Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
279 comments
·July 16, 2025yardie
My experience graduating right into the dot-bomb was it absolutely sucked. I, a fresh-faced grad, was competing against experienced engineers who were laid off after Y2K, Cosmo, Yahoo, and other dotcoms for entry-level jobs. I wasn't very bitter then, but now when I meet mid-20s developer with "senior" or "director" titles, it hurts knowing that 3-5 years of my career was wasted trying to string together credible work history portfolio.
The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.
sys_64738
Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.
bigfatkitten
Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.
Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
pavlov
Also “Head of X” which often means the titleholder is practically the only person doing X at the company, and/or has no actual power.
leoqa
Usually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
rcruzeiro
As a former Head of Mobile, I agree.
devinprater
Oh, that explains the Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer. No power.
citizenpaul
I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.
After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
sys_64738
One of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
chrisweekly
It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
immibis
I thought this was well-known, that everyone's a VP in the financial sector because a lot of contracts required a VP or higher to sign off on a lot of things and it was easier to make everyone a VP. Sort of like giving everyone sudo access.
sys_64738
Our VP Mario had 5 of us plus a contractor.
unyttigfjelltol
Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.
giantg2
More like appeasing their workers with worthless titles instead of money.
swader999
I was a Petroleum Transfer Engineer when I was sixteen. Then everything went self serve. History repeats I fear.
somanyphotons
I can't wait to see a Vice President of Helm Charts
denimnerd42
my mothers first title was inexperienced assistant in her public accounting firm
laborcontract
Graduating in a recession is really unfair to the graduate. Economists have looked at the effects on lifetime wages and it's estimated that recession kids lose in aggregate about 20% in lost lifetime wages, and to no fault of their own.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
tuesdaynight
If you don't mind sharing, what would be the things that a person should think about it before doing the same action that you did? I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
daxfohl
Not OP but same experience. If you're not overly concerned about a certain quality of life, number of cars, square footage of house, etc., then there's nothing to think about. Engineering is a fine career (granted, AI takeover notwithstanding) and a few-year gap isn't going to leave you on the street. Being a few years behind your peers in your 30's may gnaw at you a bit, but by your 40's things will have reasonably equalized. My "wealthier" friends have some nicer things, go on more lavish vacations, but it's never really bothered us. And they generally got that way because they're type-A personalities to begin with. So they're not the type of people who would even ask the question about taking time off. Maybe one downside is they can also afford private schools and tutors etc for their kids, though, IDK, we could afford to do the same (though it would be more than a blip in our finances), but they seem to be doing well and happy where they are.
So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.
[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.
snozolli
I'm not the guy you asked, but given the way that things are going right now, if you're currently gainfully employed and not miserable, then you should continue banking money for as long as you can.
For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.
Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.
eldaisfish
a mid 20s person with "director" in their title sounds good on paper but there is no credible replacement for experience.
jvanderbot
I have a former coworker in their early 20s who left a startup as Senior (they were 1 year out from graduating) to become a "Director" at another startup. Their first job was implementing the control law for the robot's wheels. In this case (and perhaps many others), "Director" just meant "Only person we have".
SketchySeaBeast
Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case of title inflation.
chaosharmonic
Can confirm, I myself was a one person support desk (for a restaurant chain) and just never officially had a title. The internal moniker of "the IT guru" was fine for an email signature, but certainly not for a resume. (I've since made other retroactive edits to that, both for something more sensible and to better represent years of scope creep.)
wnc3141
I know someone at a growing division of a FAANG who has not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now. They're critically understaffed but the screws only tighten with each year.
cjbgkagh
When I was last in tech research we were prevented from working in new interesting areas as that work was being handed over to the China branch. I think we’re entering the looting stage of empire collapse. A hyper focus on short term gains to the detriment of long term gains.
disqard
"Looting" is an apt description of the short-termism we're seeing in the tech industry.
rr808
This is pretty standard in corporate world. Our Bangalore office is now bigger than any of the US ones.
horns4lyfe
These companies that have been built on the backs of US infrastructure that now don’t want to hire Americans should be razed to the ground. Fuck them, let them try to operate in Indias fucked up business environment.
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gsf_emergency_2
Labor tariffs, anyone? Might even give the Dems some ideas!
wnc3141
certain domestic market protections would be wise for any politician to support, unfortunately the craziness of this administration smothers the conversation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
lazide
Second 174 changes from BBB pretty much are for the tech industry - dropped the prior 5 year depreciation schedule to immediate, and foreign depreciation is now 15 years (!!!).
I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.
alephnerd
> I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
paxys
Lots of assertions in the article, but the only fact I see is that new college grads looking for work had a 6.6% unemployment rate over the last 12 months, along with a hand-wavey
> about the highest level in a decade—excluding the pandemic unemployment spike
Why "about"? What was this number 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? During the dotcom bubble? The housing crisis? An actual recent crisis (the pandemic) is conveniently excluded from the comparison for some reason.
Weird for the WSJ to declare an "unemployment crisis" based on a handful of anecdotes and no actual data.
kevintb
I think the thing that’s unusual and backed up by data is that being a college grad right now has higher unemployment rate than the total average unemployment rate. This has never been the case in history until recently.
jasonfarnon
well according to the article: "Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis."
ndiddy
Looks like when you set the graph to annual average (which you have to do to avoid spikes each year when everyone graduates), the new college grad unemployment rate is in fact the highest it's been since 2014 when you take out 2020 and 2021. It's higher than it was in 2002, but lower than it was during the housing crisis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGBD2024#
brailsafe
Interesting to read this from the other side of the border on the Canadian side. Our numbers definitely support the anecdotes that suggest youth unemployment rates are terrible, but if anything I think they obfuscate how bad the problem might be. Lived experience and the real anecdotes from people I know in the cohort lead me to believe there's going to be major downstream economic breaking points some time in the next few years.
Additionally it's funny to see the term "housing crisis" be applied to the past rather than the present. If that means 2008, we tend to call it the 2008 financial collapse, but our response to it created the current conditions of what Canadians would now call the "housing crisis"
api
The housing affordability crisis isn’t a crisis if you own a home you bought in 1980, and older homeowners vote in much higher numbers.
conductr
Unemployment is a loaded statistic anyway. I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job. They're likely working in a restaurant or in retail which is technically employed.
My qualitative view on the job market right now is this line holds true
> But it is a bad time to be a job seeker—especially if you are young.
astrange
Unemployment comes from surveys (the CPS) where they call people and ask if they're employed. So the answer to questions like "do Uber drivers count as employed" is, it's up to them.
There's other questions about full-time or part-time, or multiple jobs.
(Multiple jobs are interesting because you'd think they'd belong to overworked underpaid poor people. But they're not really associated with that, and they go down in recessions since that's when you have no jobs.)
what
If they’re working at a restaurant or retail, they’re not counted as unemployed? Unless they’re working under the table.
HPsquared
Bear in mind they've already lost 4 years of employment by taking the degree.
downrightmike
The numbers are being cooked
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cjbgkagh
I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few years. This feels much worse than 2008 and 2008 was bad. At least back then there was hope that things would recover, now it feels like a permanent malaise has set in.
I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it.
The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute.
I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.
cdreke
This is what I would say to my younger self if I was starting out today: This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway. In the meantime, create your own job. Youthful flexibility is your biggest asset. Be helpful and you will succeed. Oh, and stay away from social media. It is the cigarette of the day - you don't need to smoke because everyone else is doing it.
hn_throwaway_99
> This is no different than at other times in history. Creative destruction at its best. New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
This feels a bit unwarranted. There doesn't need to be some major new paradigm shift for things to get bad from an employment perspective. All that needs to happen is for this creative destruction rate to slightly exceed the new job creation rate, and there's your tipping point. I certainly feel that your average grad today doesn't have the same opportunities I did in the late 90s.
rr808
> New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.
That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?
ternaryoperator
Of the many good comments, this is the one that IMHO is the most helpful.
I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.
My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.
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kulahan
It took me way too long in life to realize that you can do whatever gives you money, at the end of the day. Like it doesn’t have to be a job, just anything that gets cash to you.
Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!
I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.
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cod1r
I was a recent grad (2023) too but now I think that expecting a job solely with a bachelors isn't realistic anymore. Standards are being raised and it's even more "who you know not what you know" than it used to be. The only thing advice i can give to grads right now is work on what you are passionate about and take care of your health.
kkylin
Some relevant data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
photonthug
Thanks, probably better than TFA. The under-employment numbers are always telling, anyone who talks about employment without mentioning this is running a scam. Sobering to see that only elementary ed and nursing are really doing ok, fields where we're always chronically short. And even while everyone's talking about demographic bombs and aging populations, nurse-adjacent med-tech is still sitting at 57.9%.
leereeves
Even so, computer science is still among the fields with the lowest reported underemployment rate. It's essentially tied for second place, after nursing, with a much higher salary.
I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
egometry
Well, these numbers _are_ from 2023. Things seem to have shifted (especially for the new grads) in the past 2 years...
(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)
ndiddy
> I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.
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mNovak
Huh, TIL that around 50% of college grads go on to get some Graduate degree. Much higher than I expected.
whatshisface
Who knew, art history is more employable than finance.
readthenotes1
You apparently didn't look at the underemployment and median early career wage data.
I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...
angmarsbane
Or perhaps its a vanity degree? Or its pursued by people with family wealth and good connections, the sort that an auction house or high-end gallery would want to hire.
rightbyte
Interesting how approximately 6-7% unemployment rate among new SWE graduates translates to such gloomy anecdotes going around in this post.
naysunjr
6-7% of 1+ million software engineers (according to BLS) is a lot of actual people.
Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.
northhnbesthn
A non-insignificant portion of HNers found jobs during one of the last 3-4 economic downturns. They seem to happen frequently.
In truth it’s always a crisis mode. Build your networks and demonstrate value and competence such that when people leave your company they’ll regret not having you on their team. This is the right way to stay employed once you land your first gig.
susiecambria
I remember well early 1986 when I was applying for jobs. Experience required, but no way to get experience. Frustrating as hell, especially since I had no peers around and had no BA (I left college a semester early cuz I had enough credits but didn't graduate for months). I ended up getting a cool job for $11,000/year and cobbled together a stable work life. It took another 5+ years to finally get my shit together.
Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.
kaiwenwang
I'm trying to work out the theory behind this, but the rough metric is that it's due to increased transportation, automation, and consolidation. As businesses expand they leave less opportunity for those local to do something meaningful while those who run the companies are rich beyond measure. Students cram into college for the hopes of being on the other side, not the "below the API" side.
Measurement then becomes graded upon standard features as differentiation becomes harder: GPA, test scores, essay rubrics, etc. Combined with increased communication, online portals become spammed within minutes.
All this leads to quite a difficult time for the young. Inequality likely ends up being a function of the country size. It explains the USA, PRC, India, but not sure about places like Pakistan, Brazil, or Indonesia.
Still draft, but wrote a bit here about the roles in society: https://bedouin-attitude-green-fire-6608.fly.dev/writing/a-d...
Nifty3929
Two big problems:
1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.
2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.
We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.
kulahan
Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:
1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project
2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.
3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing
4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you
5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting
6. Highly specialized and targeted education
And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.
famahar
So much of my growth and maturity came from University. It gives you the time, resources, and space to learn and unlearn in a supportive community environment. Provides a structured environment to meet others on a similar path. So many people that start work after highschool end up in a career track of life where work is the only thing they can imagine in life. It's hard to break out of that.
astrange
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...
If you want college degrees to not mean something, you'd need to stop paying people with college degrees more.
Note the high paying no-college jobs may also have filters like apprenticeships.
evantbyrne
Having a highly educated population is a major competitive advantage for a society that materializes itself in more ways than I could ever hope to enumerate. We need to bring tuition down closer to what the educational portion of it actually costs and pump as many able people through college as possible. Engineers, waiters, cops, everyone.
https://archive.is/41JyI