a town I hadn't heard of - got job interview and the job. Fast forward a few years later, I had been looking for a way to find a meaningful occupation to return to central India - spent all my vacations over the years looking for something that I could do. Never found it. So one fine day, I packed up my bags from a year old FAANG job, and came back. Since then, I've been building, demoing, pitching, improvising but haven't yet made an income - neither through my network back in the US, nor cold calling. So now, I'm on foot again, just showing up at companies and realizing: the local market is much different, their needs are different ; and in person presence is a huge catalyst in advancing sales cycle. In person communication is introducing me to signals and adapt my offerings. AI, if anything, has only helped be more productive, but I totally see how it would impact entry level engineering jobs - and I don't have any answers for that. Except, that increasing the surface area by in-person interactions may be an avenue to explore if you already haven't. Hanging out at coworking spaces, going to meetups where your potential "customers" would hang out etc. might be worth a try. For a such a well written article, I'd hope someone with the right opportunity may reach out to you. Good luck.

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

#483

Post by danielscrubs »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #441
physicsguy wrote: post #395

I'm based in the UK and have been a hiring manager pretty recently. I have seen a lot of CVs like this. This was the junior positions I was advertising two years ago, this wouldn't have made it through the filter. Because largely, we (as even a small company) would get ~250+ applicants for a single position. My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explic…

250 applications per junior position shows how rough the market is for new grads

The media have been shouting the high salaries and IQ of programmers for nearly three decades, it was bound to satiate the market one day, with or without AI. Add to that the addictive nature of programming…

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

#484

Post by wiz21c »

MITSardine wrote: post #356
wiz21c wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hire, I always look at personal github projects. They are a hint that the person loves coding and loves creating software. I'm not looking for 1000 stars projects, and I don't even look at the kind of project, just the fact that the candidate has done some work in his spare time. If there's no github project, I ask the candidate what website, web communities he watches/participates in regularly. I check if the…

While those are certainly indicators of interest, is their absence an indicator of lack of interest? In other words, "has side projects" is sufficient to prove "likes programming", but I don't think it's necessary. There's only 24 hours in a day, and mastering any serious curriculum already takes the majority of those. Then there's family: some have parents to support, and/or a spouse they can't just ignore all eveni…

I happen to have kids and have always spent about 30 min a day, more like an hour, every day, looking at some side coding side projects. Being doing that before I was dad, now less since I am. But I still do. I'm past 50 now and I must admit the quantity of work I put out on side projects have decreased.

Side projects requires passion, not discipline, not effort, just passion. And that's what I'm looking for. When you like what you do you're generally good a it.

Now, I have hired people who don't have side projects, of course, they're not that common but not rare neither. And the side project question is sure not the main question. But that's a cool differentiator.

Moreover, questioning people on their side project is always more fun for them.

And of course, people with side project sometimes day dream so you have to keep them busy :-)

And having a github repo is a 15 minutes job. And most of the time, nobody will care about your side project. It's not like your marketing yourself. As I have said, I don't care about the stars. Just looking at what you do on the side, what interests you in a domain that is not far away from your job.

And side projects are always cool: I have interviewed people who were working on their game engine, planet trajectories, web sites for friends, playing with machine learning, writing little tools like Javadoc,...

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

#485

Post by array_key_first »

jfewhfuehg wrote: post #391
selimthegrim wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s in the UK.

DEI hiring exists in the UK. This is not something exclusive to America.

Most people couldn't define DEI hiring if you put a gun to their head.

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

#486

Post by array_key_first »

vkou wrote: post #306
coolThingsFirst wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring. No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.

Which is, of course, the meat of the matter. Nobody 'needs' to hire a junior anymore.

Nobody, in particular, needs to hire juniors. But everyone needs to hire juniors.

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

#487

Post by array_key_first »

jfewhfuehg wrote: post #333
mizzao wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't have LLM smell to me, at all. LLM-written essays are often very fluffy because expanding a prompt into more words often produces lots of air — but this one felt very "dense" with lots of ideas per capita.

You realise you can change the writing style and not rely on the default?

You realize that this argument can then be used to claim literally anything is AI generated? And, thereby, the criticism of AI-ness becomes worthless noise?

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

#488

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

tock wrote: post #282
chii wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc. And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being rece…

I think its more complicated. Has life improved for everyone in the last 100 years? Absolutely. Has life improved for everyone in the last 20 years? Debatable. Baseline needs like housing has only gotten worse. Its easy to compare with 1925. Is it better than 1995, 2005 or 2015?

Thanks. That indeed is a more nuanced take on things. For many 'middle' class people the quality of life has actually worsened during the past 2 to3 decades in most 'developed' nations.

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

#489

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

terminalshort wrote: post #216
lisbbb wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate. Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already…

Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.

>Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven.

As a general rule Eng/technical field have to be more transparent, because of the inherent nature of the field. It's another question if they are 'ethical', but I'd say on an average more transparent=more ethical. Exceptions will exist of course.

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

#490

Post by cutemonster »

pempem wrote: post #322
beej71 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are sometimes in a position to hire you. I'm not in the field any longer, but when I was (pre-LLM) every job I got save one was through my network. And it's 100x more important now.

I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.

> farm out referrals

Why did they do that?

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