[HN Gopher] Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
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Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
Author : bdev12345
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-07-16 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| techpineapple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You have a moral duty to report your employer for this.
| Frankly it should be treated the same as treason.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it should be treated the same as treason_
|
| No, it shouldn't. Treason has a specific meaning.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| It's anti-American behavior against a person in America
| as opposed to against the nation specifically. An attack
| on one is an attack on us all.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Lots of things are anti-American behavior.
|
| _Most_ of those things aren 't joining up with a foreign
| adversary with whom we're officially at war.
|
| Even things that are treason _ous_ in a colloquial sense
| are still pretty narrow, and tend to refer to other
| _specific_ forms of betraying your country, that just
| happen to be other crimes -- like espionage, or
| insurrection.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign
| adversary with whom we're officially at war.
|
| Adversary to the people, or the state? These are wildly
| different concepts. Just because my state has beef with
| China doesn't mean they can't convince me that my life is
| better with China in it. Sometimes states just
| misrepresent the people.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's just the free market. It it with a big spoon, you
| asked for it
| janalsncm wrote:
| Free market isn't a pass to do illegal things. There are
| many free market things that are illegal. Some would even
| be considered treasonous.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Treason is a strong word. It is a knowingly detrimental
| action against American workers and companies to dodge
| requirements for hiring skilled foreign workers.
|
| The focus and the main point remains: It's unethical,
| it's illegal, and I wish punishment on the companies and
| the individuals who fraudulently scam American workers
| out of jobs.
| babuloseo wrote:
| stoph1b.com, we have a sub lets organize.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Treason isn't even a legal concept. Who cares about any
| given meaning without that? If it strikes you as treason,
| that's as good a reason to call it treason as any.
|
| Personally, I think there's lots of treason that pervades
| our life. Hell you could argue the meaning of "national
| interest" used by our state department is itself
| treasonous.
|
| Any definition of the word will come down to what you
| perceive as in our interests. For easy examples, see
| Snowden and Manning.
| plandis wrote:
| > 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.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Which doesn't mean it isn't common.
| esseph wrote:
| Sounds about right.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| 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.
| esseph wrote:
| This is actually not at all correct. US productivity per
| worker has gone up for a very long time.
|
| https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/in-
| brief-u...
| techpineapple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| yep. H1B needs a _major_ reform. Unfortunately both the
| democratic party and the GOP is against reforming it.
| babuloseo wrote:
| stoph1b.com
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| techpineapple wrote:
| "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?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Next they will be telling us about their new perpetual
| motion machine.
| Nevermark wrote:
| While a pure perpetual motion machine isn't possible,
| "life", "economy", "knowledge" are all things that not
| only strongly tend to grow but compound.
|
| More people working doesn't just mean more jobs filled.
| It means more people making money and spending it, so
| more people needed on the supply side.
|
| The fact that it sounds circular doesn't make it bad
| logic in this case. It's actually a magnitude increasing
| spiral. All funded by the Sun.
| nradov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It would help, because they'd be paying payroll taxes into
| the system even as they were collecting benefits.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| There are tax disincentives to working while collecting
| social security.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| There's infinite potential jobs. Doing anything useful is a
| job.
| exe34 wrote:
| No, doing something people are willing to pay for is a job.
| logicchains wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| That's un-American!
| y-curious wrote:
| The minimum wage makes it illegal to work if you don't have
| the skills for minimum wage work. I wish more people
| understood this
| aspenmayer wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://archive.is/41JyI
| kkylin wrote:
| Some relevant data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-
| labor-market#--:...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Who knew, art history is more employable than finance.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 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...
| angmarsbane wrote:
| Or perhaps its a vanity degree? Or its pursued by people
| with family wealth and good connections, the sort that an
| auction house or high-end gallery would want to hire.
| em500 wrote:
| Some more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGMD25OM
| photonthug wrote:
| 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%.
| lentoutcry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The economy is in a general downturn, so it's not all
| attributable to AI.
| atemerev wrote:
| Min-wage jobs normally have a lot more applicants than
| skilled/office-based jobs. Every skill is a barrier.
| paxys wrote:
| Who says unemployment in min wage jobs is high?
| morkalork wrote:
| 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?
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem is code is a lot more context sensitive than
| most capital expenditures. If I pay for a machine that
| makes really good chalk, then when my company eventually
| folds that machine is still probably worth a fair amount to
| my competitors. In contrast, the code I wrote today which
| probably is going to save my company ~200 man/hours a year
| is almost certainly completely and utterly worthless to
| literally anyone else, because it automates a hyperspecific
| piece of a company-specific workflow.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Unemployment Crysis.
|
| They're like crocodile tears, but for the markets.
| kevintb wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If they're working at a restaurant or retail, they're not
| counted as unemployed? Unless they're working under the
| table.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Bear in mind they've already lost 4 years of employment by
| taking the degree.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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#
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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"
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| > the groundswell to Trump
|
| Thankfully that went so well!
| techpineapple wrote:
| "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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "And nobody seems to think about the period of history they
| fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of
| 91%."
|
| Don't forget that it also had the highest level of tax
| dodging available through various mechanisms.
|
| If you think the lengths people go to now are extreme to
| avoid taxes-- think about what they did were willing to do
| then.
| diatone wrote:
| As a non American I'd love to hear about this, any leads
| I can explore?
| twoodfin wrote:
| The current economic order is good.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
| deadbabe wrote:
| Millennials need to stop with this "woe is me I got dealt a bad
| hand I'm a 40 year old fuckup" sob story.
|
| If you're 40, and you graduated out of college at 22, you
| should have been in the workforce for nearly 18 years now. Even
| if you had a meager income of $50-$55k a year this whole time,
| you would have produced nearly $1 million dollars worth of
| income before taxes by now.
|
| The 2010s was one of the best times to be investing in the
| stock market, when all the FANGs were blowing up. Most of the
| entire decade was also an incredible time to be buying a home,
| with cheap prices and dirt cheap interest rates.
|
| If you're not doing well at 40 and still struggling, you have
| to accept reality: _You_ made _bad_ decisions in life and this
| is where you ended up. You didn't figure things out. The
| average millennial should be at a decent place in life right
| now.
|
| If you're a 20 something year old Gen Z you cannot look at a 40
| something year old millennial and conclude that you are poor
| because you don't have the same level of wealth as them. You
| are not on their level. Compare yourself to them when you've
| been working consistently for 20 years.
| techpineapple wrote:
| When I was 18 I got a tech job with a top ten tech company
| (no FAANG at the time) right out of high school having only
| completed half a tech trade school. Home price to median
| income ratio was under 3.
| saulpw wrote:
| > Even if you had a meager income of $50-$55k a year this
| whole time, you would have produced nearly $1 million dollars
| worth of income before taxes by now.
|
| And how much was rent, and food, and car insurance? It's easy
| to multiply a salary by 20 and conclude that they fucked up.
| It's a lot harder to actually live on $50k/year when the
| system, owned and run by extraordinarily rich people, is
| trying to extract money from you with every dark pattern at
| its disposal. Car broke down? Credit card debt, 18% APR.
| Delay in paycheck deposit? Overdraft fees. Kindly old
| landlord decides to sell? Rent +20%.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| You do realize there are parts of this country with a labor
| market beyond your comprehension, right?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I've thankfully avoided the worst of the GFC graduate
| syndrome myself but 50-55k in 2008 dollars is a very generous
| estimation of earnings for someone with no job experience
| trying to get a first job during a recession. 20-30k is more
| realistic _if_ you could find work at all. The best I could
| do was about 20k substitute teaching, and that was very
| uneven income. If I hadn 't been able to live with my parents
| for three years before scoring a Linux admin job halfway
| across the country (in a much higher CoL area) for ~48k (and
| crucially including health insurance so I could get off my
| parents' plan), I would have been on the street. It's almost
| impossible to get off the street once you're there.
|
| In short, have some empathy. Bad things do happen to good
| people, and even bad people deserve some dignity in life.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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.
| AI_beffr wrote:
| 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.
| yardie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| a mid 20s person with "director" in their title sounds good on
| paper but there is no credible replacement for experience.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case
| of title inflation.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Can confirm, I myself was a one person support desk (for a
| restaurant chain) and just never officially _had_ a title.
| The internal moniker of "the IT guru" was fine for an
| email signature, but certainly not for a resume. (I've
| since made other retroactive edits to that, both for
| something more sensible and to better represent years of
| scope creep.)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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".
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| leoqa wrote:
| Usually this is the "leads the function but we're not going
| let them into the c-suite". The head of engineering gets
| usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales,
| created in an era || at traditional / vertical /
| hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was
| inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher
| compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of
| managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior
| or principal engineers with market rates higher than
| generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President)
| might be a not particularly senior developer.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| 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.
| starik36 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| starik36 wrote:
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If you're on here, there's a good chance you have more
| connections in the industry than you realize. The best way
| to avoid being AI-filtered is never have your resume get
| fed to the AI in the first place, which means applying
| through back channels.
|
| Recommendations from trusted employees are valuable not out
| of nepotism or some other sinister force, they're valuable
| because it acts a pre-filter for the kinds of fuckups that
| no one would be willing to recommend.
| zizee wrote:
| Does this mean the H1B visa program will be curtailed? /s
| Muromec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Non-citizens still have rights
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| I believe there was an implicit /s at the end of that
| comment. At least, I really hope so.
| babuloseo wrote:
| stoph1b.com lets organize and bring positive change.
| nirav72 wrote:
| 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.
| testing1235 wrote:
| 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.
| pchristensen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| coderjames wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you offering enough pay that competent people would want
| to work there?
| coderjames wrote:
| We're in the greater Seattle area and I make north of
| $200k, so I feel like yes :shrug:
| testing1235 wrote:
| 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.
| AI_beffr wrote:
| there is certainly no shortage of tech capital flowing right
| now... where is the corresponding burst in hiring? is this
| economic or AI?
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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.
| jlack wrote:
| 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).
| wnc3141 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Labor tariffs, anyone? Might even give the Dems some ideas!
| wnc3141 wrote:
| 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...
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| cdreke wrote:
| 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.
| moosedev wrote:
| Thread from 30 days ago (albeit without much discussion at the
| time) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294488
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| yash1hi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jsight wrote:
| 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.
| kaiwenwang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Don't leave your parent's house
|
| Emigrate
|
| Start killing people
|
| More and more those are your options if you're a young American.
| quantified wrote:
| 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.
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