Work After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break

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 hand, etc).

> Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.

https://layoffs.fyi/

As with most things, getting into it seems to be primarily about knowing someone to get you in.

I’d love to hear more ideas/advice on finding alternative employment if anyone has any. I’m worried I won’t be able to find a normal job again.

I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.

No, "not enough people" is corporate speak for "the public should train our workers for us"

The salaries of most tradespeople are not increasing significantly. That would imply that the field doesn't see a shortage.

Given how damaging manual labor is to your body, that's not a good bet to make.

That has pretty much nothing to do with available supply of materials or labor. It has everything to do with burdensome zoning and permitting processes.

It's intentional. The housing problem is a policy failure. It's illegal to build homes where people want to.

If you have real skills you are expected to make something of your own on the side. Nobody teaches you how capitalism really works, they want suckers to do the shit work. The ways to win are to work for yourself, eliminate as many middlemen as possible, hide sacred knowledge, come up with scams, hide bodies for rich people.

This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.

C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.

Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.

H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.

I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.

Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.

It's a complex gamble on how the environment will (or won't) change. Both are important... but "efficiency" is way easier to measure/market in a spreadsheet.

You can't really do this in the UK where the author is based, it is very difficult. You are normally basically committed to a certain course of study after Year 1.

Yes, if you're in your 30s and have lived through a bunch of corporate downsizings before, it does make sense.

Do you remember what it was like to be 18? I had no idea what people in offices even did all day. My way of thinking about the world was 100% idealistic and had no basis in the gritty realities of corporate life.

My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.

Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.

The room was stunned silent.

Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.

Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.

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.

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.

At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.

I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.

The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed cooked for a variety of reasons, and it's a much better explanation than some skill issue. People who think they're in the same economy just don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, or legitimately don't know many people in that age group.

It was a skill issue to some extent for me when interviews weren't working out because I couldn't do niche algo problems, or I didn't get a second or first call, but it was never the way it is these days. It was difficult in pre-covid times to get back into a job if I got laid off, sometimes took a year, but there was some information to go on. I'd get interviews periodically, maybe second interviews, maybe 5 interviews, before I'd be rejected. It was maybe 1 in 40 in terms of interview to application ratio; bad enough to end up living in the car, but even then I could pick up a manual labor or barista job. Now.. it's honestly not even worth applying in many cases. It got real dark before I landed my current one, to the point where I considered switching industries, but there was no viable path to do that and see prosperity on the other side. Even now that I'm in a relatively well-paying position, it's still precarious, and long-term prosperity is not even really a remote consideration; I have to assume that despite my best efforts to preserve my income, it can and likely will go away at any time, and therefore even the most basic mortgage (which would still be ~4x my annual gross income and give us less space than renting, doesn't seem feasible. I think it would be more beneficial to just completely forget about trying to aim for milestones that barely exist anymore.

Currently, my spouse has been out of work for nearly a year, not in CS, and she's depressed—rightfully so—because it's never been this bad in our adult lives. No responses _at all_ for any job, and she's way more capable on paper for the stuff she's applying to than I am for SE. One single interview in the last 6 months for something paid, and it didn't pan out. This is Canada mind you, but still.

The economy is now composed of people who have jobs and are stressed about them disappearing, people who don't need work and do own all the land, and people who might miss a majority of their 20s in terms of working life unless they pull some miracle out of their ass quickly.

It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.

The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.

Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.