Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.

Totally agree that this guy could write books though.

On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.

> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels

Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.

I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?

He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.

In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.

I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.

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.

https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf

It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.

To be honest, I dont think recruiters read the CV anyway.

> His resume is designed poorly.

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.

His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.

It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.

I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.

>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.

Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?

>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.

Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.

> 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 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.

AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.

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.

Job markets are bad for everyone though

My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.

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.

At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.

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.

Because H1B was never about shortages, it is about wage suppression and having an exploitable underclass.

At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.

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.

What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his

A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.

>The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in.

Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.

That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years.

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.

I would be careful assuming that a lack of performance was responsible for the internships not converting.

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.

I believe they addressed this implicitly as a familiar explanation without actually needing to say it. Despite it being extremely rare to be able to pinpoint via external feedback mechanisms which areas conceivably provide tangible roi, it's just always relevant work on your weak spots.

The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed cooked for a variety of reasons, and it's a much better explanation than some skill issue. People who think they're in the same economy just don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, or legitimately don't know many people in that age group.

It was a skill issue to some extent for me when interviews weren't working out because I couldn't do niche algo problems, or I didn't get a second or first call, but it was never the way it is these days. It was difficult in pre-covid times to get back into a job if I got laid off, sometimes took a year, but there was some information to go on. I'd get interviews periodically, maybe second interviews, maybe 5 interviews, before I'd be rejected. It was maybe 1 in 40 in terms of interview to application ratio; bad enough to end up living in the car, but even then I could pick up a manual labor or barista job. Now.. it's honestly not even worth applying in many cases. It got real dark before I landed my current one, to the point where I considered switching industries, but there was no viable path to do that and see prosperity on the other side. Even now that I'm in a relatively well-paying position, it's still precarious, and long-term prosperity is not even really a remote consideration; I have to assume that despite my best efforts to preserve my income, it can and likely will go away at any time, and therefore even the most basic mortgage (which would still be ~4x my annual gross income and give us less space than renting, doesn't seem feasible. I think it would be more beneficial to just completely forget about trying to aim for milestones that barely exist anymore.

Currently, my spouse has been out of work for nearly a year, not in CS, and she's depressed—rightfully so—because it's never been this bad in our adult lives. No responses _at all_ for any job, and she's way more capable on paper for the stuff she's applying to than I am for SE. One single interview in the last 6 months for something paid, and it didn't pan out. This is Canada mind you, but still.

The economy is now composed of people who have jobs and are stressed about them disappearing, people who don't need work and do own all the land, and people who might miss a majority of their 20s in terms of working life unless they pull some miracle out of their ass quickly.

Agree 100%

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.

Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.

>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.

How would this work for the jobs that can't be replaced by AI? Sure, the programmer might be able to work 10 hours a week because of AI, but it's unlikely anything similar is going to come any time soon for nurses, so do they have to continue working 40 hours? What happens to salaries? If programmers can work 10 hours and still get paid 6 figures, wouldn't everyone flood into it, driving down prices? Conversely wouldn't the wages of jobs that can't be replaced with AI go up, because we still need nurses or whatever?