Young graduates are facing an employment crisis

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life’s not fair in general. Personally though I have no regrets starting my career in 2001. Sure it was harder to get a job and it paid less, but it made me more willing to join a startup which gave me experience and skills that opened more leadership doors later.

By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.

Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.

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.

Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.

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.

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".

Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case of title inflation.

"Looting" is an apt description of the short-termism we're seeing in the tech industry.

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...

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.

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."

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.

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.)

If they’re working at a restaurant or retail, they’re not counted as unemployed? Unless they’re working under the table.

> Can you be surely something else will come along?

something has come along - the new fangled AI stuff.

People back then also didnt think the internet would amount to much when it first came out, and people also thought mobile phones were for business users not casual consumers.

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.

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...

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.

I appreciate your insight, it did make me wonder.

> I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise.

I would be interested to hear how you reason to that. What is your definition of "success" and what is your definition of "cog wheel"?

Here is why I ask, I know hundreds of engineers who consider themselves "successful" because they have accumulated enough wealth to not ever have to work again if they choose not to. Recent data[1] shows there are over 342 thousand millionaires in the Bay Area alone. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that they were all 'corporate cogwheels' (which sounds a bit pejorative but again, I don't know how you define it).

> it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.

Again, I really would be interested to hear more about this. I find it trivially easy to tell who is "smart" and who isn't. But I will grant you that it is a skill that is enhanced by a lot of exposure to people who aren't smart but would like you to believe they are. They are a LOT of those types around. There is also a nuance between "smart" and "lazy" in that I know some really smart people who are also incredibly lazy, avoiding actually learning things if they can get by with faking it or cheating.

Your comment also made me realize that I have a working definition of 'smart' that is different than 'book learning' smart, it is more a mixture of a willingness to learn, the humility to learn from anyone, and the fortitude to put effort into seeking out new information. That is different than what some people call 'smart' and I might call 'quick' in that they can make up a plausible answer quickly so it sounds like they are speaking from understanding not just bullshitting you. My wife used to call that 'Male Answer Syndrome' :-). The idea that one must never say "I don't know" or "I have no idea."

[1] https://www.alonereaders.com/article/details/3057/top-10-cit...

Not wrong! The degree was always the stepping stone, and even for me I was always told work experience would make the difference. But now having graduated college 2 years early, with 2 high quality internships under my belt, my options are slim. Thankfully, I love what I do and don’t plan to ever stop doing it, but I feel bad for the people that “did everything right” and still aren’t landing jobs.

> that you needed to be thinking about your major and the future it might offer because just having a degree was not a magic ticket.

A CS degree was the major people "should have been thinking about" until recently.

This was my experience.

We never really recovered from the 08 crash imo. That was a changing point I think that doesn't get enough attention.

Yea my year entered the job market from college in 2008 - pretty much the worst time ever at that time. It sounds very similar. I think, if I look at my more successful peers including myself, many of us hunkered down and took whatever jobs we could get, many of us went back to school and got second "useful" degrees such as CS/nursing/etc.

My career path is so bizarre I don't really ever talk about it in great detail because it is so unique I think it identifies me and me exactly. Lots of others I know with similar stories. I would not want to go through it again.

> the days where degree=job were dying

To be fair, the previous iteration of "degree=job" that was dying 20 years ago was the older definition - broad enough to include "degree in literally anything", which was closer to how it operated say 50 years ago.

GP looks to have gone with the newer advice of "get a more useful degree = job". That wasn't really dying 20 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.

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Definitely agree about keeping costs low. Even if you do get a good job, if you keep costs low for long enough, it compounds like crazy.

Sure. Contributing to open-source, releasing and maintaining independent projects, is also good because it shows you can work with others and finish things on your own. Looking for internships is good if there are any.

You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.

They’re just looking for Indians

You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains in Australia unless they're in a self-managed superannuation fund and you have over $2 million. Regular investments outside of super are only taxed when you realize the gains. Superannuation is your retirement funds, doesn't seem that relevant to the start-up ecosystem.

I also tutor students in the entry level C++ and Python courses (which are taken during your first two semesters as a CS student), and I must agree that a large cohort of my class is only able to program if they have ChatGPT/Claude open on one half of their screen. I'm not sure how to solve this either, unless we want to start doing in person "interview" styled questions as an exam on a locked down computer.

I honestly think that doing an in person fake technical interview with a few easy Leetcode questions at the end of your education would be a good way to weed out those that have failed to even learn the basics of the trade.

I’ll second this, and we had enough resumes to only interview those with a relevant Master’s degree. I was shocked and I still don’t have a full explanation. I don’t doubt that it’s also hard out there, but on the hiring side we also did far more interviews than we wanted. (And yes the salary is >>100k, full remote, benefits etc)

> When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.

I feel like this doesn't get said enough, but I'm almost certain your issue is happening during filtering prior to even getting to the interview stage. Companies are straight up choosing (the wrong) applicants to interview, the applicant fails the interview, the company does not move forward with them, and then the companies does not go back and and consider the people they originally filtered out.

I know companies get swamped with tons of applications, and filtering is basically an impossible problem since anyone can make their resume look good, but every applicant that applied can't be that bad.

Bad applicant filtering at the first step is hurting both companies and applicants.

2 data points and you're drawing a conclusion about an entire graduating class? For all we know, you might be experiencing a reality that you're company isn't able to attract great young talent.

FizzBuzz was always a great filter. Even in the pre-LLM days. Many people can code for years and never once use the modulo operator. Solving the problem gets a lot more clunky without it and they get rejected.

When I was in school in the early 2010s I was working in a professor's lab and overheard conversations that the administration was telling profs/TAs to pass kids who profs/TA's thought should have failed. I've since seen the required coursework to graduate become less rigorous. There were students I worked with personally I graduated with who were very bad. I'm sure there still great students who care about learning but I cannot imagine how bad the average student is with ChatGPT being able to do student's assignments.

Are you offering enough pay that competent people would want to work there?

What do y'all think of this one?

In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, one of my commencement speakers (and the recipient of an honorary doctorate) was Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express. I don't remember his exact words, but his message to the graduating class was, we have a different perspective on the world and different values— thriftier ones, necessarily— and if we stay true to them, the world will reflect them when we succeed.

"Maybe instead of having a car, like your parents' generation, your first big purchase may be a bike. Times change." Something like that.

Four days later, he laid off four thousand workers from AmEx, just a smidge more people than the graduating class.

Edit: according to Wikipedia, that year he took home $16.6 million.

Low trust society. Due to how recruiting works nowadays I guess what they are doing is rational. Do they fear their main choice of employer bailing on their offer?

That U.S. tax law change was reversed in the BBB that just passed.

The big beautiful bill addressed that r&d issue.

It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).

Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.

Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.

The market is 100% efficient with everyone investing in index funds.

/s

It's unclear from the article, I'm just saying this is what the data shows. The economy is strong, and young people can find jobs, but the findings in the article suggest young people with degrees are having trouble getting jobs.

The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".

X is useful things like construction and computer science. Y is how to make people give you more of their money.

Yep, market for lemons, sadly

Yes, I've seen that. But I am not sure how to even play this AI game. My kid is trying various methods but none of them are very successful.

Invest in airlines, job fairs are coming back.

Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.

Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.

"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"

So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?

It would help, because they’d be paying payroll taxes into the system even as they were collecting benefits.

There are tax disincentives to working while collecting social security.

> we've been told to hire h1b ONLY

If you’re not being hyperbolic, this seems like fraud on the part of whoever is submitting visa applications for your company.

yep. H1B needs a major reform. Unfortunately both the democratic party and the GOP is against reforming it.

You have a moral duty to report your employer for this. Frankly it should be treated the same as treason.

I work at a Fortune 100 and for the most part, we can ONLY hire citizens and do not use H1Bs without a particularly strong reason. Curiously, I'd estimate we still hire 80% naturalized citizens.

I'm not blaming this on "old people", and certainly not "old people" who want to work, I'm blaming it on a government that artificially deflates the retirement rate.

I actually do blame this on old people. The reason jobs are being shipped overseas is because western workers are not productive enough to justify their premium. Work culture is part of that, but stuff like zoning and the welfare state is the main culprit.

No, doing something people are willing to pay for is a job.

This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.

> I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.

I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?

I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.

philosophy is probably a bad example to use because i think it's actually one of the "liberal arts" majors that's actually very applicable to skills you need in the corporate world.

the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.

At what point did equality and democracy ever exist? The only things that substantially changed were who the lords were, the method of gaining power, and what shape the power structure took. At no point was there ever meaningful equality, not even before the law.

> people should have stuck up for what they knew was right.

> everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)

> and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason

These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.

The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.

Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).

And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.

The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.

Non-citizens still have rights