Young graduates are facing an employment crisis

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-unemployment-rise-young-people-ce4704d8

by bdev12345 • 1 year ago

200 360 1 year ago

I've noticed some folks, seemingly on principle say that older folks should keep working, basically until they die, presumably because they don't want them to collect social security or other entitlements, but does that end up having the negative economic impact of making it harder for young folks to find jobs?

cit3worker• 1 year ago

please do not blame this on "old people"

anyone in corporate america in a hiring position knows the prevailing trend -- you either hire h1b (for maximum leverage) or overseas (for cost savings). we've been told to hire h1b ONLY.

careersuicide• 1 year ago

You have a moral duty to report your employer for this. Frankly it should be treated the same as treason.

plandis• 1 year ago

we've been told to hire h1b ONLY

If you’re not being hyperbolic, this seems like fraud on the part of whoever is submitting visa applications for your company.

zeroCalories• 1 year ago

I actually do blame this on old people. The reason jobs are being shipped overseas is because western workers are not productive enough to justify their premium. Work culture is part of that, but stuff like zoning and the welfare state is the main culprit.

techpineapple4• 1 year ago

I'm not blaming this on "old people", and certainly not "old people" who want to work, I'm blaming it on a government that artificially deflates the retirement rate.

alfalfasprout• 1 year ago

yep. H1B needs a major reform. Unfortunately both the democratic party and the GOP is against reforming it.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

I work at a Fortune 100 and for the most part, we can ONLY hire citizens and do not use H1Bs without a particularly strong reason. Curiously, I'd estimate we still hire 80% naturalized citizens.

pirate787• 1 year ago

This is a common misconception about the economy. There is not a fixed pie of jobs to be distributed.

Rather, the opposite is generally true, the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment.

techpineapple4• 1 year ago

"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"

So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?

barchar5• 1 year ago

Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.

Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.

jimworm• 1 year ago

That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.

nradov• 1 year ago

People who worked in the USA are entitled to collect Social Security once they are old enough. This applies regardless of whether they are still working. In other words, current income doesn't reduce Social Security benefits.

jibe• 1 year ago

It would help, because they’d be paying payroll taxes into the system even as they were collecting benefits.

readthenotes13• 1 year ago

There are tax disincentives to working while collecting social security.

stockresearcher• 1 year ago

The social security taxes you pay are used to buy credits. You can buy a maximum of 4 credits per year. Once you have 40 credits you are allowed to draw benefits from the system - when you are old enough. If you only have 39 credits, you don’t get social security.

When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.

xyzzy9563• 1 year ago

There's infinite potential jobs. Doing anything useful is a job.

exe343• 1 year ago

No, doing something people are willing to pay for is a job.

logicchains• 1 year ago

This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.

aspenmayer4• 1 year ago

I never looked at it like that. Perhaps allowing folks to work after retirement age is a form of age discrimination to a certain reading. Social Security should be sufficient for everyone’s retirement. If it isn’t, that’s a separate issue, and is also effectively another form of age discrimination, promising a funded retirement and the other party not upholding their end of the bargain.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

Interestingly you can trace the establishment of the retirement age, and of social security, directly to the frustration that younger people can't easily compete with lifelong workers.

sxp• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/41JyI

kkylin• 1 year ago

Some relevant data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

whatshisface2• 1 year ago

Who knew, art history is more employable than finance.

readthenotes13• 1 year ago

You apparently didn't look at the underemployment and median early career wage data.

I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...

em500• 1 year ago

Some more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGMD25OM

photonthug• 1 year ago

Thanks, probably better than TFA. The under-employment numbers are always telling, anyone who talks about employment without mentioning this is running a scam. Sobering to see that only elementary ed and nursing are really doing ok, fields where we're always chronically short. And even while everyone's talking about demographic bombs and aging populations, nurse-adjacent med-tech is still sitting at 57.9%.

leereeves• 1 year ago

Even so, computer science is still among the fields with the lowest reported underemployment rate. It's essentially tied for second place, after nursing, with a much higher salary.

I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.

mNovak• 1 year ago

Huh, TIL that around 50% of college grads go on to get some Graduate degree. Much higher than I expected.

AbstractH247• 1 year ago

Would be interesting to break that out by industry.

rightbyte2• 1 year ago

Interesting how approximately 6-7% unemployment rate among new SWE graduates translates to such gloomy anecdotes going around in this post.

naysunjr• 1 year ago

6-7% of 1+ million software engineers (according to BLS) is a lot of actual people.

Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.

lentoutcry• 1 year ago

I get unemployment being high for office-based jobs right now, companies think they can slap AI onto everything and get rid of employees, but what’s the reason for min wage jobs? Are they suddenly overflowing with applicants?

afavour• 1 year ago

The economy is in a general downturn, so it's not all attributable to AI.

atemerev• 1 year ago

Min-wage jobs normally have a lot more applicants than skilled/office-based jobs. Every skill is a barrier.

paxys2• 1 year ago

Who says unemployment in min wage jobs is high?

morkalork• 1 year ago

Min wage jobs are in the service industry which will take a hit from people pulling back on discretionary spending. Is it one of those "because people think there might be a recession, they manifest one" things?

barchar5• 1 year ago

Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.

Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.

janalsncm3• 1 year ago

I believe the changes have more to do with US tax laws which have made it harder for companies to write off R&D. Companies might say it’s due to AI to put an investor-friendly spin on it.

I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.

anomaly_• 1 year ago

It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).

lubujackson• 1 year ago

That U.S. tax law change was reversed in the BBB that just passed.

mensetmanusman3• 1 year ago

The big beautiful bill addressed that r&d issue.

paxys2• 1 year ago

Lots of assertions in the article, but the only fact I see is that new college grads looking for work had a 6.6% unemployment rate over the last 12 months, along with a hand-wavey

about the highest level in a decade—excluding the pandemic unemployment spike

Why "about"? What was this number 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? During the dotcom bubble? The housing crisis? An actual recent crisis (the pandemic) is conveniently excluded from the comparison for some reason.

Weird for the WSJ to declare an "unemployment crisis" based on a handful of anecdotes and no actual data.

kevintb• 1 year ago

I think the thing that’s unusual and backed up by data is that being a college grad right now has higher unemployment rate than the total average unemployment rate. This has never been the case in history until recently.

jasonfarnon• 1 year ago

well according to the article: "Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis."

conductr3• 1 year ago

Unemployment is a loaded statistic anyway. I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job. They're likely working in a restaurant or in retail which is technically employed.

My qualitative view on the job market right now is this line holds true

But it is a bad time to be a job seeker—especially if you are young.

what• 1 year ago

If they’re working at a restaurant or retail, they’re not counted as unemployed? Unless they’re working under the table.

astrange8• 1 year ago

Unemployment comes from surveys (the CPS) where they call people and ask if they're employed. So the answer to questions like "do Uber drivers count as employed" is, it's up to them.

There's other questions about full-time or part-time, or multiple jobs.

(Multiple jobs are interesting because you'd think they'd belong to overworked underpaid poor people. But they're not really associated with that, and they go down in recessions since that's when you have no jobs.)

intended• 1 year ago

Unemployment here is being used in its capacity as a trend line. It’s not loaded in the sense you are considering. From what I recall, recent graduates would not be working in retail, but currently looking for roles.

pjc505• 1 year ago

I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job

This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

Bear in mind they've already lost 4 years of employment by taking the degree.

ndiddy3• 1 year ago

Looks like when you set the graph to annual average (which you have to do to avoid spikes each year when everyone graduates), the new college grad unemployment rate is in fact the highest it's been since 2014 when you take out 2020 and 2021. It's higher than it was in 2002, but lower than it was during the housing crisis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGBD2024#

brailsafe4• 1 year ago

Interesting to read this from the other side of the border on the Canadian side. Our numbers definitely support the anecdotes that suggest youth unemployment rates are terrible, but if anything I think they obfuscate how bad the problem might be. Lived experience and the real anecdotes from people I know in the cohort lead me to believe there's going to be major downstream economic breaking points some time in the next few years.

Additionally it's funny to see the term "housing crisis" be applied to the past rather than the present. If that means 2008, we tend to call it the 2008 financial collapse, but our response to it created the current conditions of what Canadians would now call the "housing crisis"

api2• 1 year ago

The housing affordability crisis isn’t a crisis if you own a home you bought in 1980, and older homeowners vote in much higher numbers.

downrightmike2• 1 year ago

The numbers are being cooked

eej71• 1 year ago

I can only say that this direclty matches the experience of my two college graduates.

First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.

Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.

Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.

sevensor• 1 year ago

I’ve worked with a bunch of Nuke Es. Smart, interesting people with strong technical skills. They’re not working in the field though. If you really want to be around nuclear reactors, you’re much more likely to get there if you join the navy.

jmyeet4• 1 year ago

This is history repeating itself and it will only get worse.

We saw this in 2008 post-GFC where entry-level white collar jobs just completely disappeared. It was really the start of millenials graduating with a ton of debt, possibly postgrad degrees, and working at Starbucks. Not because their degrees are useless. Their entry-level jobs just disappeared.

This has never recovered.

So you don't have to search long to find now 40 year olds who are permanent renters, have barely enough in their bank account to pay this month's bills, definitely don't own their own house, still have a ton of student debt they're unlikely to ever be able to repay and realizing they have no hope and they have no choice but to work 3 jobs until they die.

Yet those who believe in the myth of meritocracy just write this off as a personal moral failure or getting "philosophy degrees". At the older end, boomers simply have no idea because they bought their $2 million house for $11,000 in 1976.

Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose.

Gen-Z is now going through this exact same thing. Many don't yet understand they're looking at their future when they see a 40 year old barista or DoorDash driver.

All while the ultra-wealthy continue to get even wealthier at an extraordinary rate. We will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes.

This cannot and should not continue.

Jcampuzano2• 1 year ago

There are parts I agree with when it comes to older people being out of touch - but I'm going to go a bit against the grain here even if some don't like it.

I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.

It is not unreasonable to say that some degrees are not as valuable as others and will be more likely to struggle financially. Its a game of statistics. You are more likely to struggle financially with a degree in philosophy than a degree in engineering. Because even companies themselves when hiring for completely unrelated positions to a persons degree will take into account the fact that the engineering graduate probably worked a lot harder than the philosophy graduate.

But I do agree that the average non-degree or "less valuable" degree holder from the past had a much larger chance of making it out okay than nowadays.

theplatman• 1 year ago

philosophy is probably a bad example to use because i think it's actually one of the "liberal arts" majors that's actually very applicable to skills you need in the corporate world.

the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.

ipdashc• 1 year ago

I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.

I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?

I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.

exe343• 1 year ago

the groundswell to Trump

Thankfully that went so well!

techpineapple4• 1 year ago

"Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose."

Sure, a few more poor people voted for trump and a few more rich people voted for Harris, but it basically rounded to 50-50. Rich people want to tear down the system too.

In fact, I think I'd want to see a breakdown by belief system. My gut is that generally speaking working class people believe in meritocracy more than rich people, and that is in fact why they voted for Trump. To not be lumped in with the 'DEI hires'(their perspective, not mine).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12930#...

The above research suggests that poor people living with high inequality are more likely to believe in meritocracy.

jmyeet4• 1 year ago

The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.

Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).

And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.

The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.

zaptheimpaler2• 1 year ago

Democracy and equality is crumbling in front of our eyes. Epstein's client list has disappeared in full public view, his footage is doctored in full public view and no one can do anything besides write angry comments or shuffle around legal paper that won't amount to anything. Everything just looks like a meaningless TV show, whatever new horrific thing happens it'll be on the news for a while and disappear - no one will face any consequences, all of us will just click the next article. We are serfs and no one wants to admit it, and we love individuality and isolation too much to have the kind of class-consciousness it would take to actually create change.

Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.

BirAdam4• 1 year ago

At what point did equality and democracy ever exist? The only things that substantially changed were who the lords were, the method of gaining power, and what shape the power structure took. At no point was there ever meaningful equality, not even before the law.

satyrun3• 1 year ago

Have you ever stopped and thought maybe there really is no Epstein client list and maybe he really did commit suicide?

Maybe the Epstein client list is the propaganda?

Why would Epstein keep a "client" list? What criminal goes out of their way to document their crimes? What service was he even offering? I don't think even the local drug dealer is stupid enough to keep a written list of clients.

If some shady forces killed Epstein in prison why didn't they just kill him before he got to prison? The shady forces can get to him in federal prison but don't know he is being investigated to go back to prison? Why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell die in a mysterious car accident?

Why do people care about a client list that makes no sense and not all this supposed video evidence?

Your post just shows you spend too much time on social media reading bullshit that you think is real and it is not.

AI_beffr4• 1 year ago

gen z is not going to college like millennials did. and i do think it was a moral failure for everyone to jump on an unsustainable bandwagon... they paid too much for a degree in the humanities and when asked about it they would say "well... its just what everyone does." mindless behavior hurts people and the economy so how is this not a moral failing? people should have stuck up for what they knew was right. everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless) and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason. people were intellectually lazy and they got scraped. big fucking deal.

jackvalentine• 1 year ago

people should have stuck up for what they knew was right.
everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)
and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason

These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.

yardie2• 1 year ago

My experience graduating right into the dot-bomb was it absolutely sucked. I, a fresh-faced grad, was competing against experienced engineers who were laid off after Y2K, Cosmo, Yahoo, and other dotcoms for entry-level jobs. I wasn't very bitter then, but now when I meet mid-20s developer with "senior" or "director" titles, it hurts knowing that 3-5 years of my career was wasted trying to string together credible work history portfolio.

The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.

eldaisfish• 1 year ago

a mid 20s person with "director" in their title sounds good on paper but there is no credible replacement for experience.

SketchySeaBeast• 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case of title inflation.

jvanderbot• 1 year ago

I have a former coworker in their early 20s who left a startup as Senior (they were 1 year out from graduating) to become a "Director" at another startup. Their first job was implementing the control law for the robot's wheels. In this case (and perhaps many others), "Director" just meant "Only person we have".

AbstractH247• 1 year ago

I actually told a startup o joined a few years back that was 5 people that I wanted a more junior title. Because cod it didn’t make it off the ground I didn’t want folks rejecting me as overqualified for roles I was well suited for and under-skilled for ones say my title

Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.

sys_647383• 1 year ago

Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.

pavlov• 1 year ago

Also “Head of X” which often means the titleholder is practically the only person doing X at the company, and/or has no actual power.

citizenpaul3• 1 year ago

I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.

After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.

bigfatkitten• 1 year ago

Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.

Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.

tuesdaynight2• 1 year ago

If you don't mind sharing, what would be the things that a person should think about it before doing the same action that you did? I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.

snozolli• 1 year ago

I'm not the guy you asked, but given the way that things are going right now, if you're currently gainfully employed and not miserable, then you should continue banking money for as long as you can.

For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.

Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.

daxfohl3• 1 year ago

Not OP but same experience. If you're not overly concerned about a certain quality of life, number of cars, square footage of house, etc., then there's nothing to think about. Engineering is a fine career (granted, AI takeover notwithstanding) and a few-year gap isn't going to leave you on the street. Being a few years behind your peers in your 30's may gnaw at you a bit, but by your 40's things will have reasonably equalized. My "wealthier" friends have some nicer things, go on more lavish vacations, but it's never really bothered us. And they generally got that way because they're type-A personalities to begin with. So they're not the type of people who would even ask the question about taking time off. Maybe one downside is they can also afford private schools and tutors etc for their kids, though, IDK, we could afford to do the same (though it would be more than a blip in our finances), but they seem to be doing well and happy where they are.

So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.

[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.

elliotto• 1 year ago

Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.

yardie2• 1 year ago

Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.

I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.

If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.

laborcontract• 1 year ago

Graduating in a recession is really unfair to the graduate. Economists have looked at the effects on lifetime wages and it's estimated that recession kids lose in aggregate about 20% in lost lifetime wages, and to no fault of their own.

Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.

dasil003• 1 year ago

Life’s not fair in general. Personally though I have no regrets starting my career in 2001. Sure it was harder to get a job and it paid less, but it made me more willing to join a startup which gave me experience and skills that opened more leadership doors later.

By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.

Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.

starik362• 1 year ago

To all the naysayers here denying that an employment crisis for STEM graduates exists... I didn't believe it either until it happened to my kid. He is a top notch software developer, far better than I was at his age, problem solving comes naturally for him.

And yet, he can't even get an interview. He worked at Dropbox for a year as a contractor right out of school, until they did a huge layoff and hasn't been able to find anything in 6 months. Real interviews are super rare - most of it just recruiters fishing for stuff.

So that is the reality that he and his peers are facing.

umvi• 1 year ago

My experience is that there is an AI war going on right now. Employers are deluged with AI-augmented/generated resumes that make candidate seem perfect (but then they flop in an in-person interview), so employers are now filtering said AI-augmented resumes with AI to even determine who to advance in the pipeline. It's a viscous arms race and if you aren't playing the game it's really hard to get an "in" without knowing someone on the inside already.

starik362• 1 year ago

Yes, I've seen that. But I am not sure how to even play this AI game. My kid is trying various methods but none of them are very successful.

barchar5• 1 year ago

Yep, market for lemons, sadly

tennisflyi2• 1 year ago

It’s the ATS more than anything

immibis5• 1 year ago

Did he use an LLM to write the bullshit parts of his resumé? It's mandatory. Companies are running LLMs to look for a certain kind of bullshit and you're supposed to use an LLM to write it. I got more interviews after asking ChatGPT to write my "professional summary" saying I have a proven track record of building reliable applications with a strong understanding of software architecture, blah blah blah. Nobody mentioned this section, even the ones who wanted to talk about the rest of my resumé. But I got more interviews.

const_cast2• 1 year ago

Recruiting, as a whole, has been extremely harmed by technology and has therefore become an incredibly low-trust game.

There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.

For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.

mensetmanusman3• 1 year ago

Invest in airlines, job fairs are coming back.

zizee• 1 year ago

Does this mean the H1B visa program will be curtailed? /s

Muromec3• 1 year ago

Expanded you mean? Wouldn’t that be nice if companies could buy and sell h1b workers? They are not citizens anyway and the Constitution doesn’t give em any rights even if they think they are white

voat• 1 year ago

Non-citizens still have rights

nirav72• 1 year ago

Lets hope so. But looks like the current admin hasn’t done much to restrict it. Other than raise filing fees, which is usually paid by the employer.

testing12352• 1 year ago

I'm currently a senior in university (Dual CS and Computer Engineering), and I can say that it looks unbelievably grim in the Computer Science side of things.

In my classes there is hardly anyone that has been able to get their hands on an internship, and even the professors have started their classes with monologues about "I don't even know why you show up, none of you will have jobs after graduation, good luck out there." (quote from my DS professor) A lot of my peers are looking to move out of the US and look for jobs elsewhere, or perhaps jump straight into graduate school to ride it out.

On the Computer Engineering side, the faculty seems a lot happier, and the students also seem to be better off. But I don't think this will last however, I have noticed a steady decline in the businesses that have been searching for Computer Engineering in our career fairs. When I enrolled there were about two dozen "Computer Engineering Wanted" posters at the fair, and the last one in Feb 2025 I only counted one.

I'm honestly thinking that if this continues I'll be looking at the military, right now I'm trying to work on side projects in the meantime.

pchristensen2• 1 year ago

There's setting expectations, but saying "none of you will have jobs after graduation" feels criminally cynical and counter productive, especially coming from a teacher.

rezmason• 1 year ago

What do y'all think of this one?

In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, one of my commencement speakers (and the recipient of an honorary doctorate) was Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express. I don't remember his exact words, but his message to the graduating class was, we have a different perspective on the world and different values— thriftier ones, necessarily— and if we stay true to them, the world will reflect them when we succeed.

"Maybe instead of having a car, like your parents' generation, your first big purchase may be a bike. Times change." Something like that.

Four days later, he laid off four thousand workers from AmEx, just a smidge more people than the graduating class.

Edit: according to Wikipedia, that year he took home $16.6 million.

coderjames2• 1 year ago

My department at the place I work is actively hiring Software Engineers. We have nine open requisitions for any seniority level and are regularly conducting interviews, but the new-grad candidates this year have been... disappointing.

I've conducted two phone screens this month and asked each candidate to implement FizzBuzz in their language of choice after giving them an explanation of the problem. Both took more than ten minutes to write out a solution and we don't even require them to run it; I'll excuse trivial syntax errors in an interview setting if I can tell what you meant.

When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.

ikiris• 1 year ago

Are you offering enough pay that competent people would want to work there?

testing12352• 1 year ago

I also tutor students in the entry level C++ and Python courses (which are taken during your first two semesters as a CS student), and I must agree that a large cohort of my class is only able to program if they have ChatGPT/Claude open on one half of their screen. I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.

I honestly think that doing an in person fake technical interview with a few easy Leetcode questions at the end of your education would be a good way to weed out those that have failed to even learn the basics of the trade.

lispisok2• 1 year ago

When I was in school in the early 2010s I was working in a professor's lab and overheard conversations that the administration was telling profs/TAs to pass kids who profs/TA's thought should have failed. I've since seen the required coursework to graduate become less rigorous. There were students I worked with personally I graduated with who were very bad. I'm sure there still great students who care about learning but I cannot imagine how bad the average student is with ChatGPT being able to do student's assignments.

klipklop2• 1 year ago

FizzBuzz was always a great filter. Even in the pre-LLM days. Many people can code for years and never once use the modulo operator. Solving the problem gets a lot more clunky without it and they get rejected.

orzig• 1 year ago

I’ll second this, and we had enough resumes to only interview those with a relevant Master’s degree. I was shocked and I still don’t have a full explanation. I don’t doubt that it’s also hard out there, but on the hiring side we also did far more interviews than we wanted. (And yes the salary is >>100k, full remote, benefits etc)

calderwoodra• 1 year ago

2 data points and you're drawing a conclusion about an entire graduating class? For all we know, you might be experiencing a reality that you're company isn't able to attract great young talent.

xboxnolifes3• 1 year ago

When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.

I feel like this doesn't get said enough, but I'm almost certain your issue is happening during filtering prior to even getting to the interview stage. Companies are straight up choosing (the wrong) applicants to interview, the applicant fails the interview, the company does not move forward with them, and then the companies does not go back and and consider the people they originally filtered out.

I know companies get swamped with tons of applications, and filtering is basically an impossible problem since anyone can make their resume look good, but every applicant that applied can't be that bad.

Bad applicant filtering at the first step is hurting both companies and applicants.

NoGravitas• 1 year ago

My experience is that this problem significantly predates AI. Not that AI won't make it worse, but pre-2020 the majority of entry level developer applicants I interviewed could not write a basic for loop in their choice of language, never mind the modulo operator.

AI_beffr4• 1 year ago

there is certainly no shortage of tech capital flowing right now... where is the corresponding burst in hiring? is this economic or AI?

bruce5114• 1 year ago

I'll roll back the clock somewhat to 1992 when I graduated. A different time, but also a challenging one. (As with all reminiscing context matters, and those elsewhere likely have a different history. )

I graduated into a world without internet (we had it at university, hosted on Unix and Vax machines, but it wasn't available commercially. ) People who had computers were running DOS. Most businesses had no computers at all.

So the job market was both good and bad. We graduated with skills that were hard to find. But we graduated into a world where big companies had computers, small companies had paper.

So huge market opportunity, but also huge challenges. We'd either graduate into big business (banking, insurance, etc) or start something new.

I joined a person doing custom software development. We'd sell both the need, the software, and usually the hardware. ) When we didn't have work we'd work on our own stuff, eventually switching from custom development to products.

We had to bootstrap, there was no investment money in our neck of the woods.

I won't pretend the job market is the same (or even vaguely similar) now, but it seems to me that opportunities for self-employment still exist. Software is still something you can build with basically zero capital.

Ultimately a job is just someone else finding a way to add value to society. Software us one of the few ways you can do that yourself, skipping the employer.

95% of people see "a job" as the goal. I get that. My own kids are like that (zero interest in starting something new.) But there are opportunities for the other 5%. Yes, it's lot more than just coding, and yes it's a lot more risky, but the opportunities are there.

As for me, I'm closing in on retirement, but at the same time building a new (not tech) business from scratch, because there's still value I can add, and a niche I can service.

I say this all to encourage current students. You can see the world as "done" or you can see it as an infant just waiting for you to come and add your unique value. And in 35 year's time feel free to encourage the next generation with your story.

theGnuMe2• 1 year ago

This is the correct philosophy.

jlack2• 1 year ago

At my company, we have increasingly been experiencing interns reneging on their offers. Students will accept multiple offers and then bail on the one they don't want last minute which prevents us from replacing them with someone else. We bring in hundreds of interns every summer and the reneg rate is approaching 20%. It sucks because it prevents people from getting an internship(and us getting the intern).

rightbyte2• 1 year ago

Low trust society. Due to how recruiting works nowadays I guess what they are doing is rational. Do they fear their main choice of employer bailing on their offer?

s1mplicissimus4• 1 year ago

It sounds like they are using a smart strategy for their outcome optimization: Not putting all eggs in one basket, or staking all hopes on one employer. You do the same by accepting a bigger pool of applicants than you plan to hire - so what makes you feel entitled to a privileged position in such negotiations?

wnc31413• 1 year ago

I know someone at a growing division of a FAANG who has not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now. They're critically understaffed but the screws only tighten with each year.

gsf_emergency_2• 1 year ago

Labor tariffs, anyone? Might even give the Dems some ideas!

wnc31413• 1 year ago

certain domestic market protections would be wise for any politician to support, unfortunately the craziness of this administration smothers the conversation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...

lazide5• 1 year ago

Second 174 changes from BBB pretty much are for the tech industry - dropped the prior 5 year depreciation schedule to immediate, and foreign depreciation is now 15 years (!!!).

I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.

pjc505• 1 year ago

Labor tariffs, anyone?

Interesting phrasing, but how do you actually make it work? What does it look like on paper? Taxing ""imports"" of services is really, really tricky.

rr8082• 1 year ago

This is pretty standard in corporate world. Our Bangalore office is now bigger than any of the US ones.

cjbgkagh8• 1 year ago

When I was last in tech research we were prevented from working in new interesting areas as that work was being handed over to the China branch. I think we’re entering the looting stage of empire collapse. A hyper focus on short term gains to the detriment of long term gains.

disqard• 1 year ago

"Looting" is an apt description of the short-termism we're seeing in the tech industry.

horns4lyfe4• 1 year ago

These companies that have been built on the backs of US infrastructure that now don’t want to hire Americans should be razed to the ground. Fuck them, let them try to operate in Indias fucked up business environment.

moomoo113• 1 year ago

People who still think FANG is some flex are lame. I just see expense line items when I talk to any current or recent FANG employee.

As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.

qwerpy• 1 year ago

As a FAANGer, I'm acutely aware that I'm an expense line item whose days are numbered. Do people still think it's a flex? There are hundreds of thousands of us. Working for an AI unicorn is the new flex.

wnc31413• 1 year ago

I think it's more of a shorthand for general mega cap tech companies

Havoc• 1 year ago

not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now

This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.

If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets

cdreke• 1 year ago

This is what I would say to my younger self if I was starting out today: This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway. In the meantime, create your own job. Youthful flexibility is your biggest asset. Be helpful and you will succeed. Oh, and stay away from social media. It is the cigarette of the day - you don't need to smoke because everyone else is doing it.

ternaryoperator• 1 year ago

Of the many good comments, this is the one that IMHO is the most helpful.

I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.

My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.

kulahan3• 1 year ago

It took me way too long in life to realize that you can do whatever gives you money, at the end of the day. Like it doesn’t have to be a job, just anything that gets cash to you.

Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!

I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.

rr8082• 1 year ago

New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.

That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?

chii• 1 year ago

Can you be surely something else will come along?

something has come along - the new fangled AI stuff.

People back then also didnt think the internet would amount to much when it first came out, and people also thought mobile phones were for business users not casual consumers.

satyrun3• 1 year ago

If you frame it like a farmer back in the day hearing there will be more jobs because of the industrial revolution so they conclude that means there will be more farmers but just doing a new type of farming, that would obviously be wrong.

To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.

alemanek• 1 year ago

Not OP, but of course they can’t be sure. No one can but if it doesn’t come along we will just be kind of screwed.

Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.

In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.

This feels a bit unwarranted. There doesn't need to be some major new paradigm shift for things to get bad from an employment perspective. All that needs to happen is for this creative destruction rate to slightly exceed the new job creation rate, and there's your tipping point. I certainly feel that your average grad today doesn't have the same opportunities I did in the late 90s.

pjc505• 1 year ago

Pleasantly optimistic sentiments, but if you want to get certain kinds of job you benefit from being on LinkedIn, and if you want a "be your own boss" job it's almost mandatory to have a social media presence so that you can find customers. It's like being in the phone book used to be.

moosedev• 1 year ago

Thread from 30 days ago (albeit without much discussion at the time) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294488

guywithahat2• 1 year ago

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not that the economy is bad, it's that there's a mismatch. We have tons of graduates who just finished with a degree in X, but we need people for job with skills Y

lispisok2• 1 year ago

What is X and Y?

immibis5• 1 year ago

X is useful things like construction and computer science. Y is how to make people give you more of their money.

guywithahat2• 1 year ago

It's unclear from the article, I'm just saying this is what the data shows. The economy is strong, and young people can find jobs, but the findings in the article suggest young people with degrees are having trouble getting jobs.

The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".

yash1hi2• 1 year ago

Referenced unemployed new grad here! I think a lot of what contributes to this is the thought that a degree=employment for college students. We feel scammed, confused, and quite frankly just angry that this was the timing to graduate into.

As a CS student I have many thoughts around the reasoning for this (AI reducing need for junior engineers, oversaturated market from COVID bubble, opaque job requirements/too low of bar). As much as I'd like to believe it's just a skill difference on my side, it's hard to deny my peers' and friends' struggle around me. I don't want my livelyhood to come down to a numbers/chance game. But sadly, that's what it is looking like right now.

collingreen• 1 year ago

Good luck out there from a millennial that's been through a couple "once in a lifetime" crashes, a global pandemic, decades of unending war, and a reduction in labor protections that appear to be just getting started.

My only advice is to keep costs low, don't give up, and find work where you can. It seems to cycle around so hopefully you'll end up ok but the days where degree=job were dying when I graduated 20 years ago so I assume there is left of that by now.

dmoy• 1 year ago

the days where degree=job were dying

To be fair, the previous iteration of "degree=job" that was dying 20 years ago was the older definition - broad enough to include "degree in literally anything", which was closer to how it operated say 50 years ago.

GP looks to have gone with the newer advice of "get a more useful degree = job". That wasn't really dying 20 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.

---

Definitely agree about keeping costs low. Even if you do get a good job, if you keep costs low for long enough, it compounds like crazy.

JohnMakin• 1 year ago

Yea my year entered the job market from college in 2008 - pretty much the worst time ever at that time. It sounds very similar. I think, if I look at my more successful peers including myself, many of us hunkered down and took whatever jobs we could get, many of us went back to school and got second "useful" degrees such as CS/nursing/etc.

My career path is so bizarre I don't really ever talk about it in great detail because it is so unique I think it identifies me and me exactly. Lots of others I know with similar stories. I would not want to go through it again.

joebob42• 1 year ago

This is maybe kind of rude, and hopefully it doesn't come off this way, but where were you still getting the message that degree = job? Not that a degree doesn't help, but I graduated 10 years ago and the message was already pretty clear across the media I interacted with that that was no longer the lived experience / that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.

tayo422• 1 year ago

This was my experience.

We never really recovered from the 08 crash imo. That was a changing point I think that doesn't get enough attention.

xboxnolifes3• 1 year ago

that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.

A CS degree was the major people "should have been thinking about" until recently.

yash1hi2• 1 year ago

Not wrong! The degree was always the stepping stone, and even for me I was always told work experience would make the difference. But now having graduated college 2 years early, with 2 high quality internships under my belt, my options are slim. Thankfully, I love what I do and don’t plan to ever stop doing it, but I feel bad for the people that “did everything right” and still aren’t landing jobs.

tekla2• 1 year ago

Dumb, this is a lie people tell themselves to feel better. I heard this crap since 2005 and it was never true.

horns4lyfe4• 1 year ago

It’s not AI, It’s offshoring and H1B. Accepting that won’t make you friends at parties in some circles, but it’s true and you should all be furious about it

moomoo113• 1 year ago

Why not do a startup?

AbstractH247• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, what tier school is you degree from?

If it’s not an ivy league American or something very noted in its niche I don’t think it’s been worth it for a while.

It’s not the degree, it’s the relationships you build along the way and how much it makes you think is possibly within your reach.

creer• 1 year ago

degree=employment

I also don't understand this. For years now, social media has been flooded with objections that this is not the case. Where were these people who didn't hear this message?

But it goes further: the young people around me who are brand new to fairly fresh into the job market - who must have heard of the problem - are still coasting probably scared but as far as I can tell not doing anything about it. Where are efforts at building references? At buidling networks? Some education streams have been (for years also) very much about building networks: THEY understood (and in the case of MBAs, to the point that everybody complains about them.)

And still further, this applies to more senior people also! It feels like many people with years of experience also have little network to show for it. It's not for lack of opportunity. And go through interviewing on (self-destructive) auto-pilot when they might have enough experience with that for significant statistical results just from their own experience.

I'm way at the front when it comes to arguing that schools do not teach fundamental skills like career development, business (/real) world awareness, or even basic reasoning skills, intro law, etc. But there may also be a question of passivity, obliviousness, wishful thinking.

Blaming the victim? Yes but I also blame the schools. Perhaps there is plenty of blame to go around. And not much of it is about the latest AI nonsense.

(And historically this can go pretty far: In the US there is a background of fast food jobs as entry level youth jobs. Whyyyy? Plenty of the high school and college students around me are plenty qualified enough to fulfill the duties of much more responsible and higher paying jobs. But they don't look for them.)

theGnuMe2• 1 year ago

At some point mother is the necessity of invention which is a shift in perspective. You may have to make a market for yourself basically. It's not easy. This being a YC site, I would go through and apply to all of the interesting YC work at a startup places. There is an opportunity right now to understand AI and how to apply it to the digital workplace. Anyway, it is not easy and I wish you the best of luck!

_ea1k• 1 year ago

Honestly, I think the impact of AI on jobs at all levels is being understated by folks here, as insane as that is.

Oh, I don't mean because it is actually doing people's jobs, or even because it is making people more productive (though it certainly is doing that in some cases).

I mean because management has bought into a lot of strange and misleading ideas about where it is right now. They think that you get a 10x engineer by using AI IDEs and other tools. If it fails with their existing tech, that clearly means it wasn't trained on their current tech stack so they should switch!

There are a lot of sales opportunities, but the reality and the things that non-practitioners and practitioners are seeing are far apart.

northhnbesthn2• 1 year ago

Which is fine. If they’re right they’re right.

kaiwenwang• 1 year ago

I'm trying to work out the theory behind this, but the rough metric is that it's due to increased transportation, automation, and consolidation. As businesses expand they leave less opportunity for those local to do something meaningful while those who run the companies are rich beyond measure. Students cram into college for the hopes of being on the other side, not the "below the API" side.

Measurement then becomes graded upon standard features as differentiation becomes harder: GPA, test scores, essay rubrics, etc. Combined with increased communication, online portals become spammed within minutes.

All this leads to quite a difficult time for the young. Inequality likely ends up being a function of the country size. It explains the USA, PRC, India, but not sure about places like Pakistan, Brazil, or Indonesia.

Still draft, but wrote a bit here about the roles in society: https://bedouin-attitude-green-fire-6608.fly.dev/writing/a-d...

chubs• 1 year ago

Anecdata: Recently spoke with a friend's son who graduated compsci a year-ish ago, he reckons none of his year got jobs, now working in a kitchen. (in australia for context). Very sad. For comparison, I graduated just after the dot-com crash, and our year mostly found jobs, just not very good ones, so maybe they're doing worse than we did. Good luck convincing anyone to study compsci any more.

somanyphotons2• 1 year ago

Slightly off topic, did Australia ever fix the laws around stock options that meant you paid taxes on unrealized gains?

I always wonder about things like that stifling the start-up ecosystem and lower numbers of jobs

s-lambert• 1 year ago

You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains in Australia unless they're in a self-managed superannuation fund and you have over $2 million. Regular investments outside of super are only taxed when you realize the gains. Superannuation is your retirement funds, doesn't seem that relevant to the start-up ecosystem.

jamesy0ung• 1 year ago

As an Aussie computer science student, I do wonder what they are actually looking for. I know full well that uni isn’t teaching anything useful (heck my uni doesn’t even allow compsci students to take C programming) so I try and extend my knowledge by working on projects in my own time. Recently I’ve been getting into reverse engineering, before that I was writing my own shell from scratch in C. Is this good stuff to do job-wise?

astrange8• 1 year ago

Sure. Contributing to open-source, releasing and maintaining independent projects, is also good because it shows you can work with others and finish things on your own. Looking for internships is good if there are any.

You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.

horns4lyfe4• 1 year ago

They’re just looking for Indians

quantified• 1 year ago

Supply and demand. Too many people crashing into the world. Businesses are better at running with fewer people and successful businesses prevent conpetitors from getting very far, that's why they are successful.

mathiaspoint3• 1 year ago

I don't think that's it at all. It feels a lot more like a large scale coordination problem to me.

mensetmanusman3• 1 year ago

The market is 100% efficient with everyone investing in index funds.

tennisflyi2• 1 year ago

I’ve faced this since 2020. ATS are the true gatekeepers. Someone finally sued

hnpolicestate• 1 year ago

Anyone else interested in generations and eras? When did the "knowledge economy" begin in the West, late 60's? Anyway I imagine LLM's are in the process of killing off the knowledge economy. Personal computers expanded it.

redwood• 1 year ago

Stay hungry

NetOpWibby• 1 year ago

2008 all over again

Nifty3929• 1 year ago

Two big problems:

1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.

2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.

We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.

astrange8• 1 year ago

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...

If you want college degrees to not mean something, you'd need to stop paying people with college degrees more.

Note the high paying no-college jobs may also have filters like apprenticeships.

s1mplicissimus4• 1 year ago

where I'm from, apprenticeships are not seen as a gatekeeping mechanism, but instead as an opportunity to learn something "useful" (aka some trade or craft) and get started with low or no pre-training - typically apprenticeships will start at age ~15 and take 3 years. Businesses are supported by state subsidies for educating apprentices.

It's not all rose petals but overall seems like a valid option for someone who can't/doesn't want to pursue a higher education career.

kulahan3• 1 year ago

Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:

1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project

2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.

3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing

4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you

5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting

6. Highly specialized and targeted education

And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.

evantbyrne3• 1 year ago

Having a highly educated population is a major competitive advantage for a society that materializes itself in more ways than I could ever hope to enumerate. We need to bring tuition down closer to what the educational portion of it actually costs and pump as many able people through college as possible. Engineers, waiters, cops, everyone.

satyrun3• 1 year ago

All we need is an ultra cheap online accredited option. We can easily mass produce education at this point for almost nothing.

This would be hugely beneficial to society but there is obviously a lot of rent seeking and cartel like behavior by some in the network or we would already have something this obvious.

famahar• 1 year ago

So much of my growth and maturity came from University. It gives you the time, resources, and space to learn and unlearn in a supportive community environment. Provides a structured environment to meet others on a similar path. So many people that start work after highschool end up in a career track of life where work is the only thing they can imagine in life. It's hard to break out of that.

hackable_sand2• 1 year ago

I did go to work after high school, as a software engineer in fact.

Now I can't get a job, so I'm going to university.

Anyways, you don't get to tell me how valuable I am to society, that's disgusting behavior.

epolanski• 1 year ago

Do not forget that while number of graduates is at historically high levels, the economy hasn't adapted to it. Still needs drivers, bakers, plumbers, etc.

I've read that since then 70s the ratio of blue vs white collar in US has shifted by few % digits, but the number of graduates has boomed in the meantime.

This means that now jobs that never required a degree require one and titles are inflated to make people feel better.

downrightmike2• 1 year ago

We actually have more than enough jobs for graduates, they are just being outsourced to india/manila. We really don't need more bakers, Wonderbread saw to that. Why drive when uber destroyed the taxis and trucking companies barely pay their drivers? You are living in a wishful world that will not align with reality.

hackable_sand2• 1 year ago

Which one are you? Driver, baker, or plumber?

cod1r• 1 year ago

I was a recent grad (2023) too but now I think that expecting a job solely with a bachelors isn't realistic anymore. Standards are being raised and it's even more "who you know not what you know" than it used to be. The only thing advice i can give to grads right now is work on what you are passionate about and take care of your health.

noobly5• 1 year ago

Personal question, but I had to drop out a couple years ago as a Math/CS senior. I felt like the clock was really ticking back then to get my foot in the door. I'm considering re-enrolling (only two terms remaining), would it be better to wait until if/when the market has recovered so I can enter the market with a fresh degree? I worry a downside of completing it now would be a stale degree by the time the job market recovers. Assuming equal job experience, employers seem to prefer fresh graduates. But you know what they say about time in the market vs timing the market..

monero-xmr• 1 year ago

You are over analyzing this. It doesn’t matter. No one cares about when you graduated. You are going to need to hustle. If you are truly passionate about this industry you will make it work. Trying to fit some ideal on paper with timing is impossible

noobly5• 1 year ago

Thanks, you're probably right. I do feel that letting the dust settle on the AI layoff hype train might be prudent, but getting it done sooner is likely best.

alephnerd6• 1 year ago

How much would it cost to complete your degree? Could you take online or CC courses that you could transfer to your old program?

While having no degree hasn't historically been much of a blocker, during a weaker job market credentials can and do play a role in tie breaking during hiring.

Honestly, even a WGU style bachelors degree can be enough depending on years of experience.

noobly5• 1 year ago

Not much given that it's a state school and I only have two terms (6-8 courses) remaining. I'll probably re-enroll this fall, perhaps I've been too negative. Thanks for the input.

wil421• 1 year ago

Pursue a degree now to get you foot it the door sooner. I went back to school after a few year break. I also worked nights and weekends full time in the restaurant industry. It took sweat, tears, and burn out but over a decade later it’s 100% worth it.

Don’t worry about timing at all.

noobly5• 1 year ago

Thanks for the input, I'll aim to wrap it up promptly then.

tpurves• 1 year ago

Graduate employment crises happen at least once every decade (initial covid, 2008 crisis, dotcom bust, early 90s recession etc). What I could argue is more unusual are those bubble times when getting a great job right out of college is easy. And then how quickly those expectations are taken for granted...

GenX'ers will remember the days of 'Slackers' 'Reality Bites' and the malaise of those who graduated with fancy degrees in the early 90's but stuck in barista jobs etc.

ChuckMcM3• 1 year ago

If you're young and reading this and having feelings of fear and dread, I can sympathize. When I graduated with an engineering degree the industry was saying that there would be no jobs for us because all of the engineering was either being done elsewhere or that our skills wouldn't translate to what engineers needed to know. There were bits of truth in that, hardware was moving off shore, software was still very much local, and new tools and techniques were sprouting up.

But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed. What they are spending their "cleverness beans" doing (as an early mentor of mine once called the propensity for humans to innovate) is always in demand. And no matter what you have heard, there has yet to be invented any replacement for either human intuition or creativity.

anal_reactor2• 1 year ago

But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed.

Not exactly. I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise. Moreover, even if what you say is true, it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.

ChuckMcM3• 1 year ago

I appreciate your insight, it did make me wonder.

I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise.

I would be interested to hear how you reason to that. What is your definition of "success" and what is your definition of "cog wheel"?

Here is why I ask, I know hundreds of engineers who consider themselves "successful" because they have accumulated enough wealth to not ever have to work again if they choose not to. Recent data[1] shows there are over 342 thousand millionaires in the Bay Area alone. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that they were all 'corporate cogwheels' (which sounds a bit pejorative but again, I don't know how you define it).

it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.

Again, I really would be interested to hear more about this. I find it trivially easy to tell who is "smart" and who isn't. But I will grant you that it is a skill that is enhanced by a lot of exposure to people who aren't smart but would like you to believe they are. They are a LOT of those types around. There is also a nuance between "smart" and "lazy" in that I know some really smart people who are also incredibly lazy, avoiding actually learning things if they can get by with faking it or cheating.

Your comment also made me realize that I have a working definition of 'smart' that is different than 'book learning' smart, it is more a mixture of a willingness to learn, the humility to learn from anyone, and the fortitude to put effort into seeking out new information. That is different than what some people call 'smart' and I might call 'quick' in that they can make up a plausible answer quickly so it sounds like they are speaking from understanding not just bullshitting you. My wife used to call that 'Male Answer Syndrome' :-). The idea that one must never say "I don't know" or "I have no idea."

[1] https://www.alonereaders.com/article/details/3057/top-10-cit...

jimbokun2• 1 year ago

Bezos, Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg all had significant technical skills. And Ycombinator pretty much required founders are technically competent.

Being successful at business doesn’t require being a “cogwheel”.

susiecambria• 1 year ago

I remember well early 1986 when I was applying for jobs. Experience required, but no way to get experience. Frustrating as hell, especially since I had no peers around and had no BA (I left college a semester early cuz I had enough credits but didn't graduate for months). I ended up getting a cool job for $11,000/year and cobbled together a stable work life. It took another 5+ years to finally get my shit together.

Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.

SamuelAdams2• 1 year ago

Or, alternatively, the crop of current grads education is abysmal compared to past graduates, and companies are reluctant to hire them.

This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.

Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.

s1mplicissimus4• 1 year ago

idk why this was downvoted but anyway: the educational fallout from covid affected all ages, so the effect really is going to last for the next decade at least, with fading effects towards the younger generations as the educational system hopefully will be able to patch up the gaps somewhat. And if you grant that the negative effects will last much longer than 2 years, it doesn't make a lot of sense business wise to hold off new hires for that long

cjbgkagh8• 1 year ago

I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few years. This feels much worse than 2008 and 2008 was bad. At least back then there was hope that things would recover, now it feels like a permanent malaise has set in.

I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it.

The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute.

I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.

mavelikara• 1 year ago

Are you Steve Balmer?

cjbgkagh8• 1 year ago

Steve Balmer is a hype-guy

AbstractH247• 1 year ago

I’d like to think this will leads to a new wave of startups and innovation.

Hope I’m right?

cjbgkagh8• 1 year ago

I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent.

For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.

gh0stcat• 1 year ago

Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.

unixhero• 1 year ago

I had to completely abandon my 5 year 2 degree studies and get a job in enterprise it transformation.

It has been like this since 2012

guskel• 1 year ago

If they’re talking about this now, it’s been going on for a while. Just finally reaching the public consciousness now where it’s a common subject on the news.

northhnbesthn2• 1 year ago

A non-insignificant portion of HNers found jobs during one of the last 3-4 economic downturns. They seem to happen frequently.

In truth it’s always a crisis mode. Build your networks and demonstrate value and competence such that when people leave your company they’ll regret not having you on their team. This is the right way to stay employed once you land your first gig.

ChromaticPanic• 1 year ago

7% unemployment means 93% are employed. So it's really not that bleak.

octo888• 1 year ago

The way we cheered on remote work is really biting us in the ass. It's scary how many people I know or accounts I've read about all new hiring in their department just being Indian remote employees.

Young graduates are facing an employment crisis

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