> looks at resume
> garbage formatting that only AI would love, with little substantial content beyond the sea of candidates would offer.
All the talk about humans and yet producing a piece of paper that doesnt respect human time.
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
That said I have no idea how competitive this program is.
That's what it says on paper but that's not reality. If you are asian you are suddenly not disadvantaged even if you are an immigrant. It is just legal racism.
The fact that employers even get to play games like this tells you a lot about our current situation ironically.
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough.
I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
Yes. But not always. Getting an internal referral helps somewhere between not at all and a lot. And it is pretty random, nothing to do with you. Just a matter of timing and attention span and where other candidates are in the queue.
However, it never hurts. So overall, don't expect networking and referrals will get you the job, but do expect it to help every now and then. So it is worth spending some time on that.
A bunch of other new grads, all in a cage match over entry level that don't exist?
Where are the nativists, and why aren't they demanding a $100,000/license tax on AI?
I'm not in the field any longer, but when I was (pre-LLM) every job I got save one was through my network. And it's 100x more important now.
As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
That is the point of OP's article yes, that and the idea that being "out of distribution" is increasingly important. This, mentioning his unique qualities (e.g. a Deep Mind internship) and not his similar qualities (everything else) would probably be pertinent
Yes, this is a big factor. As an actively hiring manager, there's nothing worse than when HR enables receiving resumes through linkedin apply. We got a flood of many thousands of resumes. While I feel a duty to review them all, it's just flat out impossible so I had to skip most of them without reading.
On my most recent hire I'm glad HR stopped that and required people to file through the company website. Volume was reduced to many hundreds, which is more tractable. I still wasn't able to review them all, but at least a much higher percentage, like 60% instead of 2%
AI will do a cheap job of automatically filtering the potential candidates for a hire.
A suitable AI LLM can even be leveraged as automation that calls up the filtered candidates and evaluates them for the basics.
So that would filter the wheat from the chaff.
And then the humans can take the process further to interview and select the candidates for the hire.
So yeah, AI will replace the HR recruiters at least for the mundane tasks.
There's no way to cheat at that point. You either have what they need (yay btw) or its not a fit
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).
Yeah.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
And I missed it when skimming
The people looking at your resumes will skim because they have a lot of resumes to look at
If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.
“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes.
But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades.
So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.
My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.
When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
It might pay for him to listen for a bit.
He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
>> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models.
>> The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps.
Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well.
The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM
In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size.
I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.
> Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
That would accelerate the decline.
Were you not around 10-20 years ago?
I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.
Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques.
I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.
Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.
In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
As for your job search, I would recommend that you look way beyond your home country if you haven't started doing that already. There are markets where there are jobs and while finding work overseas is not easy, there are markets where ML/product/research roles are still open.
Free advice from the Internet- That role you're describing is pretty rare for new grads. You'd normally look for someone with experience and a track record before trusting them with open ended work or product management roles.
Start by being a "junior" builder in a team, then as you prove yourself you'll be given broader scope, this can take a while. There are teams building things that need strong builders. The smaller the company the more likely you'll be able to grow faster if you perform well.
However the problem is for every role, you will be faced this 10,000+ other applicants, so you need to keep that in mind.
So instead of that your best bet is to build an AI startup in the US [0]. You have built AI systems for others, surely you can do it for yourself?
[0] Do not build a startup in the UK or Europe.
Best of luck and reach out if you need advice.
Going "out of distribution" in abilities also means your job prospects go "out of distribution". When you specialize, so too does the kind of position you'd be the better fit for. This can mean radically fewer possibilities, and strong geographic restrictions.
To give an example, my PhD topic concerned something "that's everywhere" but, when you look at things more closely, there's only < 10 labs (by lab, I mean between 1 and 3 permanent researchers and their turnover staff) in the world working on it, and around that many companies requiring skills beyond gluing existing solutions together, in which case they'd just as well hire a cheaper (and more proficient) generalist with some basic notions.
This isn't even a very abstract, very academic field, it's something that gets attacked within academia for being too practical/engineering-like on occasion.
I understand the "belly of the curve" gets automated away, but consider that the tail end of the curve - producing knowledge and solutions to novel problems - has been for a long time, since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, if not oral communication. The solutions scale very well.
A researcher's job is, almost by definition, to work themselves out of a job, and this has been the case since long before AI. Once the unknown has been known, a new unknown must be found and tackled. There's very, very few places in the world that truly innovate (not implementing a one-off novel solution produced in some academic lab) and value those skills.
I don't mean to be overly bleak, but it doesn't necessarily follow from this automation that the freed salary mass will go towards higher-level functions; just as likely (if not more), this goes towards profits first.
they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc.
And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being received that they didnt invest in personally. This is what the tide that lift all boats are - and because everybody is lifted, those who complain about lack of the trickle down sees the high-flyers benefiting enormously while their own benefits aren't "visible".
Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
>Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.
I don't think you're asking a serious question.
What kind of answer would you accept? It's not like you're going to change your mind if they say that e.g. the Cyvorefrx family from Palm Beach is one of the people on the top, right?
Nor is this question an effecive rhetorical device to convince onlookers: they'll rightfully ignore it just like people ignord "Who are these Guantanamo Bay torturers you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of guards and soldiers?"
It's not a serious question because the preceding statement wasn't serious either. It's just a vague anti-elite statement.
At the very least, it's not the CEO's job to keep unemployment rate low. That's the job of politicians and central bankers. To blame unemployment on "people at the top" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how society is structured. To take your Guantanamo Bay example, it's like blaming it on terror on "the military industrial complex". Is it vaguely directionally correct? Yeah. Is it a cogent statement? No.
"The people richer than me" is typically the meaning here. You here this complaint often even from people in the top 1% of the richest country on earth.
Look up Bilderberg group
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
Pretty sure $400k was not on the table for anyone but a tiny minority
But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.
I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
It's bad across the board - 20%+ under & unemployment for basically everyone.
In some science fields good luck getting a job if you don't have a Ph.D.
But otherwise, yes, these things are cyclical. But I think the trend, even with AI, is still towards more software. We've had explosive growth over the last few decades.
https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/pfbid02UTHoop...
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
> Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens.
Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
Another baseless assumption.
> they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
Another baseless assumption.
We've also had people poached by other companies.
I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job.
Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments.
Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats...
Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
Also, how would it differentiate between outsourcing and SAAS?
A _better_ solution would be to remove the H1-B cap and continue to skim the best graduates worldwide. Same with removing the green card quotas. Make sure if someone gets an H1-B, they can transition to a green card and then to citizenship.
That's always been the US's super power.
Keep the density of innovation in the USA by inviting people in.
Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
I'm still figuring out exactly what the research will be but the plan is essentially data science applied to bird migration patterns (lots of statistics and modelling currently). Overall if you like birds and don't like money apparently a strong math/tech background is potentially useful for ecology research with the idea that's it's easier to teach me about birds than teach an animal science person data science and programming (though I did take an undergrad ecology class before applying to ecology programs).
Edit: engineers are always skeptical of my career change but my friends actually in the life sciences are more confident I'll be able to figure it out.
Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.
Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.
It's a complex gamble on how the environment will (or won't) change. Both are important... but "efficiency" is way easier to measure/market in a spreadsheet.
I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".
It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.
I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.
The rules are, do well at your internship, and you'll probably get a job offer.
The author also seems to be saying that they are getting interviews, but no job offers. ("The interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections.") Another rule is, if you do well at interviews, you will get a job offer.
So, without putting any value judgment on anyone, this is what's happening. The author isn't doing well enough on internships and interviews.
So my advice is not "just apply to more places", but to do that and also practice programming in order to interview better.
At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.
I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.
We've had several candidates with completed bachelor's degrees apply for internships, prove themselves, and get full-time jobs that way. This "back door" job hiring pathway might work elsewhere as well.
It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.
The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.
Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.
The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed cooked for a variety of reasons, and it's a much better explanation than some skill issue. People who think they're in the same economy just don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, or legitimately don't know many people in that age group.
It was a skill issue to some extent for me when interviews weren't working out because I couldn't do niche algo problems, or I didn't get a second or first call, but it was never the way it is these days. It was difficult in pre-covid times to get back into a job if I got laid off, sometimes took a year, but there was some information to go on. I'd get interviews periodically, maybe second interviews, maybe 5 interviews, before I'd be rejected. It was maybe 1 in 40 in terms of interview to application ratio; bad enough to end up living in the car, but even then I could pick up a manual labor or barista job. Now.. it's honestly not even worth applying in many cases. It got real dark before I landed my current one, to the point where I considered switching industries, but there was no viable path to do that and see prosperity on the other side. Even now that I'm in a relatively well-paying position, it's still precarious, and long-term prosperity is not even really a remote consideration; I have to assume that despite my best efforts to preserve my income, it can and likely will go away at any time, and therefore even the most basic mortgage (which would still be ~4x my annual gross income and give us less space than renting, doesn't seem feasible. I think it would be more beneficial to just completely forget about trying to aim for milestones that barely exist anymore.
Currently, my spouse has been out of work for nearly a year, not in CS, and she's depressed—rightfully so—because it's never been this bad in our adult lives. No responses _at all_ for any job, and she's way more capable on paper for the stuff she's applying to than I am for SE. One single interview in the last 6 months for something paid, and it didn't pan out. This is Canada mind you, but still.
The economy is now composed of people who have jobs and are stressed about them disappearing, people who don't need work and do own all the land, and people who might miss a majority of their 20s in terms of working life unless they pull some miracle out of their ass quickly.
Red flags for me:
* Talks a big talk on AI but it’s inscrutable if any of it goes beyond “I installed PyTorch and ran example code/prompted an API”
* Multiple projects but from demos it’s very unclear what they actually did. (Not “very legible technical work”)
* No GitHub on résumé despite claiming it on “skills”
I can get a good engineer onboarded to AI tooling quickly (heck, some of the referenced techniques have existed for only months), but I can’t reliably take someone from AI consumer to engineer.
These issues are very widespread. I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together.
They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. But perhaps my expectation of "real systems" is different than yours.
To put this into perspective, I mentor and have mentored lots of juniors from code schools and traditional, four year university computer science majors in web dev. Having some concept of both the web stack/language and a basic understanding of good coding practices is about the most I'd expect. All thing things that sit on top of it, like scaling the stack, performance optimizations and the like are things I wouldn't even come close to expecting a junior to know. Those are things I'd expect to have to coach on.
This is just how the junior job market seems to operate now. Barely anyone wants some open-ended, curious recent graduate who's eager to expand their technical knowledge with new skills that are taught to them at the job. Everyone wants juniors to punch well above their weight - to even have a chance of an interview, ideally your resume should indicate that you're already an expert at every required skill in the job listing. They fish out the top 1-5% of all graduates and the really desperate people who are willing to go work a junior job despite extensive work experience - everyone else is welcome to keep putting in hundreds of applications elsewhere. Of course, it makes sense that you'd want the best - but it feels like there's active pressure now to hire as few people as possible regardless of circumstance. Companies will keep searching for the miracle candidate - if they don't find one, they'll just repost the listing until one shows up. Everyone else has locked the doors on hiring altogether. We're probably going to see a push on juicing more value out of existing workers than paying new ones, so the average graduates will continue having nowhere to go.
You’re looking for seniors with junior pay grades.
If there's no github project, I ask the candidate what website, web communities he watches/participates in regularly. I check if they are related to programming or building software (bonus point if you read HN :-)).
Both are good signs that there is an interest in the job that goes beyond paycheck.
You’re looking for special snowflakes, but want to pay usual money. You may find that money also works as a motivation, a transactional relationship between an employer and an employee is healthy in that neither has to pretend there’s anything else that ultimately matters. (The illusion can be kept only until the first round of layoffs anyway.)
At that time I realized my American Dream of becoming an engineer was just that: a dream. A shared illusion we all propped up until we couldn't. So, I turned down engineering schools, took a year off to work in a coffee shop, and went to university for a Bachelors in Fine Arts.
I figured: if I was going to be unemployed and living paycheck to paycheck, I might as well follow my own dreams and try to have fun doing it.
Only a few years after graduating, I'd return to engineering—computer programming instead of robotics—but that experience has always stuck with me.
Almost 20 years later, I feel the same gut-punch as I see whats happening to young people.
For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem.
The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
As with most things, getting into it seems to be primarily about knowing someone to get you in.
I’d love to hear more ideas/advice on finding alternative employment if anyone has any. I’m worried I won’t be able to find a normal job again.
Do whatever is of most value you find easy but others find difficult, specialize, find a location with more demand and less competition, brand distinctly, advertise efficiently, and make sure your prices are calibrated correctly. Maybe it's installing security systems or home automation integration.
It's intentional. The housing problem is a policy failure. It's illegal to build homes where people want to.
No, "not enough people" is corporate speak for "the public should train our workers for us"
Company CEO paid-orders-of-magnitude-more-than-median-employee:
"Not enough local people with XYZ skills!"
Skilled local person: "I'm right here, just pay me properly."
Unskilled local person: "I'm right here, train me and I'll do it even at your low wage."
Local educational institution: "We could run training courses if you want to work with us on that!"
...
CEO: "Guess we'll have to get them from overseas!"
Similarly, the world has a terrible megayacht shortage! This is obvious, because I can't find any selling for the $20k in my budget. I demand to know what the government is going to do to fix this existential threat to the nation and our very way of life!
[0] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
There will be jobs, but also, it might take more time and energy to find them (~12 months vs ~6 months historically). Plan accordingly (structural living expenses, cash on hand, etc).
> Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
Anyone got a way of characterising that?
I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.
The salaries of most tradespeople are not increasing significantly. That would imply that the field doesn't see a shortage.
Given how damaging manual labor is to your body, that's not a good bet to make.
If you have real skills you are expected to make something of your own on the side. Nobody teaches you how capitalism really works, they want suckers to do the shit work. The ways to win are to work for yourself, eliminate as many middlemen as possible, hide sacred knowledge, come up with scams, hide bodies for rich people.
I’m more of a mid-level dev, but I was recently unemployed for about 6 months and it felt brutal - and this is despite having a couple years of work experience. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for junior data scientists where there’s an even worse supply to demand ratio of applicants (and almost always with graduate degrees).
Hopefully this is what changes. If, for example, AI reduces labor needs by 50%, we ought to gradually move to a 20 hour work week. Consumption patterns would change— the Covid years provide some very limited guidance on how such a dynamic would be shaped by changing the demand for different forms of entertainment and leisure activities.
The main thing though especially in the US with its cultural roots is that western society will need to reevaluate the idea of person worth so tightly coupled to labor and career- and the Puritan Work Ethic.
It seems very unlikely that the pattern would hold uninterrupted for thousands of years only to end soon. People organize around their work, whether it's the tasks of a a medieval farming household, an new steam-powered industrial textile mill, or commuting to their office-job.
How would this work for the jobs that can't be replaced by AI? Sure, the programmer might be able to work 10 hours a week because of AI, but it's unlikely anything similar is going to come any time soon for nurses, so do they have to continue working 40 hours? What happens to salaries? If programmers can work 10 hours and still get paid 6 figures, wouldn't everyone flood into it, driving down prices? Conversely wouldn't the wages of jobs that can't be replaced with AI go up, because we still need nurses or whatever?
None of this is radical, it happens on a small scale constantly. Happening at this scale this fast is going to be painful, less so if there’s a minimum of thought put into it, but still painful.
But there has to be some change in things. There is no equilibrium possible in having the world produce the same amount of stuff but half the population has zero money or everyone has half as much— and can’t afford that stuff so then it just wouldn’t be produced, but that isn’t the way the economy has ever gone either. We have a 5 day work week in part because 1) industrialization made it possible and 2) It gave people more time to themselves, which was required in order for people to have time to spend more money on all of the things being produced by industrialization. It was a somewhat deliberate process and even happened pretty quickly. Something similar should hopefully happen here.
There are alternatives! A “Covid 2.0” that ends up being much deadlier could present a much more morbid solution in the form of outright population loss. But then again, absent a little economic foresight then even without a sequel worse than the original Covid the social unrest and other upheaval might simply lead to a bunch of absurd wars and we get the same or worse population loss… sorry, I don’t want to get into the territory of bad Hollywood movie plots. But massive changes to labor force expectations on what employment means are pretty much required in some form or fashion.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.
However, that doesn't seem like the authors core point. The authors' core point here is that they feel that the level of competition is past the point where their meritocratic achievements have any weight because to be competitive in the present marketplace, they need to either (1) inherently be _born_ in a different country with a low cost of living, (2) give up certain basic freedoms, (3) settle for a less skillful job where they can be an outlier in the distribution (for how long?) etc. -- all of which, to them, feel less meritocratic.
Of course, they might also feel "entitled" to a job, but that's not the interesting part of their argument (at least to me).
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
But, the author's skill is exactly where the growth is: he's a AI graduate! If author has trouble finding a job, the reason certainly couldn't be the lack of growth in AI automation jobs?
I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.
Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques!
I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.
Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.
In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
“Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. ... Models feast on that part of the curve. ... The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. ... An out of distribution human, in my head, is someone whose job sits far enough in the tail of that curve that it does not currently compress into training data. ... [But T]hey are not safe; nothing is. They are simply late on the automation curve.”
Then he says it's only a matter of time until the outliers are automated too. That's more speculative, but may not be wrong. It's only been three years since ChatGPT shipped. This is just getting started.
I guess I’m just annoyed that everyone in the comments is reaffirming the AI is stealing jobs narrative, but half the studies coming out say it’s actually wasting peoples time and they are poor judges of their own productivity.
It just feels like AI is a convenient excuse for businesses to cut costs since the economy is crap, but no one wants to admit it for fear of driving their stock price down.
I accept, though, your point that economic factors not directly related to AI are also playing a role. Presumably economists are now trying to to pick apart the effect of each factor on the job market.
spot on! at my place - playwright + prompts instead of hiring QA. data analytic guy is gone ... noone is missing him
today's random quotes
- "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is" ...
- "he job market in India has grown 9% in 2025, so far. 53 million in new jobs. I wonder, how many jobs came from U.S. companies being off shored?"
5 trilllion off the global IT bubble funded by VC money taken somewhere else poured into GPUs and data centers
look at number of linkedin profiles in US companies like Accenture in India .... 450 000 + ... feel really bad biggest transfer of head-counts from US, chatgpt just fuelled it
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.
Can't people already do massive amounts of damage to a company truck/van by driving it into the water, or dumping gas on it and igniting it? Doing it remotely only makes marginally easier, but most people won't do it because they don't want to be on the lam just to send an anti-capitalist message.
The room was stunned silent.
Society should not be engineered to make sure members of the professional class don’t have to enter the working class. To do so would be unfair to the working class, not to mention bad for competition and productivity. Demand is high for a variety of trades and healthcare jobs.
Not that working class has anything wrong with it. Most of us are. Preferring to do white collar is perfectly alright. Considering the emotional toil rote work has on you
That said, I don't mean to be dismissive or condescending of the article as a whole, because I think this is a well written article that raises a lot of good points that are worth reading and thinking about. I find myself with similar thoughts and it's a bit scary/depressing at times, even as someone nearly twice their age(in part because of my own offspring).
Yes, if you're in your 30s and have lived through a bunch of corporate downsizings before, it does make sense.
Do you remember what it was like to be 18? I had no idea what people in offices even did all day. My way of thinking about the world was 100% idealistic and had no basis in the gritty realities of corporate life.
You’d very quickly rise to the top of the public sector
My brother in law is only in his mid 20s and is in charge of half a dozen engineers
No nepotism (we honestly know no one) just leaping from the right firm to the public sector at the right time
Look for government consultant jobs or even better straight engineering roles
The result of this is that Accenture and co. staff with local people on-site for public sector accounts.
Nobody owes you anything. Grow up
Management has generally become persuaded that juniors are not worth hiring. My current shop is a bit more thoughtful on this which is good. But. The desire for senior+ is out of line. Particularly when companies want to pay junior rates. =}
---
Dear author,
I don't know any period in the past 20 years where entry level jobs were properly allocated outside of FAANG. I have always advised talking to Microsoft, as my perspective is that they have the best entry level pipeline.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can afford to stay in it" is an old stock traders proverb. And I believe it applies the AI fad. I do not believe that the dreams of actually replacing humans will work out generally. But it will be a painful experience for the employees and the prospective employees.
This is why we must break the siloes and give the tech to as many people as possible. Not access through an API, but the weights for the models and schematics for the robots.
I think we'll be fine on that front, though. AI and robotics R&D is open enough and people seem willing and capable enough to keep it that way, so the short-term job market issues will disappear. The remaining threat from AI is a long-term existential one.
That's how it's been my entire adult life.
- What jobs are they applying for? - Do they understand the benefits they can bring to a team? - Are they showing up in interactions like they show up in this blog post? How can they take radical responsibility for the problem of finding job? Doing what you are told and not getting a job sure sucks but if that's all someone tells me about what they did, I am 100% not passing on a good recommendation. - Their resume needs work
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
I'm not really seeing it aside from "there's a large uptick because there's eventually a recession".
Further, the graph is otherwise smooth. We don't really see small bumps - 1 or 2 exceptions not reassuring.
Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well.
Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will change things more than offshoring but once again not as much as everyone seems to think. We still have offshoring but it didn’t stop programmers ramping toward and beyond seven figure salaries.
To the author’s credit this doesn’t read like panic, it’s level headed, but it is inevitably quite dark. In the 90s recession people temped, worked in coffee shops, and made or listened to amazing music. Not to be flip but maybe for a college grad (no kids) getting sidetracked from a tech developer job for a while is a blessing in disguise.
From the employer side, it's becoming incredibly difficult to find qualified inbound candidates. The main issues is AI + non-US spam. Every job listing we post attracts ~200 applicants, and maybe 5 US based humans.
It's a full time job to wade through the spam to find the actual people, especially when a lot of people are lying about location / experience on the resumes. The result is we've just stopped taking incoming applications and only go outbound to find candidates.
And we're a small startup. I imagine any midsized+ company has 100x this problem.
But in regards to US/EU remote, I imagine the EU candidates come with slightly higher overhead (different payroll processing, employment regulations, time zones, etc). Which makes it easier to adopt a US only approach.
I don't know why we need to be so dramatic about AI and automation. The reason you're not getting hired is because there's not enough positions and we have a huge amount of people in the industry. Tech is not exploding like it was in the 2000s and 2010s. It is a mature industry. That comes with mature industry issues like when the economy sucks, it doesn't grow anymore.
Have you noticed how we're still in a trade war? What about the government shutdown? The high interest rates? All time highs for cost of living? Wages not keeping up with costs at all for practically any profession? Dang, it's almost like if all the money going to AI stonkz wasn't happening... we'd be in a recession... hmmmm
Data Science Intern at Eco Startup
MLE at Health Startup
-----------
Did most everything right but is definitely falling through the cracks somehow.
Tech careers are no longer careers they are gigs. You get in you are lucky but Elon can tweet something and you can be out in a whim. Now it's for geniuses, turbo slaves willing to work 70 hours a week and that's unsustainable for more than 6 months.
Keep in mind this is in Europe as well, we don't make the crazy salaries Americans make with stocks. Basically 40-50K salary if you're lucky and that kind of money doesn't warrant the effort required for it.
- Just another recession, nothing to do with AI or automation. It'll pass and things will be back to normal.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs away from western countries.
- A massive move of well-paid jobs to automation and AI.
What an "exciting" time to be alive
The stock market continues to puzzle me.
It's not just this fellow. I'm hearing it from friends and relatives whose children are new grads in CS, cyber-security or and similar fields.
It was already a bit like that when I graduated in 2012. In retrospect, I think there was a huge difference between me and people who graduated just 5 years earlier.
It's like there used to be a social contract that made sense but it stopped working suddenly at some point and we're basically gaslit because everyone from previous generations thinks the social contract is still working... Meanwhile since us millennials didn't know what to expect we kept convincing ourselves that it's just a bit harder than we thought... 5 years later; OK even harder than we thought... 10 years later, OK this is insanely difficult... 15 years later... Ok ok something's really wrong about the system... I'm basically a work zombie and no results. Talking with my parents about career feels like talking to aliens from a different parallel universe with completely different economic laws inhabited by completely different beings.
An alternative explanation is that this is an unusually ugly correction brought about by a combination of factors including but not limited to a prolonged period of essentially zero interest rates and a long time since the last real correction.
presumably to reduce future jobs in the outer edges of the distribution curve
If all of this info is factually correct, then I may have to adjust my priors even more about the dire state of entry level job market.
And I say “not popular” because so many tech people directly benefited from perpetuating and supporting those harmful policies. We were one of the primary beneficiaries of the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” and all that… As long as the massive paychecks kept coming and the work remained at home… we had no reason to question any of it.
Sadly the chickens are finally coming home to roost and it’s our kids that are fucked the most.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.