1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
No idea about small companies but FAANG companies get > 1 million resume submission a year. You need to take that into account, the recruiters and other people in the chain do not have time to read your essay.
> I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.
I agree but then the reality is that we are here now, so it's no longer ridiculous. So if you are that brilliant, you understand that there is no point of fighting the current, so to make your life easier and to get the job where you can feel fulfillment, you might have to adjust your CV to fit the reality. That is a part of the intelligence you need to adapt and has always been.
Buddy, the amount of people these days with MASTER’S degrees that can’t even communicate via 2-3 (short) paragraph email exchanges… yep, it can be rough out there.
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.
It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.
People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were.
As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).
Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines.
But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees.
My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.
When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered.
Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.
With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be.
If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
The resume design is incredibly poor. It’s a 90% likely instant reject from me just from the resume. It looks like a resume from someone who does not know what they are doing. How hard is it to copy a resume template from google, seriously…
20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on.
I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.
It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things:
1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.
>> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models.
>> The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps.
Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well.
The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM
It didn't have LLM smell to me, at all. LLM-written essays are often very fluffy because expanding a prompt into more words often produces lots of air — but this one felt very "dense" with lots of ideas per capita.
My first thought while reading the article was relief that I'm finally reading something not written by ChatGPT. As someone who is super tired of reading AI slop these days, this was not it. (IMHO). And even if it was, it was definitely not annoying to me like the default setting of ChatGPT i.e. the "It's just not X. It's XXX!" format. I liked the cadence, the only thing I did not like was the verbosity. Ultimately there is going to be a pattern or a so called "voice" even in human writing. So as long as it's got good taste, whatever.
It's hard to fault a young CS student for focusing on AI (that's where all the hype is) but there is a certain irony that he'd probably be more employable if he had some experience working on Boring Line of Business (BLOB) apps. The tech industry will probably always have orders of magnitude more "can you make this CSV/XML/JSON format slightly different" jobs than frontier AI gigs.
> The British economy is in the toilet at the moment.
I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.
I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ).
I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.
Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques.
I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.
Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.
In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
As for your job search, I would recommend that you look way beyond your home country if you haven't started doing that already. There are markets where there are jobs and while finding work overseas is not easy, there are markets where ML/product/research roles are still open.
Thank you for writing this post. Your writing is insightful and thought-provoking. I would love to follow your blog to read your future posts as well, but I could not find an RSS feed or an email newsletter option. Is there any chance that you would add RSS to your blog in the future?
Free advice from the Internet- That role you're describing is pretty rare for new grads. You'd normally look for someone with experience and a track record before trusting them with open ended work or product management roles.
Start by being a "junior" builder in a team, then as you prove yourself you'll be given broader scope, this can take a while. There are teams building things that need strong builders. The smaller the company the more likely you'll be able to grow faster if you perform well.
Your free advice is well-taken and apropos in 2015 and before. The major point of the essay is that junior builders--e.g., people doing tasks that are standardized and understood well enough to automate--no longer get hired. Either we get a new way to identify the ability to complete open-ended work, or the tech sector suffers a succession failure (or everybody gets replaced by robots before the current generation of senior experts retires).
Fascinating article, it really got me thinking if I'm “out of distribution” enough. Also wild that this could have been a scifi essay just three years ago.
Great post. I think your situation would be a bit more different if you were in San Francisco in the US instead of anywhere in the UK where at least with your AI/ML background, there are lots of related roles there.
However the problem is for every role, you will be faced this 10,000+ other applicants, so you need to keep that in mind.
So instead of that your best bet is to build an AI startup in the US [0]. You have built AI systems for others, surely you can do it for yourself?
Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
I think a lot of tech people feel this way. The feeling of mismatch between my values and the values of leadership is why I left the industry. I'm starting a Master's degree studying birds and it feels like such a weight off of my shoulders to not have to justify corporate decisions to myself.
C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
This rant is inspiring, it makes me want to find, or be, that company that is putting the accelerator down and building things instead of focusing on limiting costs and replacing people with AI.
To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
> so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time
they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc.
And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being received that they didnt invest in personally. This is what the tide that lift all boats are - and because everybody is lifted, those who complain about lack of the trickle down sees the high-flyers benefiting enormously while their own benefits aren't "visible".
I think its more complicated. Has life improved for everyone in the last 100 years? Absolutely. Has life improved for everyone in the last 20 years? Debatable. Baseline needs like housing has only gotten worse. Its easy to compare with 1925. Is it better than 1995, 2005 or 2015?
While purchasing power of goods has gone up dramatically, the growth in house prices have far outstripped wage growth in the last 50 years. Since housing is people’s largest expense, people don’t feel better off even if they can afford nicer gadgets or to go out to eat more.
For some (even many) measures, over a long period of centuries, on average, yes the world is probably going up. For other measures perhaps not. And at a small time frame very plausibly not.
Example: housing. Yes compared to 100 years ago the houses are almost certainly safer and better equipped. On the other hand, now I will likely never get to own one because cost of living is insane, and will be subject to financial stress for N years.
I don't think it's a valid argument to dismiss all criticism of modern life just because statistically I would've died at age 2 in 10000 BC.
>To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it.
Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
>Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.
> Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
I don't think you're asking a serious question.
What kind of answer would you accept? It's not like you're going to change your mind if they say that e.g. the Cyvorefrx family from Palm Beach is one of the people on the top, right?
Nor is this question an effecive rhetorical device to convince onlookers: they'll rightfully ignore it just like people ignord "Who are these Guantanamo Bay torturers you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of guards and soldiers?"
"The people richer than me" is typically the meaning here. You here this complaint often even from people in the top 1% of the richest country on earth.
> Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same thing all over again or something completely different. What I think will be fascinating to watch is how the market for talented engineers changes as the bottom drops out and the pipeline of new grads dries up, or maybe it will balance out again? Or will these companies reap what they sow as they stop hiring and then cannot hire again because no one is entering the field anymore?
AI may actually change everything but I suspect things are cyclical to at least some degree. The $400K jobs may dry up for most--and certainly having two or more those jobs at the same time will--especially for people without degrees or degrees from no-name colleges or boot camps. It may be reasonable to expect CS/programming jobs will become more like lots of other STEM degrees in terms of requirements and comp.
Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
You can look out to other economies to see how software plays out in a "normal" market, not a VC and mega-corp backed one. Salaries in those economies for software are like you are predicting, in line with other skilled professions.
It was the same for me growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley in the early aughts, post dot com crash. Even when I went to college in 2008 the conventional wisdom was that there weren’t going to be any jobs in software, it was all being outsourced. I studied CS anyways, because I loved it. It was still very hard to get my first job out of college in 2012.
But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.
I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
> I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
Back before the Dotcom Boom, unless you were in Silicon Valley, most jobs were "Programmer/Analyst" and you worked for low wages for a big company. This is what I did and it took me many years before I could get my foot in the door in Silicon Valley but once I did, I never looked back.
From what I've seen, CS/programming job growth is significantly worse than in other comparable fields. Though my guess is that's a retrenchment from overhiring and overpaying.
The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
I work for big tech and we've been hiring US graduates fairly continuously. We're also taking students for internships.
We've also had people poached by other companies.
I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job.
Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments.
Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats...
Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries.
Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
No, companies were already having trouble getting prospective staff H1Bs. Making them more expensive just increases the incentive to move the job offshore.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
I find it strange. Any other qualified profession like doctors or lawyers would never let there an army of people from other countries to worsen their job market.
I'm based in the UK and have been a hiring manager pretty recently. I have seen a lot of CVs like this. This was the junior positions I was advertising two years ago, this wouldn't have made it through the filter. Because largely, we (as even a small company) would get ~250+ applicants for a single position.
My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities.
Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special.
The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like:
* 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc.
* Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of>
* A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+)
And even then, you can't interview all those people.
I was recruiting for junior devs in the UK back in the early 2000's and it was the same story then. One job we advertised had over a 1,000 applicants. 750+ were immediately ruled out because they had no right to work in the UK, another 200-ish were people from other professions trying to get into tech, but that still left us with 50+ people we should have interviewed but couldn't. We had to get down to arbitrary decisions on ridiculous grounds to cull the pile of CVs to the dozen or so we actually had time to interview.
And this was a small business in rural England. I can't imagine the stack a large company in a city would have to go through.
It has always been hard to get into the tech industry. There has always been a shortage of junior positions, and getting the first gig has always been the hardest step of this career.
However, I can totally understand how LLMs are making this worse. An LLM fills the exact spot in the team that would normally be taken by a junior dev. Anyone trying to get into the industry these days has my sympathy.
The media have been shouting the high salaries and IQ of programmers for nearly three decades, it was bound to satiate the market one day, with or without AI. Add to that the addictive nature of programming…
If you think that’s bad, about 15 years ago I asked a recruiter from Rolls Royce how competitive their grad scheme was and it had over 20000 applications per year at the time.
Readit News
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
That said I have no idea how competitive this program is.
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.
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In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.
As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.
Yeah.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes.
But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades.
So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.
I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).
[1] https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf
But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
It might pay for him to listen for a bit.
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My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.
When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.
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The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.
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1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs.
2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...)
3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.
>> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models.
>> The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps.
Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well.
The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM
My first thought while reading the article was relief that I'm finally reading something not written by ChatGPT. As someone who is super tired of reading AI slop these days, this was not it. (IMHO). And even if it was, it was definitely not annoying to me like the default setting of ChatGPT i.e. the "It's just not X. It's XXX!" format. I liked the cadence, the only thing I did not like was the verbosity. Ultimately there is going to be a pattern or a so called "voice" even in human writing. So as long as it's got good taste, whatever.
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I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.
I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.
Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques.
I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.
Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.
In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
As for your job search, I would recommend that you look way beyond your home country if you haven't started doing that already. There are markets where there are jobs and while finding work overseas is not easy, there are markets where ML/product/research roles are still open.
Free advice from the Internet- That role you're describing is pretty rare for new grads. You'd normally look for someone with experience and a track record before trusting them with open ended work or product management roles.
Start by being a "junior" builder in a team, then as you prove yourself you'll be given broader scope, this can take a while. There are teams building things that need strong builders. The smaller the company the more likely you'll be able to grow faster if you perform well.
Best of luck and reach out if you need advice.
However the problem is for every role, you will be faced this 10,000+ other applicants, so you need to keep that in mind.
So instead of that your best bet is to build an AI startup in the US [0]. You have built AI systems for others, surely you can do it for yourself?
[0] Do not build a startup in the UK or Europe.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc.
And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being received that they didnt invest in personally. This is what the tide that lift all boats are - and because everybody is lifted, those who complain about lack of the trickle down sees the high-flyers benefiting enormously while their own benefits aren't "visible".
They do care whether their life is better than their parents' generation, and on that score, they are by most measures worse off.
For some (even many) measures, over a long period of centuries, on average, yes the world is probably going up. For other measures perhaps not. And at a small time frame very plausibly not.
Example: housing. Yes compared to 100 years ago the houses are almost certainly safer and better equipped. On the other hand, now I will likely never get to own one because cost of living is insane, and will be subject to financial stress for N years.
I don't think it's a valid argument to dismiss all criticism of modern life just because statistically I would've died at age 2 in 10000 BC.
Who are the "people at the top" you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of executives and politicians?
>Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I see more meaningless work created and wealth continues to consolidate at the top.
Yes, if you're willing to accept pre-industrial revolution levels of living standards, you can probably get away with hours of work per week with modern technology, but people want iPhones and 5G internet, so they can complain on HN.
I don't think you're asking a serious question.
What kind of answer would you accept? It's not like you're going to change your mind if they say that e.g. the Cyvorefrx family from Palm Beach is one of the people on the top, right?
Nor is this question an effecive rhetorical device to convince onlookers: they'll rightfully ignore it just like people ignord "Who are these Guantanamo Bay torturers you speak of? Are they just an amorphous blob of guards and soldiers?"
"The people richer than me" is typically the meaning here. You here this complaint often even from people in the top 1% of the richest country on earth.
Look up Bilderberg group
I applaud this optimistic interpretation and wish it were true. Where I differ from your opinion is; "Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more ..."
Unfortunately this is not the case, as technological advancement is usually driven by attempting to reduce costs. And labor is often the highest cost a company incurs.
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Which is certainly a lot different than the expectations that were set since post dot-com.
Obviously (? I think) there will be jobs but they may well be more in line with middle-class professional jobs than some cadre has been in the last 10-20 years.
Pretty sure $400k was not on the table for anyone but a tiny minority
But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.
I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/pfbid02UTHoop...
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
We've also had people poached by other companies.
I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job.
Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments.
Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats...
Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
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Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
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I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
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Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.
My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities.
Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special.
The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like:
* 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc.
* Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of>
* A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+)
And even then, you can't interview all those people.
And this was a small business in rural England. I can't imagine the stack a large company in a city would have to go through.
It has always been hard to get into the tech industry. There has always been a shortage of junior positions, and getting the first gig has always been the hardest step of this career.
However, I can totally understand how LLMs are making this worse. An LLM fills the exact spot in the team that would normally be taken by a junior dev. Anyone trying to get into the industry these days has my sympathy.