Two initial thoughts:

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.

Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things:

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.

Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ).

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.

Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.

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.

To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. 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.

I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?

The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?

I'm based in the UK and have been a hiring manager pretty recently. I have seen a lot of CVs like this. This was the junior positions I was advertising two years ago, this wouldn't have made it through the filter. Because largely, we (as even a small company) would get ~250+ applicants for a single position.

My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities.

Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special.

The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like:

* 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc.

* Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of>

* A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+)

And even then, you can't interview all those people.

First, I'm sorry you're having problems finding a job -- that sucks.

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.

What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.

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".

My two cents: As someone who is actively hiring and looking at a lot of résumés from fresh grads (albeit looking for more systems programming experience), I would personally not move forward with an interview for this CV.

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.

I just wanted to comment on the "out of distribution" solution the author proposes, partly for the young grads on this forum.

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.

I always feel a bit conflicted when I read these experience from new grads: on the one hand, there's no question the job market today is not the one they signed up for; on the other, the expectation of recent grads is completely alien to me as someone who entered the job market in the shadow of the dotcom bust.

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.

When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities.

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 a high schooler in 2008, I watched my family struggle. Pay cuts, temporary furloughs, and constant stress became normal. The same for my friends and their families. The vestiges of 90s excess and advancement were over.

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.

Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ).

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.

"It's the economy, stupid."

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

>The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life

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.

Depressing article but it really captures the zeitgeist among recent tech grads.

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).

"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."

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.

In the boom times people get too cocky and in the retrenchment they get too pessimistic.

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.

Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.

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

> There are already public memos from large companies where leaders tell their staff that any request for headcount has to come with a justification for why an AI system cannot do the job

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

Great essay. This part seems particularly astute:

“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.”

> “I am not the person in the VR rig or in the forklift chair. My world is the white collar side of this,”

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 understanding the 'I did everything right and look what happened' intro, though certainly not a unique feeling. Tech hiring slowed at the tail end of 21 and the mass layoffs started in 22, 4 and 3 years ago respectively. Studying to go into a market in an obvious downswing has predictable results. Not that you should give up, but it's going to be switch majors or ride out the downturn. And that's not unique to now or even computer science(remember the MBA glut from the early 2000s?).

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).

I’m in a similar spot but from a slightly different angle: I just finished a CS degree, but I’m working in IT Ops at a fintech while trying to move into SWE/SDET.

What you describe about the “center of the curve” hollowing out matches what I’m seeing from the inside. A lot of the work that would have gone to juniors is being either handed to automation tools or piled on a few senior people with AI assistance. Job titles still exist, but the entry rungs feel thinner and more contested.

The “out of distribution human” framing really resonates. Right now my survival strategy is to lean into weird combinations rather than trying to be a generic junior dev: mixing ops, security, automation, and AI glue work so I’m the one deciding where to use models instead of being the person they’re replacing.

I’m curious if you think there’s still any value in aiming for “standard” entry level SWE roles, or whether the only realistic play for new grads is to find niche, messy, cross-domain work and hope that’s far enough in the tail for long enough.

Reading the posters cv and experience, I suspect they have a skill gap in theory of mind. ie, understanding how they are perceived. Sure, the economy is hard, and finding a job is difficult. Questions I have

- 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

It is easier to start your own business than to get a job for a certain class of people in our industry. There is just not enough supply of jobs for people who “did everything right.” It’s a painful economic signal that US economy has run out of cushy Big Tech jobs and now needs an influx of innovative firms. This is difficult to explain to your relatives over Thanksgiving turkey but it is nonetheless the truth in my experience. If I could go back in time I would have gone to an Ivy League, gotten the proper internships, moved straight to the Bay during ZIRP, but alas I don’t have a Time Machine.

Well author writes very well so I’d imagine he’ll land on his feet.

The scary part to me is that it’s not obvious what the correct response to this potential future is. A pivot into out of distribution is functionally impossible for many. The new grad because if they don’t know the in curve stuff yet then expecting out from them is a tough ask. And for established people it’s a big leap out of comfort zone if you can even figure out which way to leap

It’s like telling someone to be smarter. Easier said than done

At the heart of every fast destructive technology leap is the (econo-militaristic) competitive drive to not be left behind. Whatever sociological damage technology causes pales to the innate desire to avoid being subjugated. This is on the mind of every major leader right now.

I wished I could get someone passionate on my team who wants to learn n grow. I’m at a FAANG company. I’m a self taught idiot with no college, but a lot of being in the right place, the right attitude and willing to grind to fill in my missing gaps. I’m top performer on my team, but I don’t think I’d make it today though starting at the bottom. I know I’d have a hard time getting a new job today for sure.

The same BigTech that for the past couple of decades have loudly proclaimed "go to a good college and get a degree in CS and you'll get a decent job" have now betrayed those who followed their advice. It's heartbreaking.

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.

"The people in the middle of the bell curve face a dramatically less promising future than the tail end" is also the key message of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over, 13 years ago.

This guy is in the UK, like me. The UK hiring market is freezing up, and has been since reeves et al raised employer taxes on hiring employees. They also just added some more legislation to make them harder to dismiss, and increased minimum wage, fueling wage compression. Now everyone is waiting for the budget in November to see what will happen next. I'm pretty sure most of this guy's problems are related to that, not AI. I work as a contractor in tech and bounce around different businesses. A lot of them are encouraging/using AI in some form but there are always new hires, whole functions aren't being replaced. People are on boarded every week. This is more science fiction than reality at the moment. The problem is taxes and regulations.

(Australian not an American here)

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

I enjoyed reading your essay - really nice work. With regards to job prospects, please review the resume.

Those big paragraphs should really be bullet points and even then, highlight the contribution or interest you have that makes you "out of distribution human" in the CV.

It isn’t just CS anymore. Now, it’s any entry level and even mid-level office positions. Anecdotally, it’s not just one industry or department anymore. There are a lot more applications and the applicants are also way more qualified.

The stock market continues to puzzle me.

This seems badly supported, likely entirely wrong. There is a lot of hype about automation, but hiring has all but stopped before without any automation revolutions being needed. If automation were driving this then there would be a shape to things with the most readily automated tasks sticking out, but what the labor market is showing is an extreme slowdown across all sectors broadly.

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.

A lot of millennials have had this feeling "I did everything right, but I'm not seeing any results" because the job market is all new to them it's like "Am I supposed to be seeing result by now?" They literally have no idea what to expect. But they keep having to lower their expectations...

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.

To me it seems that there's a contradiction in what the author is trying to say. On the one hand he's saying that for new grads like him, the job situation is getting worse and worse, because of AI. He's saying that AI, while taking over low skilled jobs, is growing and dominating the labor market.

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?

Interesting to see that the answers to his problems are literally embedded in the intro and outro : what you were “told” by adults was 100% B.S. (adults has no idea what the world was going to be like and what was the “right” path) and he was probably intelligent enough (as we can see by the writing of this article) to realize this by himself (simply questioning the culture around him is enough, what’s teenage years for ?) but he preferred to continue to believe the very serious adulty lies.

Nobody owes you anything. Grow up

In my experience, the best way to get hired is not actually to apply traditionally, but to put yourself in places people are actually looking. For me that has been Hacker News. Both of my latest jobs I've gotten from posting in the HN jobseekers thread, and all of the applications I've made outside of HN have never even gotten a reply. I think employers looking for exceptional candidates are more likely to look in exceptional places rather than "normal" places.

Ahmed with Deepmind internship can’t get a job? It’s not your resume that’s the issue it’s your name and the market in general.

The number of junior roles I have seen my companies open in the past 8 years - and I've been at a few different shops - is less than he fingers I have. And this is _before_ the AI-copolypse.

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.

Where I work we desperately need two new graduates for embedded controls dev jobs on-site in the US. We're very picky, looking for attitude and aptitude rather than super-specific skill sets. But over the next year we definitely need two and our preference is new graduates.

Remove all government regulations and all of these people would have decent jobs quickly. You can learn any trade with YouTube videos. Electricians make $175 / hr in Washington state now. I replaced my own electrical panel after reading a book and watching YouTube videos.

Large AI siloes, if allowed to exist, will bifurcate humanity. People who have a stake in those AI companies will no longer need the rest of the population to provide goods and services. We will split into two economies, where the lower economy is forever indebted to the upper economy for the bones they occasionally throw for free.

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.

You could try investing the unemployed time in your own project and see if it goes somewhere. Do the things you’d like to get hire for. Innovate. I understand it’s unwaged work but at least you don’t waste your time and it will make your cv better.

I appreciate the authors points here. There are definitely large swaths of interns/juniors who are going through this pain.

That being said, it is also true that the quality of graduates we are seeing has dropped dramatically in the last 2-3 years. We have really been struggling to hire competent juniors. Most bomb their interviews, and with coding tools many have not actually had to learn fundamentals at university.

Computer science has exploded in popularity because of the money that can be made in the industry and the distribution of people who enter the field has changed significantly. I do wonder about the signal to noise ratio here from people who maybe should not have entered the industry.

Interesting that a new grad that interned at Deepmind is not able to find a job.

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.

The hard truth is that companies overhired the year after COVID hit, and have spent the last year or two laying off those. If you look at any graph showing job listings, one will see that during COVID year (back to ZIRP), the numbers exploded. In the year prior to that, from '18 to '20, the numbers of job listings had started to flat out. Remember that the interest rates were going up back then, until COVID hit.

Right now the number of job listings is roughly following the same trajectory as prior to COVID. Meaning that if you had built some regression model up until COVID, the model would put us around where we are today.

For the young people that have never experienced this, it has happened before. And it will happen again. Most people are lucky enough that they will only experience this after big financial crashes, while others work in industries with natural boom and bust cycles.

One day recruiters will wine and dine you, promising a job 12 months before you graduate, with a fat signing bonus and other perks. The next day they'll ghost you. I've gone through two of these.

the book "Ultraltralearning" by Scott Young was/is a useful resource for people who want to "open their minds" to different perspectives on finding work, imo:

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/

https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/r81s4t/

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ultralearnin...

https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competi...

https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Scott-Young-audiobook/d...

From the UK. Named Ahmed.

I think this plays a factor.

Honestly, it just reminds me of 2000-2002 or so... Seemed to hit the coastal cities before here in Phoenix, but it got bad here right after 9/11 and I had trouble finding any work for close to a year. I was able to start working again for half what I was making before almost a year later... I'd done a handful of projects, but nothing solid at the time.

I spent most of my free time reading and learning as much as I could. I learned C# offline from "The Complete Reference" and the beta command line compiler as I didn't even have consistent internet access.

It was a rough, severely depressing time in my life. It absolutely sucks. Right now, I'm working under a contract role that I like, but zero benefits, which is a problem financially/medically. And the job market is rough (already took a 35% pay cut) just to keep working.

All I can suggest is stick to it, stay busy as much as you can and focus on work-adjacent hobby projects as much as you can. As others have pointed out, maybe try your hand at writing. There's always room for good technical writing out there, though it doesn't always pay the best, it can help your career and can be good for supplemental income.

> For most of the industrial era, you could assume that any large physical operation, like a warehouse, would need a certain number of human bodies to move boxes and drive forklifts.

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.

Came out right after dotcom bust. It was really disappointing when I learned that corporate America simply moves on to the next graduating class. All the recruiting mechanisms in place means you’re going to get burned pretty bad if you miss that hiring wave. Some of my classmates took years to find something long term. You’re so much better off taking a year off from school to reset. As most things in life, timing is everything.

I'm getting a 404 so: https://archive.is/viaSP

> young person complains about jobs because automation, outsourcing and immigration

> 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.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024

With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.

This is what happens when there is hyper-optimization of capital rate of return at the expense of cruelly suppressing the rate of labor wage increases. The middle class shrivels up to nothing and the precariat explodes with millions of under-counted homeless and functionally-homeless people. I guess billionaires really want to live in fortified gated communities in otherwise poor countries surrounded by favelas, criminal street gangs, and abject suffering.

Honestly I think "applying for jobs" is becoming a thing of the past.

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.

the irony here is that you are studying AI and looking for work in AI,

presumably to reduce future jobs in the outer edges of the distribution curve

It’s not popular to say in these parts, but societies insane covid reaction fucked over the younger generation so, so, so bad. Our kids are gonna be paying for that nonsense for their entire lives. We stole so much from them it isn’t even funny.

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.

What we cannot know is: which of these are we seeing:

- 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

If this blog post still doesn't help the author find a job, that's a really hopeless situation.

Research Intern at Deepmind

Data Science Intern at Eco Startup

MLE at Health Startup

-----------

Did most everything right but is definitely falling through the cracks somehow.

This page is no longer accessible. Why did author take it down?

Reading this reminds me how much I have missed good writing these days.

I’m not saying people should get jobs they are way overqualified for, but I believe there are many in these situations who choose to be unemployed rather than work in jobs that they could do in their industry.

Similar situation (in some sense, an entry level entrepreneur here) Except, I have a decade plus experience. Yet find your situation relatable. After graduating with an engineering degree from a not so bad college in India, all my job applications were going in an abysmal pit. Even the 18 call centers I applied to rejected me (despite being told of having reasonably good English language skills). What worked was relocating to a metropolitan town and literally going door to door in person and show up at companies and walk-ins, and I got an engineering job (btw, I'm at that exact stage now - will get to it later). Few years later, went to US for MS, spent a year after graduating in applying for jobs - stopped counting applications after 2250th application. Didn't even get a single interview. Out of desperation, did a site-wide search for some niche enterprise software name I knew about on craigslist, landed a craigslist subdomain page for a town I hadn't heard of - got job interview and the job. Fast forward a few years later, I had been looking for a way to find a meaningful occupation to return to central India - spent all my vacations over the years looking for something that I could do. Never found it. So one fine day, I packed up my bags from a year old FAANG job, and came back. Since then, I've been building, demoing, pitching, improvising but haven't yet made an income - neither through my network back in the US, nor cold calling. So now, I'm on foot again, just showing up at companies and realizing: the local market is much different, their needs are different ; and in person presence is a huge catalyst in advancing sales cycle. In person communication is introducing me to signals and adapt my offerings. AI, if anything, has only helped be more productive, but I totally see how it would impact entry level engineering jobs - and I don't have any answers for that. Except, that increasing the surface area by in-person interactions may be an avenue to explore if you already haven't. Hanging out at coworking spaces, going to meetups where your potential "customers" would hang out etc. might be worth a try. For a such a well written article, I'd hope someone with the right opportunity may reach out to you. Good luck.

If i am manage to land an entry level job with a pathetic pay and keep it for a few years, I will be well suited to benefit from the eventual shortage of the mid-senior level engineer. am i right or am i just coping?

So do a PhD? His CV is good, what is there to lose?

> The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.

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.

[dead]

[flagged]