As someone who is essentially still a new grad (~3yoe), I wanted to give my two cents as to why the job market for new hires is so bad.

My buddy had his septic tank drained last week. He's feeling burnt out as a software engineer and had idly did a bit of a job hunt as an experiment, sending out 70 applications, mostly to larger companies. He has a phenomenal resume, not top .1%, maybe more like top 5-10% in NYC/Bay Area markets, but also has a long line of previous managers that'll sing his praises all day. Despite that, all blanket rejections, not even a callback for a 30m screen.

Anyway, he's talking with the septic tank guy and AI comes up and my buddy asks if dude is worried at all. The guy says, "yeah I figure somewhere out there, there'll always be some shittank that the robots can't get to, and they'll have to call me."

So folks worst case scenario we just empty septic tanks!