Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.
Nobody takes such people seriously unless that startup later has a successful exit.
And by successful I mean a big exit. Like IPO or high 9 figure or bigger acquisition.
Imagine working somewhere and then walking away with peanuts and calling yourself a “director”. Of what? You got played lmfao.
Didn't all the characters in American Psycho had the title VP on their business cards?
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.
Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.
Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.
Good times. Sigh.
Dey don't make em like dat no more.
Grrr.
:)
That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.
I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
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.
People are as ignorant and stupid as their experience in life permits.
This is why highly imperfect messages about privilege resonate despite being imperfect (which they must be to resonate, perversely).
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
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.
The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.
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.
Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.
> 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.
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
As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.
I haven’t paid much attention.
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.
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
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.
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.
Hope I’m right?
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.
> 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.
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"
Because they're stuck with this fairly illiquid asset and therefore have a very big incentive to exert their inconsequential shred of control over the institutions that more or less unilaterally control their experience owning that asset.
Unlike the 60s and 70s the number of people coming of age now and in the years to come is smaller than older people (unless we get liberal with immigration). How will that impact the future direction of society?
It isn't a crisis for them now. It was a crisis for them in 1980, someone buying a home in 1980 would have had an interest rate of around 14% on their mortgage.
I met an old timer a few days ago with a beautiful garden, who bought their house in Vancouver, BC for $24,000 in 1972. Checking the tax assessment data now, the land underneath the house is worth $1.6m, while the building is assessed at $40k. Based on recent sales nearby, his property is realistically worth (on the market, maybe with some renos) 100x what he originally borrowed to buy it in absolute dollar amounts, about 20x accounting for inflation, or about 2x a conservative compounding investment. The guy was pleasant to chat with, and sympathized, because he knew his son-in-law who's probably my age won't be able to set up even close to the same sort of shelter without some very high incomes coming in, and he can see the future not looking so great for people in his life.
But that's a modest, old, not that nice detached home. If I were to shoot for a small ~800sq ft 2 bdr condo built in the last 20 years, it would be require $120k down, $20k just in transfer taxes, and $7k a month to service the debt.
Yes, 1980 sucked, money lost a huge amount of value relatively speaking, but what are we talking about here.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Once you’ve automated manual labor and mental labor, what’s left?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
2. Sure, you in particular can sense who is smart and who isn't according to some arbitrary definition that you have. The problem is, this doesn't scale. There's no process that allows ten recruiters to recruit fifty smart programmers efficiently. For a while we had Leetcode, until it turned into a memorization contest, and in my opinion, memorization is a different skill from intelligence. We rejected Leetcode without pointing to any alternative. And now in the age of LLMs and international jobs, cheating is rampant. If you apply to 500 jobs using automated scripts, there's decent chance that at least one company won't notice that "PhD in Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" is a problem rather than an asset. They have 50 000 applicants anyway, so they just use LLM to go though the resumes. And then you use LLM to answer whatever questions they have.
"... a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket."
In your first bullet there, you describe what I think of as CRUD jobs, and I agree with you that not only are they more 'assembly line' than art, a lot of them will be eliminated by the ability of LLMs to synthesize common solutions. Typically if the company's business is extractive[1] rather than value producing then much of the company's work will be to revitalize its novelty rather than actually achieve anything. Value producing companies however typically both value innovation and creativity more and they generally create durable net wealth growth over time (they are valued more for their core competencies than their monthly recurring revenue or daily active users). Having some of your compensation in equity in the latter is valuable, equity in extractive companies evaporates when the company's herd of data cows moves on to other pastures.
But your examples speak more to poor management and training than to the job quality. Yes, there are managers who are so unsure of themselves that they cannot tolerate having their decisions questioned, and yes there are developers for whom their managers haven't helped them develop the ability to lead and lift up others to their level of understanding. And that makes for a shitty work environment.
When a developer questions their manager with regard to the assignment it is on the manager's shoulders to help them understand the constraints and to listen to the questions. If they can't share some of the non-public parameters that are affecting the available choices, they can say ask for the developer's patience until those things come out which will answer the questions. And of course good questions can open up even better solutions so should be entertained and explored. Too many managers however are already suffering from imposter syndrome and that makes them really resistant to questions. If you're manager is bristles at your questions, that's something to work on in itself. Learning to 'manage up' as they say is just as important as learning the best way to update a database with the current transaction.
"Figuring out a solution when left alone" is a leadership test. If no one else understands your suggestion, you can work back from first principles and see where you diverge, when they ask questions you have to listen and teach rather than listen and correct. No one will listen to someone, no matter how smart, if they aren't willing to listen themselves. Further, even the most ignorant and 'stupid' person has something to teach. There is tremendous value in 'helping' someone develop their 'stupid' idea. Both parties get a better appreciation for how the other one thinks about things.
I agree 100% that hiring is broken. It was funny because when I was at Google and part of the hiring process they did lots of data analysis and discovered that no matter how they selected, 10% of the people they hired did well, 50% were average, and 40% ended up getting laid off within a year or so. They pushed and pushed to have people submit the resumes of people they knew because Google knew that this was a much better selector than recruiters or head hunters. I've been at companies where another factor would hold, managers would get '1' requisition to fill, so they wanted a superstar, but it is impossible to know if someone is a superstar because there is so much entanglement between what the person likes, the environment they work in, and the management style that works best for them. I knew people who were superstars where I was working, got recruited out to a different company and failed miserably. Similarly people who came in as 'just get someone' and rose to the occasion to become really great.
Hacker rank, leetcode, others, all were great at figuring out that someone could write code creatively and actually understood it, but said nothing about whether or not that person could be civil with others who were there to help. You need both for success.
Thanks for adding the additional information. I agree that it sucks that there are a lot of 'job slots' that fit your descriptions well and and it doesn't help that the managers are under trained as well. I'd also agree that those jobs are set up, intentionally or not, to make long term success in them unlikely. And given how little capital it takes to start up an extractive business there are more of those jobs in the pool than the ones where the company is making products of intrinsic value. My unpopular opinion is that licensed software products fill that gap, but that is a different discussion.
[1] The 'web 2' business where a company creates an website that attracts humans for the purpose of extracting data about those humans for re-sale to third parties. The websites come in many flavors 'games', 'news', 'fashion', 'recipes', but have in common that they need to maintain novelty to prevent boredom and their users 'leaving', so they essentially rewrite themselves over and over and over again, and work on ways of trying to extract more kinds of data from their users. Every one of those I've seen up close has been run by someone who sees exploiting people for personal benefit as a 'business model' so workers there are just as exploited as the users their code is exploiting, just along a different vector.
Being successful at business doesn’t require being a “cogwheel”.
I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)
Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.
Might have something to do with the appalling employee retention numbers in today’s tech scene.
Why bother spending six months, and five figures, training someone, only to have them hop to another company in 18 months?
I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A CS degree was the major people "should have been thinking about" until recently.
We never really recovered from the 08 crash imo. That was a changing point I think that doesn't get enough attention.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Literally nobody noticed because everyone had covid trauma the second time, so we had a "vibecession" where everyone felt like there was a recession because they wanted there to be one.
2008/9 was a change in the expectations of college degrees. Going into 2008, we all got the advice to get degrees and jobs will just show up. After the crash we never got back to that point. Common knowledge ever since 08 has been college doesn't ensure a job at the end and your stuck doing unpaid internships and dealing with a competitive job market
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hardcore version of this is labor unions of course, but the small version is occupational licensing for all kinds of small-time occupations like hairdressing.
They shouldn't worry so much, since Americans are also culturally afraid of any kind of job where you have to do X if they think they aren't an "X person", to the point they won't apply to do it for any amount of money. Applies to physical labor (farmworkers) as much as mental (anything where you have to do math).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
At least with a calculator, people still had to know the difference between addition and multiplication, in order to use the calculator correctly
A calculator will always give you correct result as long as you give it correct input. This is not the case with LLM. No matter how good your prompt is, there always a chance the output is completely garbage.
One way I try to disincentivize cheating on projects is by having in-class paper exams, including weekly quizzes, as well as in-class paper assignments, and making sure that these in-class assessments are weighted significantly (roughly 60% of the overall grade). No electronic devices are allowed for these assignments. This forces my students to be able to write code without being able look up things online or consult an AI tool.
I still assign take-home programming projects that take 1-2 weeks to complete; students submit compilable source code. Practical hands-on programming experience is still vital, and even though cheating is possible, the vast majority of my students want to learn and are honest.
Still, for in-person assessments, if I had the budget, I’d prefer to hand out laptops with no Internet connection and a spartan selection of software, just a text editor and the relevant compiler/interpreter. It would making grading in-class submissions easier. But since we don’t have this budget, in-class exams and exercises are the next best solution I could think of.
As the world changes, education can be slowest to adapt. My father did his math on a slide rule. I was in high school as we transitioned to using calculators.
My personal take on your approach is that you're seeing this from the wrong side. Creating an artificial environment for testing suggests to me you're testing the wrong thing.
Of course most school, and college, classes devolve to testing memory. "Here's the stuff to learn, remember it enough to pass the exam." And I get it, this is the way it's always been, regardless of the uselessness of the information. Who can remember when Charles 1st was beheaded? Who can't Google it in an instant?
Programing on paper without online reference tools isn't a measure of anything, because in the real world those tools exist.
Indeed, the very notion that we should even be testing "ability to write code" is outdated. That the student can create code should be a given.
Rather an exam should test understanding, not facts. Here's 2 blocks of code, which is better and why? Here's some code, what are the things about it that concern you?
Instead of treating the use of AI (or Google, or online help, or that giant C reference book I had) as "cheating", perhaps teach and assess in a world where AI exists.
I truly do get it. Testing comprehension is hard. Testing understanding is hard. Testing to sift wheat from chaff is hard. But, and I'm being harsh here i know, testing memory as a proxy for intelligence or testing hand-code-output as a proxy for understanding code is borderline meaningless.
Perhaps in the age of AI the focus switches from 'writing code' to 'reading code'. From the ability to write to the ability to prompt, review, evaluate and so on.
Perhaps the skill that needs to be taught (to the degree that community college seeks to teach skills) needs to be programing with AI, not against it.
I say all this with respect for how hard your job is, and with my thanks that you do it at all. I also say it understanding that it's a huge burden on you that you didn't necessarily sign up for.
Don't lock down the computer unless you are hiring people to work in a SCIF. Instead, give candidates a brutally hard/weird problem and tell them to use any resources they can get their hands on, by fair means or foul. (They will do that anyway if you hire them.) Then watch how they deal with it.
Do they just give up and stalk off in a huff?
If they Google for answers, do they use sensible queries?
If they use AI, do their prompts show skill at getting ideas, avoiding blind alleys, and creating effective tests?
If they call their friends, see how effective they are at communicating the requirements and turning the answers into a solution. Might be management material.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always wonder about things like that stifling the start-up ecosystem and lower numbers of jobs
Rather, the opposite is generally true, the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment.
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.
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?
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.
If you’re not being hyperbolic, this seems like fraud on the part of whoever is submitting visa applications for your company.
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.
But wave stickiness is sorta just part of human nature.
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.
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.
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.
That said, be strategic when re-enrolling - if you have a job today, hold on to it tightly and try to finish your program remotely and/or via transfer credits. Finishing a degree at the expense of having a job today is really dumb given the current market.
If you can take low cost and/or remote offerings from a CC or normal college, you can continue to hold a job. Also, most colleges now offer their courses online for credit - even Stanford and Harvard type programs. I'm sure your original program offers a significant portion of it's coursework online for credit.
Finally, Ds get degrees. You can skirt with the bare minimum and you'll be fine. If you are mid-career and kept your day job, no one will ask about your GPA.
Don’t worry about timing at all.
/s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Thankfully that went so well!
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.
It has been like this since 2012
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".
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.
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.