Live data from Hacker News

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

urlahmed.com

491–500 of 502 posts

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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work financially? Will you work in academia?

Yeah, I'm employed as a research assistant as part of the Master's program currently. There are jobs in government, non-profits, and academia potentially after. I've never loved money (except for the flexibility having it gives me) so I have several hundred thousand saved up after a decade of engineering so while grad school is an 82% cut in pre-tax pay I can withdraw 1% a year from my investments and live fine. Even…

> There are jobs in government

Moved from private to government and couldn't be happier. Look for a state position so that lunacy like the current admin can't touch you down the road.

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

#492
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada under its current leadership is probably a dead end. I'm not trying to be cruel but that's just the reality of your situation. Time to think about emigrating if you want a better future.

My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.

This is a candle in the dark, thanks for sharing. Hopefully this has residual effects outside tech, for my spouse's sake and that of many others, but it's good nonetheless.

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

#493
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they addressed this implicitly as a familiar explanation without actually needing to say it. Despite it being extremely rare to be able to pinpoint via external feedback mechanisms which areas conceivably provide tangible roi, it's just always relevant work on your weak spots. The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed co…

Canada under its current leadership is probably a dead end. I'm not trying to be cruel but that's just the reality of your situation. Time to think about emigrating if you want a better future.

Although deeply cynical, it's hard to wholly disagree, with the exception of specifying the current leadership. I think it's a problem composed of really bad system-level feedback loops at multiple levels of government and society that extend decades back and are only now becoming this evident recently. I do think that in terms of the tenure of the Liberals, they've had a rare amount of time to try and mitigate where we're at now, so I can't say I'm a proponent.

Additionally though, I'm quite happy to just forego the obvious material goals instead of emigrating, because despite the leadership, I'm a happy Canadian and love where I live, but hopefully I don't need to question that for a while. I'm not that interested in other countries atm.

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

#494
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, my counterpart who interned for a similar team, and performed better than I did also didn't get hired. My manager was honest with me about what was going on.

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

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, true. I worked for a big tech company when they were building a team in China so they could lay us all off in Palo Alto.

How long did it take?

About a year

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

#497
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bonuses. Usually there is no penalty for failed referrals, so the more people they refer, the more likely someone gets hired and sticks around long enough for the bonus.

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

#498

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…

> The British economy is in the toilet at the moment.

I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks at Patreon Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream. “Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.

I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't. You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most…

Yes, survivorship bias is probably happening here; but I’m not doing anything like “sorting by paid”. Each of these authors I discovered “organically”; generally through Reddit or Royal Road, any many I’ve been following (on Patreon!) since before they started making $$.

From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.

Post reply on HN