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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
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.
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 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.
- 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
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 stock market continues to puzzle me.
“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.”
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 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.
Nobody owes you anything. Grow up
- 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
Data Science Intern at Eco Startup
MLE at Health Startup
-----------
Did most everything right but is definitely falling through the cracks somehow.
With the exception of COVID, nearly every small uptick is followed by a large uptick.
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.
GianFabien•1h ago
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.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
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.
https://layoffs.fyi/
jackvalentine•1h ago
Anyone got a way of characterising that?
spencerflem•1h ago
toomuchtodo•1h ago
cellis•1h ago
rsaz•1h ago
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.
DivingForGold•1h ago
cuttothechase•4m ago
accurrent•1h ago
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.
platevoltage•42m ago
asdfman123•1h ago
No, "not enough people" is corporate speak for "the public should train our workers for us"
_carbyau_•4m ago
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!"
bsder•43m ago
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.