- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
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The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.
The numbers aren’t too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.
It’s important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there’s no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don’t have to do it this way but that’s how it’s been decided for a while now.
I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn’t find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question.
You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
That’s not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I’m not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That’s why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I’d have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won’t catch me claiming they’re professional training factories.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It’s not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today’s programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of “programming being the second literacy”, with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools (“primary technical school” that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn’t considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of “we can live like this no longer”, and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn’t see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
Coding trade schools effectively exist already — diploma granting Community Colleges exist for this reason. Here’s one, for example.
But that’s not a University. We shouldn’t change the role of a University to match that of a diploma-awarding Community College. Challenging employers to see such students as being as useful hires compared to a University educated developer is likely a different story, however.
The grads coming from less rigorous 4 year programs are already lacking. Computer programming is complex enough that I would be very reluctant to learn from a trade school that took less than four years.
An electrician’s work or a plumber’s work are also complex. Or carpenter’s.
Come on. This is not about complex theory being used, this is about messed up instruments, where layers upon layers of bullshit are laid to deliver upon hype.
People writing compilers and operating systems and cryptography libraries are those who need real education. People who make websites or Android apps on the framework of the day - need knowledge that is a thing in itself with no fundamental value.
This should be common knowledge. I recall in the 1990s there was a huge push for truck drivers. Everywhere you went “Be a truck driver! Own your own business! Make six figures!” And only a decade later, employed drivers struggle to make ends meet.
If you see a huge push for a particular job - you better plan your exit.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don’t need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That’s insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a “computer scientist”, just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I’ve worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a
forloop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I’m greatly oversimplifying. My point is there’s no “computer science” involved.)After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That’s so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
This explains why people gave me a hard time for getting an anthropology degree…
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech. Used to be full of other people like me and I really liked it. Now it’s full of people who are equally as enthused about it as they would be to become lawyers or doctors.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
I’m going to amend your timeline slightly, but only to note that Y2K masked what likely would have been a bit of a slump in the late 90s. Hiring around Y2K was crazy — but once the crisis date passed (with little fanfare due to the tremendous amount of work and money poured into remedying the issue), we definitely hit a slump as many of those extra hires weren’t really needed in a post-Y2K world.
…at least until we get to Y2K+38 in a few years. And maybe Y2K+40 two years after that 😛
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.
After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.
I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.
I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)
3000? That’s hyperbole right?
No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.
When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.
I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.
Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.
I have twenty years experience and it took me 300+ applications to get my current job.
Times are changing.
It sounds like the same amount of effort that it would take to make a really good open source project, or contribute to an existing one.
I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t get a job with something like that under your belt. Also 3000 applications is probably a bit shotgun rather than targeted and HR would be able to pick up on it
Well believe it gramps, most of the open source projects contributors now either just do content creation as a side hustle or are permanently looking for work, at least in my experience
You’re right that my time was wasted, and knowing the outcome, I wish I could go back and do more project work before trying to enter the job market.
But I don’t think that is a financial possibility for most Americans. Going to school drained my savings, when I graduated I had almost nothing except for school debt, medical debt, and high rent. Saying “I’m gonna take off and work for free for a year” never really seemed like a possibility.
And as for my apps, the 3000 were not shotgun, they were all personalized, custom cover letters, keywords, etc. It only averaged out to 3/day. I did not track the apps where I used AI to submit them- the AI ones were definitely shotgun.
be willing to move
you’re offering salt in the middle of the Pacific
I fled from the Midwest because there were no good jobs outside of the oil and gas industry, and ended up in the Seattle area. Saving up and moving cost 2 years of my life, Im not sure I could do it again.
…and I did apply to some jobs on the west coast, although most of my apps were around Seattle.
But please tell me, where should I have went instead of Seattle?
I was in a similar boat. Graduated right around the housing crash. If my wife didnt work at the time, we would have been in a terrible spot. It look a good 6 months to get my first job. After that, I haven’t had any issues popping into jobs.
Sounds like you got a raw deal. Our industry has many highs and lows when it comes to jobs and work available.
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don’t mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the “good idea fairy” so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
You know its bad when dude casually drops that he’s a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.
I work in pharmacy and casually joke about being a legal drug dealer all of the time.
Not all drugs are street drugs!
Oh you guys have the HARD shit, I don’t even compare.
Hey, its a new legal industry. And selling drugs lets me sleep much better at night compared to having to pretend whatever new bullshit they are pushing is not terrible.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’…
We have all been conditioned by the media to think of drug dealers as bad people, but if you aren’t violent and only selling to consenting adults there is nothing inherently wrong or evil about it, other than braking the law. You are providing a valuable service to your community, like every other job.
A lot of drugs are very addictive and ruin people’s lives. I’m well aware a lot of lives were ruined by the stigma attached to to drugs, but to swing from they are evil criminal people to just equating drug dealing with every other job is insane to me.
If someone breaks their arm doing a skateboard trick, do you blame the seller of the skateboard?
Consenting adults know the risk of taking drugs, if someone gets addicted the blame doesn’t fall on the dealer.
Not to mention that the vast majority of drug users dont become addicted or have their lives ruined. Rather they have their lives significantly improved
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with “10 years experience” on their resume for twice what they’re paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you’re unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That’s when you can really squeeze’m
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don’t even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was “qualified”, meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
When android and ios were taking off, I’d see job requirements saying 8 to 10 years experience in Android development.
It hadn’t been out 8 to 10 years.
You’re dead on about the 5% of what you learned thing. I’m on like my 20th tech job and pretty much every one has been different. What I learned in school has applied to only the most basic aspects of any of those jobs. Everything else was learning as I go and just generally understanding how PCs and software work. I have done fairly well with upward mobility (currently about as high as I can go without taking another leadership position) but I had to bust my ass to do it and it was only because I always stood out because of that so I would be first choice. There were never enough promotions/mobility to go around to everyone that was deserving.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
There is always free time to self educate. Being a programmer means constantly keeping up with the news, new technologies, and adapting to new standards to keep the code clean, maintainable, extendable, readable, and relatively fast.
This is what we say now instead of expecting training and apprenticeship programs.
It’s propaganda
It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.
The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.
A isn’t anyone’s fault.
B isn’t anyone’s fault.
C is where businesses have gone sour, but it’s not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)
It’s not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody’s responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that’s on you. You can take what your job gives you and that’s it, and you’ll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that’s not going to make you very successful.
I really don’t want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don’t invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There’s a ton of reasons why that’s the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there’s a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn’t really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.
You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you’re a good worker, but that isn’t fast. It was never fast, and most people aren’t satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn’t get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don’t want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.
I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you’ll enjoy your jobs much better if you’re passionate about what you do, and you’ll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.
None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you’re replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he’s trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn’t knock them for that.
Well said, I do enjoy my field and my employer. I worked for quite a few different companies. One I was all on my own and had to learn myself - my seniors hardly ever had time to explain shit to me so I was left alone with documentation and asking least possible amount of questions. Then, I had a team leader who was passionate about explaining stuff and telling me what to do, how, and why.
Everyone is different, do what you like, chase what you desire, and do the job you enjoy.
On the other hand, I am now in the boots of a senior, and I am desperately trying to show more junior colleagues how exciting it is to explore the work we do - nobody seems to care, nobody seems to implement whatever co shit I try to show them, nobody wants to change their ways, and I feel like fighting windmills.
If you want to be successful, you have to either be super lucky, or be passionate and constantly improve to reach new heights.
I think the biggest systemic issue in most places is that most people don’t actually know how to train people, including most senior staff. Very few people are actually natural trainers/instructors, so they have to be trained in how to train, and the expectations that they do so has to be part of company culture as well as time baked into the workday to do it, because it DOES take time. It pays off huge in the long run but it can be hard to see the forest through the trees if the management themselves don’t know or understand the value.
As much as I hate corporate jobs they’re generally better than small companies about having a formalized training program. It’s a shame because there’s so much garbage in corporate culture that a lot of small businesses don’t want to implement the good with the bad.
One thing I’ve seen over the years is that a TON of businesses have NO IDEA how to be functional. It’s a person that started in their garage and managed to grow and they just do stuff, and keep just doing stuff and hiring more people to do stuff and quickly outgrow the garage but don’t introduce sound business practices that you need to run things effectively. It’s crazy how many businesses are like that.
When I started college I was in for biochem. Quickly realized there aren’t many jobs and most pay pretty shit, so I switched to computer science. Did some research and found that while there are good paying jobs, good luck finding them. Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in, and I had a full ride that I didn’t want to waste dropping out). Graduated and now I’m a mechanic and make more than I would have if I stuck with my original bio degree. I also love what I do for a living despite the possibility of making more doing something else. Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because “somebody said I’d get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don’t have right now”. Not saying young adults weren’t fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It’s not like you were FORCED to go to school.
Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in
I specifically avoid hiring students from business majors because they are only into the networking and not doing work lol.
That sounds about right lol. I went to what is known as a REALLY good business school, and I learned more about how to run a business in a year as a service advisor and the owners right hand than I ever did in 4 years of school. I know nothing beats on the job experience, but still I thought I’d learn a little more of value than I did …
In fairness they are very social and make great spreadsheets.
Business as a major should be abolished.
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren’t in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them…
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
… and you just give up?
You are not ‘unemployed’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a ‘discouraged worker’, who is also ‘not in the labor force’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
…
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and… you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely ‘underemployed’.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs… you may also be ‘overemployed’.
…
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers… did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn’t.)
You’ve also got measures like LISEP…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are ‘functionally unemployed’, by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure ‘doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job’.
…
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of ‘did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?’ would be ‘are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?’
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
- sincerely, a not unemployed but technically ‘out of the the labor force’ econometrician.
Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn’t enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can’t figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.
You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they’re cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.
Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They’re dead-easy to set up and free so there’s no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.
If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.
Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.
Great advice. Also make a PR to an open source project, have some public discussion of trade offs you considered, and get it merged. That’s an awesome differentiator. I’ve seen thousands of developer resumes without this. It shows you can work effectively and productively on good code and with a team.
I appreciate your perspective here. There is an element of whining and negativity among job-seekers lately. I’ve seen some people buckle down and hustle, and I’ve seen others give up in frustration. The truth of this is that there are going to be a lot of people who never even get to use their CS degrees, and there will be people who “win” and get jobs like this without one. It boils down to what you can do and whether or not a company in your area finds value in it.
It’s not fair. It’s just what we have to deal with.
Yeah, no. Once I saw this kind of bullshit was needed for programming jobs I just pivoted to IT and cybersec.
These days the pay is just as good, and chances to find a job are even better, the environment is much lower pressure and this gross techbro exploited/exploiting attitude that somehow programming is special and not just a modern day 9-5 factory job is non-existent. With dev jobs, the goal posts are ever shifting. No I’m not doing a portfolio, no I’m not doing your “take home assessment”, no I’m not doing a live coding exercise for your £20k ass minimum wage job where “we measure work by effort, not time” and I’ll somehow end up on call. I love programming, but not enough to let myself get fucked by corpos every which way.
You do have to deal with corpo boomers though, but if you’re lucky they mostly realize they’re just cogs that got lost and they better not make too much noise or they’ll be let go.
In the 90s everyone was getting “web certified”
In the 90s “web” was about knowing FTP, HTTP and HTML. Should have stayed this way. Scripts in browsers were a mistake.
Stallman, is that you??
Give it a minute. Pretty soon, they’re going to need a lot of people to fix all the vibe-code that’s currently being spewed out by AI. That’ll be a monumental task.
Just found out someone in my team has been vibe-coding VBA in Excel that our team is now using. I asked who was going to maintain it and she didn’t know what I meant by maintenance.
Reminds me of web development in the Dotcom days, cleaning up Dreamweaver HTML garbage.
In the 1970s companies started “Stack Ranking” all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
… There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
That’s what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn’t magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.
The fairness meter at the bottom of the article is absurd. “Unfair left leaning” like yes, how dare the libtards use statistics to show how broken our economy is
If you are speaking of the needle position on the dial thingy, I believe it’s just the default until you vote, not meant to indicate anything (though it’s misleading). You have to vote to see actual results.
Brave goggles has a similar concept. Search “vaccines” with “from the right”, get a bunch of disinformation antivaxxer crap.
Just call it what it is: “Unfair truth leaning”, “Unfair fake leaning”.
I’ve been saying that the market is oversaturated for YEARS now but this just enrages tech bros into insulting me personally. It’s very strange.
I always tell me CS/CE/Info students that they should focus on non profits, government agencies, etc. where at least employment will be stable.
Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you’re a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn’t even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it’s competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that
/s
That was a fantastic impression of reality. Well done.
I don’t get why they would insult you, but I have been hunted and not had to find jobs since I finished school, sometimes they fight each other. But it may be not quite the same job, i’m a coder turned game designer
Even in europe there is no workers union for IT. Atleast not that i know of. IG metal and Verdi didnt answer my email about that
What? I’m working in IT and am a member of ver.di. Of course it’s an IT union.
They never emailed me back to my question. But good to hear. Is there a specific subsection that i should message?
Try this page: https://ikt.verdi.de/
Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren’t necessarily directly compatible.
CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.
It’s not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they’ll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.
An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they’ve even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn’t).
Computer science is not IT.
ooof got some bad news for you there.
Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?
Personally, I’ve been able to avoid IT jobs so far.
IT as in information technology is a stupid broad category, and the only people who say otherwise are just trying to not be painted as in IT.
Network engineer, IT. Software Dev, IT. Program manager for that big roll out, still IT. Call center meat in a seat, IT.
My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.
There’s a couple in Norway for engineering / technology, NITO and Tekna
Would you happen to know of any for germany?
It’s finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it’s probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.
AI hasn’t really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very, if any, few fresh graduates.
It’s short term thinking that’s going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don’t have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They’ll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they’ll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won’t be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.
