So it seems to me that the article only serves to confirm your biases. After reading the article, you might feel that the job market is impossible, or you might feel that there's something important left out about the subject of the article. Or even both. Either way, I don't see anyone reading this article with their view of the world challenged.
It was a mix of opportunity, the willingness to seize it, how well you talked and finally, in a large amount, luck.
Did Ivy League phds boomers not get jobs after 2000 applications?
What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Maybe this person's applications include things that are big red flags. Maybe when they get to the interview stage they give off the impression they are a fraud?
Maybe they're even lying about the 2000 applications.
Maybe their resume is just written really badly.
As you say, there's just nowhere near enough information.
>What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Good questions, I don't have many answers since I'm only one of the above, certainly not an Ivy League PhD :)
So I'll respond with a short response to your prompt, using only the natural intelligence this senior citizen has remaining .
>graduated summa cum laude from Rice University and enrolled at Princeton for his Ph.D. in 2018. His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024.
>he aimed to work in science roles at pharmaceutical companies.
This shows a certain kind of kind of ambition and brilliant capabilities. I would think if he had stayed in Houston in 2018 and went straight to work at an oil company or chemical company he would done a lot better by now. Then with a company helping pay for the advanced degree, they will already be more invested in your progress after that.
I almost took this route myself when I was right out of school, my first employer was fairly ideal as a research company that had some money-making chemicals (including a pharmaceutical I didn't know about until I got the job), however it was the only chemical place at all in the college town, founded by one of my professors 20 years earlier. That's just about the opposite of how it is in a truly industrial location.
>The response to numerous applications was mostly silence, with a few rejections.
For me it was from applying at non-chemical outfits so I could potentially survive the Nixon recession and remain in the college town to regroup and see about further degree pursuit.
I'm not up-to-date but I would think that staying in Salt Lake would also limit the job possibilities for pharmaceuticals compared to places like New Jersey. All things being equal a local candidate can often be preferred precisely because the screening process takes so long, by the time they get close to selecting the winner, the need to get to work immediately rules out any further delays. Job goes to the one that can start the next Monday without involving any personal "logistics", and who can put the nose to the grindstone uninterrupted immediately without distractions, making up for time lost when the position was unfilled.
>Weis studied chemical principles and molecular interactions,
I did that, it was a very worthwhile stepping stone, no doubt about it, I also accepted a destiny to thrive or not based on my own technology. I'm a chemist, not an engineer though.
When an opening came up at my local target chemical employer, the competition was so overwhelming in number I didn't stand a chance. This felt about the same point in the recession as it is now. I began to realize I needed to start looking in another state, so that was going to be after my fiancee graduated if we could survive that long.
No such thing as on-line screening yet, and phone screening had become out-of-the-question, with hundreds of applicants, employers never had any more time for that, especially for jobs where the application form is what you need, not so much a resume. Fax machines were not even out yet.
So you applied in person and it was personal screening from that point forward. During normal times an open position would draw a few applicants a week, and it could always take a long time for a candidate to get hired whether the employer was seeking some uncommon previous experience or not.
The problem was, there were now hundreds of applicants per day for jobs of any kind, and it was getting worse.
The real break came when I was applying for miscellaneous local jobs (hope was still declining across the country), one time at a lumber company. I didn't think my chances were too good after I talked to some of the other applicants, a number who had at least a few years somewhat related experience when I had not much.
But I was already wearing a tie so I stopped by the old chemical plant when there wasn't an opening and the Personnel lady[0] liked me and pulled my original application to review. I toured the plant and labs with the actual hiring PhD, and within a week they made me a part-time job 4 days a week Tue-Fri. I tried my hardest to kick butt in a visible way and within 6 months some of the other workers started to say "to themselves", "why doesn't he have to work on Monday?". So that's how I got the first full-time job in my field :)
Things were still not ideal concerning pay and (chemical) toxicity, and after I became a more experienced candidate I went for "greener" pastures, some of which were uniquely toxic in their own ways :\
There was a real big difference once I got to an actual major industrial environment. There are more diverse opportunities, but more normal in the sense that the majors have money-making chemicals first & foremost usually based on natural resources more so than technology, then their research is also massive in scale afterward, when they simply need it more and can afford it better. Realistically, though the number of opportunities are far more abundant, I would still say the biggies fund far less experimentation than the amount they could actually afford. Which turned out to be where I found my niche and eventually started my own research company, with somewhat deeper theoretical background for the most part after more than a decade of more intense experimentation, and leaning much more on ambition to make up for the lack of advanced degree. By now it's been a few more decades of further advances.
>Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics.
I know a little but sure don't think I could pull my weight doing that compared to a decent engineer. However I still feel confident I could turn him into a money-making lab worker right quick, no engineering required. Just like I did the last time the employer I had hired a ChemE PhD for me to train.
For this person in particular having circuit boards on the bench without being under an employer's direction, that is one thing most ChemE's don't do. I think a good one-word piece of advice might be "electrochemistry", and would consider focusing on networking with as many of those in every level and position in the battery technology landscape. I would play the odds that there's more employers who don't have "any" open positions (compared to those that do where odds are in your favor) and focus on the former (after already experiencing so much of the latter) so that when something does come up you might have a better chance.
[0] The "HR" designation for the established Personnel Office at corporations was still in the coining process. With the unprecedented amount of meat they now had to draw from, it could then be recognized as more of a "resource" to be exploited, and huge compared to the personnel they still had working after the widespread cutbacks. A great deal of rebalancing took place between the effect these external untapped resources have versus the internal human resources, especially with regard to pay & benefits. Once it got underway it did kind of snowball in a lot of areas. For instance you could start a salt mine based on a natural resource, but eventually once you had thousands of employees and for some reason growth has stalled, quarterly figures can still be goosed toward increase by extracting more from human resources along with the same old salt. It's all just salt of the Earth to some people when you think about it ;)
It is something you get by specializing on a topic so much that you are pretty much THE expert on that specific topic. (The inside joke is that at the end of your PhD you must know everything about nothing)
This fundamentally makes the usual job search strategy of casting a wide net completely useless. A PhD is typically a worse employee than a normal malleable undergrad you can train unless you really need an expert on the topic the person has a PhD on.
It’s not uncommon for top tier Phds to land good jobs regardless of, but that’s more because of willingness to do different things, give up on solving problems you have invested half a decade into, and the general availability of researchy jobs.
The last one is the least important.
In practice you read the relevant papers, and have mentors and collaborators explain the insights useful for a particular purpose until you get the zeitgeist but not an in depth understanding of a neighboring field.
During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.
Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.
The lectures are usually given by the professor (head of the research group). Sometimes a PhD gives a lecture when the professor is away. But yes, it depends on your employment contract. If your contract involves a lot of teaching you might even give a whole lecture - though this is rarely the case for employees without PhD.
I think it happens quite rarely that a company is looking for a PhD based on the specifc topic of their thesis. If that ever happens, you can consider yourself lucky though, because they will probably pay you a fortnue if they really think that they couldn't put any other PhDs on that topic.
*that is not to say field of research like "Machine Learning", but rather something like "loss functions for graph neural networks".
> It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure.
Unfortunately, it seems much of the hiring process is automated, and they are not going to tell you how to navigate that.
But still, it feels like there is some missing information here. Surely, with a summa cum laude from Rice and a Ph.D. from Princeton in ChemE, he has impressed someone along the way. He needs to concentrate on places where he has a connection, however tenuous. Especially at the relatively rarefied Ivy STEM Ph.D. level...
If he is having trouble getting people to make connections for him, well, that would definitely be an important piece of the puzzle...
In the future, just know that typing archive.is/{paste article link} in your URL bar almost always removes paywalls. There’s also an extension that does this automatically for most news sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294166
Are you sure it is not the opposite? Why would they...
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
1. Your ability to speak.
2. Your ability to write.
3. Your ability to think.
- in that order! If you suck at social communication, you basically have to be an era-defining genius like Newton in the thinking department if you want to make it. And even he almost didn't get his most famous work published if Halley (yes, the guy from the comet) hadn't seen beyond his social quirks and realized his genius.
Be careful also of the environment you plan to enter, because there exist ones in which people (or some people) cannot read past the "John eats an apple" level of complexity. You need to be able to calibrate.
convincing people will "climb".
That, in bad environments of people of little judgement, includes the worst: high convincing skills but low or rotten substance. Some people are just pure climbers: it takes an environment of clean eyed people to prevent their damage.
I imagine for a lot of positions this is true, but surely not every position is like this? Like say, at an HFT firm/hedge fund/etc. -- if you can make people ridiculous amounts of money, they'd be insane to turn you away just because you're socially inept. They would just give you a room to do your thing solo and make everyone rich, no?
That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.
Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.
In the vast majority of jobs however, being technically competent only matters to give you a chance of getting the job. Being more technically competent increases your odds.
But what will be the defining factor is the evaluation if "Can I like (or at least tolerate) communicating with this person on a daily basis?"
Even at companies where you have multiple rounds of leet code, there will be a couple of behavioural interviews in the mix. Those are definitely not fluff.
So, your professor's rules are no longer relevant. There's nobody to speak to, no matter what you write it's not going to change anything. Thinking isn't a priority either.
You need to know people. That is all.
Anecdotally, I had this happen to me. For the context, I'm moving back from the Netherlands to Israel. I've been looking for a job in the Netherlands before giving up and leaving. Despite maybe a hundred or so applications that I've sent, I've never heard from anyone. I think, Dutch law requires a timely response to the application and so I would get template rejections most of the time. Sometimes seconds after applying.
Back in Israel, I also applied through LinkedIn and Indeed. But I also happen to be on the file in some HR agencies which supply candidates to the programming jobs. I've received an invitation from such an agency to interview for a job with a company I've already applied to through LinkedIn (and was promptly rejected). I've landed an interview, and when asked about my job hunting efforts in the Netherlands, I jokingly described the application through LinkedIn and the likes as futile, as nobody reads those applications.
The interviewer start beating his chest assuring me that they would never... I decided to withhold from them the fact that they actually would. I'm still at the... third interview with them now. So, we'll see how it goes.
Anyways. My larger point is: the automation brought to job hunting is very disadvantageous to the junior workforce. Connections always played a role, but now their role is exaggerated. The article describes it as decreased job mobility (nobody quits, so there are fewer jobs to hire people into). And while it keeps the appearance of low unemployment, the problem with it is that it's the same people who are unemployed all the time. Our unemployment model isn't prepared for this. The idea behind social security unemployment compensation is that you find a job relatively quickly and only need a few months to get by before you do. This doesn't work anymore, as unemployment lasts years.
This is bad on many levels: it lowers the number of professionals entering the field, it leads to the loss of expertise as older workers retire w/o having trained a replacement, the effort spent on acquiring expertise is wasted by the young workforce as they are forced to change direction.
Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.
> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.
A PhD always involves a huge random element. You commit to working long term under the close supervision of a person you don't know, often in an unfamiliar place far away from home, in a project that may not lead anywhere. And you may not even know if research is actually something you want to do and your personality is suited for. Most of the time things ultimately work out, but for many people they don't. Most of the latter manage to find something else, but there are always some unlucky people who don't. (And who may be scarred by the experience.)
Harsh words for someone you've had no social interactions with. To me this statement says more about you than Jack Weis.