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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I actually told a startup o joined a few years back that was 5 people that I wanted a more junior title. Because cod it didn’t make it off the ground I didn’t want folks rejecting me as overqualified for roles I was well suited for and under-skilled for ones say my title
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.
> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
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.
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.
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.
> not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
As a FAANGer, I'm acutely aware that I'm an expense line item whose days are numbered. Do people still think it's a flex? There are hundreds of thousands of us. Working for an AI unicorn is the new flex.
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.
certain domestic market protections would be wise for any politician to support, unfortunately the craziness of this administration smothers the conversation.
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.
Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.
I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent.
For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
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.
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.
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."
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"
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#
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.
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.)
> I'm going to assume that they are working but just not in a 'career' job
This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.
Unemployment here is being used in its capacity as a trend line. It’s not loaded in the sense you are considering. From what I recall, recent graduates would not be working in retail, but currently looking for roles.
I can only say that this direclty matches the experience of my two college graduates.
First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.
Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.
Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.
I’ve worked with a bunch of Nuke Es. Smart, interesting people with strong technical skills. They’re not working in the field though. If you really want to be around nuclear reactors, you’re much more likely to get there if you join the navy.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
If you frame it like a farmer back in the day hearing there will be more jobs because of the industrial revolution so they conclude that means there will be more farmers but just doing a new type of farming, that would obviously be wrong.
To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
Not OP, but of course they can’t be sure. No one can but if it doesn’t come along we will just be kind of screwed.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
> 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.
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.
Pleasantly optimistic sentiments, but if you want to get certain kinds of job you benefit from being on LinkedIn, and if you want a "be your own boss" job it's almost mandatory to have a social media presence so that you can find customers. It's like being in the phone book used to be.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
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.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
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.
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
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.
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'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
Interesting phrasing, but how do you actually make it work? What does it look like on paper? Taxing ""imports"" of services is really, really tricky.
Deleted Comment
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.
Hope I’m right?
For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.)
This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.
First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.
Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.
Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.
Deleted Comment
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.
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?
To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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...