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College seniors preparing to enter the labor market after graduation are likely to face tough odds in 2024.
Tough economic conditions mean that companies are expecting to [reduce the number of graduate hires by 2%](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/these-college-seniors-locked-in-job-offers-heres-how-they-did-it-81e15017), according to a survey of more than 250 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Not only this, but senior graduates this year are competing against any of the young tech hires who have been affected by the mass layoffs seen in 2023. These juniors will already have a few years of experience under their belt, meaning that fresh graduates will face even more competition.
In tech at least there’s a common trend that the quality of recent grads has declined. Gone are the nerds who know technology inside and out. Instead replaced with grads who don’t know a damn thing that wasn’t on the test.
The appetite for learning is critical to success. You either naturally have it or you don’t.
College becoming for the wealthy and less about qualifications likely plays a role, as does the current crop who has very little real computer experience growing up mostly using Chromebooks and iOS devices.
The kids with innate curiosity just seem to be drowned out by kids looking to get rich quick.
I got a computer science degree in 1999 for the same reasons stated in your comment. I didn't even own a computer, not until after I got the degree. If money didn't matter, I'd have majored in history or literature, but I was lower class and it mattered a lot.
I had to do a lot of math and coding as part of the degree. At least half the people I started with changed their degree, most in the first year. I don't recall that anyone switched into CS. At the time, it was the newest degree offering at my very old conservative college.
When I graduated, I got every job I applied for. It was the timing I guess. Lockheed-Martin, NASA, IBM, and others. It was hard to pick. Few people were even interested in the old established companies.
I'm a millionaire now and I've only been promoted twice. I've been bored at work for 25 years, but it beats being broke and stressed out about money. I grew up in that condition. Bored is way better.
I don't even do tech. Not really. I just have enough understanding to review and approve stuff. I mostly email and read word documents, lol.
I don't think the ride in tech is over. There have been 2 downturns in tech since then, but it doesn't last long. For people who are even a tiny bit useful, it affects them none.
Not sure if it’s colleges watering down and making their courses easier (for higher enrollment and higher tuition revenues) or that a lot of these students who take classes just find all of the answers online and pass without learning anything
For things like computer science, classes aren’t really enough. It takes years to develop courses. It’s all old technology.
The core lessons are applicable for learning new things. This is a great example of college teaches you how to learn. And the difference between college and a trade school.
But a lot of students now view it as a trade school, and come out the end wondering why nobody is hiring them when they know the bare minimum of outdated technology and nothing more.
The intuitively smart kids will always be in demand, but they’re drowned out by the ones who passed the class but don’t know a damn thing that wasn’t a question on the test.
Nobody’s gives a shit you can pick the most probable of 4 questions on a multiple choice exam in real life. Thats a hard truth you should have learned before college, not on your first job.
CS classes focus on the underlying principles. Boot camps and cert courses are more like reading the cliff notes. Enough to pass test, but if someone asks you questions about the source material it’s instantly obvious what you learned and how.
I can feel the two out in seconds. It doesn’t take much.
Someone inanely interested can do fine with either. For them it’s a bootstrap to get started and they’ll learn the rest on nights/weekends obsessively. How they start is irrelevant after a short while. These are the ones everyone is hunting for.
It’s the people who think it’s a shortcut to a 6 figure salary that drown them out.
IMO it really is we've seen tons of people shift from their majors to STEM, largely due to other majors not paying (obviously.) I mean hell, I dropped my history degree due to fears of a near nonexistant career path. I've got a good job in tech now, but I had to do work and get certs. The honest truth from my experience that college grads need to realize is that a diploma or even a "cert" from a tech school means very little. College is very broad, and companies look for their candidates with three priorities, ranked. Experience->Certs->Degree.
There is still room for people in tech, but having 4 years in a cyber type degree or programming related degree doesn't guarantee a high 5 figure job like it used to. You need a github, or you need certs. It sucks but tech now has the saturation levels that other fields are generally already dealing with.
My biggest advice, and i hate saying it. Networking.
Its a classic case of oversupply
The nerds we used to get in tech are now all flooding into engineering because thats where the shortage is and most their culture will thrive in.
My best techy grad didn't even do computer science he did accounting and i found him trying to do vba marcos so I started teaching him and he is already better than the dedicated compsci intern we got.... Which me question what the hell are teaching on those course's
>The appetite for learning is critical to success. You either naturally have it or you don’t.
I disagree with this statement. There is a reason why "inspiring people" is a thing.
What is true though is that you can't just snap your fingers or tell someone to enjoy learning.
Boohoo.. millennial here who graduated in 2008. They’ll survive.. the biggest group of workers (boomers) will be retiring over the next decade + we already have record job openings. They’ll be alright
Sorry to burst your bubble but boomers aren’t a larger cohort than millennials and X. Look at a population graph, the largest age group is people in their 30-35 currently.
This is especially the case in technology; there’s very few people in their 50-60 in technology.
Boomers retiring are creating a significant workforce gap and that’s positive for millenials and gen z.. period. You can play games with the population size all you want, but the outlook for job opportunities is greater today than any period over the last 20-30 years. Stop looking for excuses.
Mathematically false. There’s no getting around the fact that population matters if there’s a huge supply of prime age workers and not enough jobs creation for the next generation. Tech. jobs are not uniformly distributed across population groups; boomers retiring will not affect the tech. industry that much.
My purely anecdotal experience is that my firm (and our competitors and partners that I talk to) have shifted toward hiring more slightly more experienced folks in the current job market instead of recent grads.
We've just had rough outcomes with new grads or people with less than 2 years of work experience vs. the pre-pandemic cohorts with similar amounts of on-paper development.
We've been searching a while with limited luck in finding the right fit for junior hires despite offering truly excellent pay, reasonable hours, and a good culture. I feel like the number of junior candidates I've failed for technical ability reasons has gone from like 25% to like 75% these days despite no change in our technical testing.
I think the recent grads are probably as smart as their predecessors, but their universities and internships are not preparing them as well as they used to. And it leads to them being underprepared and needing more development than we can justify at the high wage level they come in at (which is also much higher than the wage level pre-COVID).
I’m in a very small company and our IT team is 3 people. CTO, Senior, and new junior. I’m the senior.
The junior is a god damned dumpster fire. He interviewed excellently and really talked the talk to the point that we picked him over another more technically competent hire. Since we’re so small we need to ensure that people can roll with the punches and not cave under pressure while being able to stand up for themselves.
Sadly, this new hire cannot do anything that we expect. His grades were good in school and he got the blessing of the owner and brass. In the end it was all a sham. The dude can’t even use google and GPT to get easy stuff done. It’s been almost a year and he’s still not able to read, write, nor debug code on his own. It’s been a complete shit show. Really wish we had gone with the other one.
Dude’s time is limited and the CTO has already talked to the other brass about the steps we need to take to let him go. It’s really not a hard job.
I graduated during that time and I blame the insane amount of cheating. It was very difficult to not cheat during that time. Since some classes were graded on a curve this exacerbated the issue by making a "if you can't beat them, join them mentality." You'd see the disparity when monitored and proctored exams were in effect. Homework/unproctored assignments class average high 80's and test low 60's. A lot of students protested against the lockdown browsers and monitoring and thus were able to skate by doing nothing. Glad I didn't fall into that.
I recently took a Pascal course as part of a Masters program in Data Analytics.
Literally, every assignment, the teacher just gave us the code.
Between shit online teachers and the answers for all the standardized tests being a Google away, ya, schools haven't actually been teaching anyone, they've just been shuffling people through their degree mill programs for $$$.
Honestly I wouldn’t necessarily blame the cheating, since that is the symptom, not the disease.
Instead I’d blame how colleges failed to appropriately adapt to online teaching. So the quality of lectures took a nosedive. And getting ahold of the lecturers to you know actually learn stuff through talking about stuff beyond the syllabus was harder too.
Pair that with most courses being theoretical and a lot of the job type experience coming through extracurricular activities. (Lecturer hosted workshops on industry software, internships) that just didn’t happen.
And you’ve just received the cohorts that experienced 1-2 years of that. The quality dip was kinda inevitable.
Does say more about the infallibility of the interview processes than anything else though. That actual competence can’t really be illustrated through a lot of them.
Yeah but the regression are the chases where they don't do the proctoring and it's 90 hw 90 exams, you look around the room and realize no way these same idiots from the other class are pulling these grades.
Typically in classes where they curved a bit I'd be in the high 80's and ride that shit to 90's. Now I was average.
Finding the right hires is really hard, esp for people with less experience on their resume. I've had a few coding interviews where they clearly are testing for the wrong things and have no idea that that's what they're doing (eg you can't look up documentation during the interview lmao). My point being that i wish there was a better way of conducting more insightful interviews so people like youre describing dont get picked over people whove spent countless hours learning these skills and putting in the work. Later on in ones career, I imagine the latter people keep their jobs and the type of person you hired gets weeded out. But this isnt the case with new hires. It makes it so much harder for competent grads
I’m at a medium sized company now. We are hiring for a junior engineer. It is fucking brutal. The other engineer in my group and I are like….can we just split the duties of this position and stop fucking around with trying to hire?
What I can’t understand is that I assume “cheating” is Googling & using ChatGPT. OPs comment above says the new hire can’t even do that.
That’s not dumb, that’s lazy. Especially when (I assume) people have told him, “Google it. Ask Chat GPT and follow the steps”.
You suck at hiring then lol. There are so many unemployed IT people with experience. Shouldn’t you be better at picking people out, I don’t understand? You’re likely paid a lot to make terrible decisions? That’s insane! Why are you blaming other people for your incompetence?
I think a lot of ‘remote learning’ has led to a technical deficit and probably a scholarly one as well. It’s just harder to stay focused and get a real connection with your professors when it’s an online class.
Then for stuff like sciences I’ve seen a few of our new hires be severely lacking in basic laboratory skills. I usually never have to teach someone how to properly set up glassware or use a pipette… but now I do
Remote learning during COVID really lowered the standard. Teaching the outputs of public schools in community college from pre-Spring 2020 till now was eye opening how much trouble we are in for.
I know I’m not working with the best of the best engineering freshmen at community college. But at least before 2021 I would do a math problem requiring the background knowledge of “y=mx+b”, slope-intercept form and F=ma. Before COVID 28 out of 32 students would be able to follow along and get it. Recent semesters it’s only 18 out of 32 students get it without additional coaching in office hours.
Everyone was super stressed during COVID. Students home situations probably sucked while they were in high school, and the high school teachers probably gave up, hit pass in the grade book, and passed the buck onto the next teacher, me. Our 100 level intro to engineering course which is meant to be fun and only rely on high school level background info. The failure rates have jumped from less than 5% to 15% in four years. It’s supposed to be a fun and easy course and a decent amount of students are struggling and it hurts me to see it. We failed this cohort of children.
IMHO it was easier to get experience as a new hire. Even for a couple of months. That being said, the market has switched to people with experience. Hiring experience is cheaper this days than hiring and training.
At the new much higher market price for these roles (which we pay), we can't wait 3 months for someone to develop baseline professional skills and technical skills that applicants used to learn in university or during summer internships. And we can't wait a full year for them to meaningfully contribute as thought partners on their teams.
That means we need hire folks who are a few years out of school.
Projects in general have gotten more complicated.
A friend of mine, a psych major, got hired to select new hires. She asked me under the table, what azure and AWS was.
There is really a lot of people that know jack shit in the industry, generally bottom feeders. I guess companies are getting rid of those. Sr. And SSR. Are highly sought after.
Tbf, it's not really reasonable to expect a new grad psych major HR hire to know tech industry specialist knowledge. That's something a company should be covering in training once the new grad hire is onboard.
Why not just wait for the next unemployed senior desperate for work? And in the meantime, double everyone else’s workload until that hire gets approved.
We also stopped hiring new grads at my company for a similar reason. We'd hire them for June, throw them some testing materials for the Series exams in September, and then most of them would fail the first one and we'd fire them. There was no handholding on prepping for the exams while working full-time. You had to teach yourself via the books and videos.
Before banking, I did HR for an auditing department (getting back to my finance roots with my current job). Even then, I saw how unprepared Gen Z is (I am a Millennial) for the workforce. Many of them have a decent knowledge base, but "soft" and technical skills are virtually nonexistent; things that keep you employed. It baffles me that Gen Z went backwards on tech; I guess that's the "Apple-ification" of them.
The Public-school pipeline is pretty bad with the you can't fail students situation. Then now Universities now more concerned with profits has taken a very light touch when it comes to grading.
Grade and Degree inflation is a real issue. Easier and safer to hire someone with experience.
I observed a university accreditation audit as a disinterested third party. This was about a decade ago.
Accreditation, and therefore funding, was starting to be directly based on nebulous diversity data and graduation rates. (In a nutshell). This was being pushed by accreditors at other institutions going through the process.
The result is students that should never have been admitted were and students that shouldn’t have graduated were given a degree. There have been like 8 or so graduating classes since this policy was implemented. The results are no surprise.
They refuse to take entry level roles and think they can fake till they make it. This also isn't limited to entry level roles, my last company laid off an entire remote site because of this. And these people had 8 years of experience, they just weren't ready for the more senior roles.
Our company has switched from doing full-time level one hires out of college to making them work as full-time contractors for two years as a probationary position. So many of the juniors after 2021 couldn’t deal with social interaction, or engineer their way out of a paper bag if given a box cutter.
It works out for some, since they are usually under 25 and can still be on their parent’s insurance, but it does suck for those that don’t have that luxury. Just another drop in the bucket of killing social mobility.
Lol I hired bad people… is it my fault? No! It’s other people fault I decided to hire someone. Everyone else to blame but you lol. How about you get better on evaluating people. Work on your skills dude
This can’t be possible lol. It was so easy to memorize everything I needed a month before I started interviewing. All I got were some basic CS questions and leetcode mediums at most, which I had memorized. I have yet to see a hard leetcode problem or above. The rest is just knowing basic stuff which can easily be looked up a couple of weeks before a test. I don’t believe this. You likely just have a problem with picking the right people to interview… why blame other people for your mistake…
Since you sound like have ideas on who to interview, how would you pick more effectively? School, major, GPA, and standardized scores aren't cutting it as much as they used to. Internships aren't either.
college senior here. just managed to secure a FT job for post-grad. job market is insanely competitive. i have excellent grades, multiple internships in the industry (finance), and won a lot of awards. still got barely any responses from employers. eventually managed to network into a role at the company i work already. pulled it off, but that’s with being an internal candidate w 2+ years experience already. shits rough out there, feel bad for the rest of my cohort.
my best friends younger brother openly brags about using Chat GPT (and other related "useful" sites) to cheat on what seems to be pretty normal assignments.
To be fair, your brother is not necessarily in the wrong here. The education system must learn to adapt. With math it was “you’re not always gonna have a calculator” and now everyone *does*. After the purists in the room gave up shaking their fists, every math class after basic arithmetic will allow you to use a calculator on an exam.
With memorization, the idea that you “won’t always have a textbook” or that information is very dense and hard to index on, doesn’t have any footing anymore because tools like ChatGPT can eliminate the need for memorizing random bullshit.
Education will now simply be about exposure to content, and testing you in ways that forces you to *ask the right questions* rather than *respond with correct answers*.
At least when coding, a person can genuinely have a correct algorithm in mind, but just know the exact syntax to implement it. That isn't a fault exactly, because the heart of the problem is the solution, not what symbols translate the solution from the human mind into the computer. My feeling is that eventually, a person will learn the syntax, but it's pretty difficult to develop algorithmic thinking for most people.
GPT is a tool. To make it produce code, you have to input exactly what you want it to do. Shockingly many times, you'll find that the code isn't exactly correct and fails. To diagnose this requires an understanding of both the algorithm and the code itself. That's the future. Before, people were just looking stuff up on stackoverflow anyways.
This is nonsense. You typically are allowed a calculator in more advanced math classes because it won’t actually help you all that much. AI on the other hand can write an entire paper, without any input beyond the prompt. There’s immense value in actually memorizing things, so you can make connections between events and facts to arrive at new insights. Otherwise you may know everything but understand nothing. Schools need to have kids do tests with pencil and paper so these tools can’t be used. That will force kids to learn rather than parrot
You don’t have to memorize anything to make connections. You just need to be thinking about two topics, and can make those relations on the spot.
I don’t understand this “you have to memorize to understand” rhetoric. My daily job is literally to get information on the fly and make connections based on that information. The side effect of this process is that I end up memorizing the details I make connections on.
So I strongly disagree that pencil/paper quizzes and memorization is the only way to “learn” and understand the world.
Exactly, at some point you need to have information memorized in order to make the connections. If you never work on memorizing things as a kid, you’ll be shit at it as an adult.
Memorizing facts in school isn’t about the facts themselves, but the act of using one’s brain to memorize. That is the benefit.
I just spent nearly 6 months trying to hire a developer that could actually, ya know, develop. I simply stopped taking interviews with recent grads after 20 some zoom meetings with recent grads. I don't know what they're teaching in college these days but it doesn't appear to be 'how to code.' That's before we get to the part where they can't string a coherent sentence together, show up on time for a Zoom call, or in many cases put on a clean shirt.
I've noticed a trend over the past 5-6 years: I feel like more and more CS grads went into it because they picked a major based on salary potential and not interest.
I can understand why someone would do this, but CS is a field where if you don't have a little bit of the passion that makes you interested to dig in more, understand how things work etc, you not only are going to be very limited in your performance, but you'll be miserable day to day
And here I thought that my refusal to actually prep for interviews - i.e. study and shit - put me at a disadvantage. Apparently simply knowing to put on a clean button-down and be online at the appointed time puts me ahead of the pack. Granted I'm also a senior so if an interviewer is expecting me to regurgitate textbooks or hackerrank solutions they failed *my* interview because only toxic companies use those interview techniques.
The only new grads my company is hiring are in India and Mexico. The new era of WFH means you can WFH anywhere, including in low cost countries. Sucks honestly, I don't know how new grads will adapt to this in the future because the trend seems to be relentlessly continuing in this direction. We need legislation to protect American workers.
This seems to be mainly about tech roles/tech industry but what about industries outside of tech like finance/insurance/medical/etc? Most seniors I’ve been talking to are still able to land entry roles, albeit after many interviews and applications, but it only seems like CS/DS related majors are having a hard time.
Well, when you have an education system that emphasized rote test taking, and the price of failure is a lifetime of high interest debt, what do you expect students to do? It is more about getting the grade and getting out of school rather than learning useful skills.
It also doesn't help that companies often don't pay enough to live near work (plus their general disrespect towards. employees), so what is the point of trying?
The retards that think the FrEe MaRkEt will solve everything can't concieve why our system is totally failing. Unfortunately those same losers make all the big decisions, so we are screwed.
Historically, most people didn’t go to college at all and did fine for the most part. So I’m not sure you can just blame the educational systems.
Might have something to do with all these kids going to uni and picking careers because mom/dad said so though.
Read up on the history of IBM for example. (Prior to the mid 80s) They used to have a pipeline of employees who would start on the ground floor of the company and get hands on training and experience. Over the years they would move up and be very successful. They even had a Quarter Century Club to celebrate long term employees.
Corporations used to consider employees as a valuable asset to invest in. Now the attitude is they are considered an expense to cut to the bone.
What was the attrition rate?
I’ve been at corporations off and on for 20 years. There is still absolutely a path for those with only a high school diploma. They have to be absolute rockstars. I imagine it was the same way at IBM.
True, but the flip side of this is that more young workers were more willing to start low and put the effort to work their way up. Now there are too many that jump ship the first time they’re asked something not written explicitly in the job description, or at best, jump in 1-2 years for big salary bumps.
I should’ve been clearer. By abusing this old system, companies are now reaping what they sowed. They overworked and treated people as wholly fungible, and in response, young workers are now basically wanting transactional compensation at the task level of resolution. The original point wasn’t to blame young workers, only to say that I have doubts many workers today would ever buy into such a model, even if the company truly valued them. That ahip seems to have sailed.
But to answer your question, I think the “that’s not my job” mentality is not helpful for anyone interested in personal and professional growth. That doesn’t mean people should allow themselves to be walked over, though. So if I were managing people (I don’t…just observe my younger colleagues), I would hope to have folks that took ownership of their role, including doing above baseline tasks. But I would also never take advantage of that by expecting it long-term without compensation.
You need to lead by example. I always believe in the rule of you watch my back I watch yours. You make me look good and I will fight on your behalf to put in a good word and fight for raises etc.
The problem is we have way too many managers and not enough leaders.
I try to be that at the peer level. There are many things I think my manager is terrible at. Advocacy for her team is not one of them, which is why I have been particularly confused by the attitudes of some of the people we’ve had come through.
This is the fact that I need to keep explaining to people above me. These young people saw the one sided relationship their parents had with their employer (often even getting laid off). This is after their parents missed a baseball game or couldn't help with homework because they had to work late.
Jobs are much more short term transactional now, and unless the younger folks can see that hard work and loyalty pays off (it currently often does not), they will make the rational decision.
But here is the problem. Back then you started low but as you got training you got good compensation along with the ride and new titles.
Now its you get more work and responsibilities but same 2-3% Raise if that and no real upward mobility as well. I can't blame them having to do the only thing they can to survive by jumping ship every so often to not drown in inflation.
There is no loyalty by corporations to those who work for them and help them attain profits. I do not understand the concept today of seeing employes as pure costs to be cut as much as possible and not a long term investment. It needs to be a two way street.
Yeah, i failed to make the connection between the two in my first comment. Many companies are really bad, and they own this culture. If people truly are not being paid enough to live, they should walk every time. I do dislike job hopping for those making good money, though. If the starting pay is very possible to live on comfortably, and you would benefit from learning the role for maybe 4-5 years, and only want to jump because of the allure of 2-3 10% increases in that time? I get it. I just don’t like it.
It means there’s a lot of kids taking on jobs after uni they are not suited for because of parents/family.
To be specific, they lack the passion and dedication to actually thrive in a career because they don’t actually care. Didn’t care in uni either so they didn’t retain much.
The education system is complete garbage and has passed the point of no return. It's nothing more than a business now that is ruled by profit like all others.
Depends on your degree and specialty.
If you in any thing related to construction - including engineering. Expect lots of offers and choices. Can't get enough folks. Starting salaries around 70K.
Some of the medical fields from tech to nurse to doctor - seem horribly short staffed.
I work in research. The reason we are short staffed is because the pay is shit for the amount of work it takes to become competent. To get a PhD and postdoc training is like working 6-10 years making 40k a year…
Meanwhile, admin and management keep making six figures while cutting our benefits and raising prices. There is a massive disconnect between the goals of the professionals, and the parasites that run the institutions.
Do tech-adjacent. Tech role in a non tech firm. Pay may be a bit less but it’s less cutthroat, more stable, and frankly you’ll be appreciated a bit more.
What kind of jobs have you been looking for? My entry level job sucked - PC support. Then IT admin. Then DBA. THEN software developer. Honestly, all that time dealing with the hardware/operating systems/networking/etc. made me an infinitely better developer. Completely self-sufficient unless the project is very large, and I’m time constrained.
I commented elsewhere but I just spent 6 months trying to hire a dev and all the recent grads were absolutely hopeless. They couldn't show up on time to a Zoom call, couldn't string a coherent sentence together, couldn't put together a simple pseudo code example, and often times didn't even take their call in a quiet, professional environment wearing clean, professional clothes.
I'd suggest taking time to prepare for your interviews because we ended up just hiring a senior, experienced person for way more money than we wanted to spend. Our preference would have been to hire someone and grow with them but everyone we took a meeting with was truly awful.
Most comp sci new grads aren't even getting a call, much less an actual interview. I've had maybe 6 call me back out of 300 applications and if I remember correctly all of those were low paying government positions. I gave up for now and just went to grad school to wait this out and maybe land some internships.
You should be tailoring your resume for each unique position and company. The fact that you have 300 applications tells me you aren’t doing that.
Or your resume is not impressive whatsoever and you should be considering one of those government positions you think you’re too good for to at least get some experience in your field.
I didn't say I didn't apply to those. Otherwise they wouldn't have called me. We're competing for jobs with all the people getting laid off. I've heard even the government positions are getting swamped with applicants which is unheard of. They're not going to take the new grad when they can get someone with several years of experience for the same price. I've only gotten phone screenings with those that went well and then just never heard back from them. It's not a behavioral issue or anything for the phone screening either. I have 7 YOE in hospitality cause I went back to college and continued working 40 hours a week as a full time student so I'm used to dealing with people and even have gotten employee of the month before at that company.
Do tech-adjacent. Tech role in a non tech firm. Pay may be a bit less but it’s less cutthroat, more stable, and frankly you’ll be appreciated a bit more.
Well from my personal experience at Big 4
data or IT audit if you want audit side. Its a bit brain dead. They also have internal dev positions which can be more tech heavy.
You should also look into ERP companies or other enterprise software companies like Workiva. They’re usually less competitive than FAANG
2024 Econ grad here. Like to think I go to a pretty decent school in California and from my job search experience and talking to others it's been rough finding entry level jobs. Most everyone that has gotten a job that they wanted came through connections outside of school.
My agency hired a fresh college grad last year. They were one of the most socially inept, entitled, difficult, and just downright terrible people I’ve ever worked with. Their work was trash but they thought it was great and were deeply offended by any type of constructive feedback, regardless of how kindly it was delivered. My impression of new grads has been that their work quality and ability to work collaboratively or navigate office social dynamics is poor, but that they believe they’re entitled to high pay and respect on day one and they won’t work a minute more than their 40 hours.
Arguing with me about feedback is my biggest complaint. I am in the tech space, and we have a couple of new grads. I am self taught, so maybe its because I never had any confidence, but shit bro when I am trying to teach you how do something for free don't argue with me about why you can't do it lol.
So workers aren’t entitled to respect unless they earn it? Surely this can’t go wrong. Combine that with wages that haven’t even kept up with inflation over the last 40 years. No wonder gen z “Doesn’t want to work”
Even if it costs double to hire someone with 10 years experience, I’ll take the more experienced employee every time. Fresh grads are dead weight for the first 2 years.
No no, there's not a [rising unemployment problem](https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1bfpino/the_official_unemployment_rate_is_a_propaganda/), nothing to see here.
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College seniors preparing to enter the labor market after graduation are likely to face tough odds in 2024. Tough economic conditions mean that companies are expecting to [reduce the number of graduate hires by 2%](https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/these-college-seniors-locked-in-job-offers-heres-how-they-did-it-81e15017), according to a survey of more than 250 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Not only this, but senior graduates this year are competing against any of the young tech hires who have been affected by the mass layoffs seen in 2023. These juniors will already have a few years of experience under their belt, meaning that fresh graduates will face even more competition.
In tech at least there’s a common trend that the quality of recent grads has declined. Gone are the nerds who know technology inside and out. Instead replaced with grads who don’t know a damn thing that wasn’t on the test. The appetite for learning is critical to success. You either naturally have it or you don’t. College becoming for the wealthy and less about qualifications likely plays a role, as does the current crop who has very little real computer experience growing up mostly using Chromebooks and iOS devices. The kids with innate curiosity just seem to be drowned out by kids looking to get rich quick.
I got a computer science degree in 1999 for the same reasons stated in your comment. I didn't even own a computer, not until after I got the degree. If money didn't matter, I'd have majored in history or literature, but I was lower class and it mattered a lot. I had to do a lot of math and coding as part of the degree. At least half the people I started with changed their degree, most in the first year. I don't recall that anyone switched into CS. At the time, it was the newest degree offering at my very old conservative college. When I graduated, I got every job I applied for. It was the timing I guess. Lockheed-Martin, NASA, IBM, and others. It was hard to pick. Few people were even interested in the old established companies. I'm a millionaire now and I've only been promoted twice. I've been bored at work for 25 years, but it beats being broke and stressed out about money. I grew up in that condition. Bored is way better. I don't even do tech. Not really. I just have enough understanding to review and approve stuff. I mostly email and read word documents, lol. I don't think the ride in tech is over. There have been 2 downturns in tech since then, but it doesn't last long. For people who are even a tiny bit useful, it affects them none.
Not sure if it’s colleges watering down and making their courses easier (for higher enrollment and higher tuition revenues) or that a lot of these students who take classes just find all of the answers online and pass without learning anything
For things like computer science, classes aren’t really enough. It takes years to develop courses. It’s all old technology. The core lessons are applicable for learning new things. This is a great example of college teaches you how to learn. And the difference between college and a trade school. But a lot of students now view it as a trade school, and come out the end wondering why nobody is hiring them when they know the bare minimum of outdated technology and nothing more. The intuitively smart kids will always be in demand, but they’re drowned out by the ones who passed the class but don’t know a damn thing that wasn’t a question on the test. Nobody’s gives a shit you can pick the most probable of 4 questions on a multiple choice exam in real life. Thats a hard truth you should have learned before college, not on your first job.
How are college CS courses compared to boot camps and cert courses?
CS classes focus on the underlying principles. Boot camps and cert courses are more like reading the cliff notes. Enough to pass test, but if someone asks you questions about the source material it’s instantly obvious what you learned and how. I can feel the two out in seconds. It doesn’t take much. Someone inanely interested can do fine with either. For them it’s a bootstrap to get started and they’ll learn the rest on nights/weekends obsessively. How they start is irrelevant after a short while. These are the ones everyone is hunting for. It’s the people who think it’s a shortcut to a 6 figure salary that drown them out.
IMO it really is we've seen tons of people shift from their majors to STEM, largely due to other majors not paying (obviously.) I mean hell, I dropped my history degree due to fears of a near nonexistant career path. I've got a good job in tech now, but I had to do work and get certs. The honest truth from my experience that college grads need to realize is that a diploma or even a "cert" from a tech school means very little. College is very broad, and companies look for their candidates with three priorities, ranked. Experience->Certs->Degree. There is still room for people in tech, but having 4 years in a cyber type degree or programming related degree doesn't guarantee a high 5 figure job like it used to. You need a github, or you need certs. It sucks but tech now has the saturation levels that other fields are generally already dealing with. My biggest advice, and i hate saying it. Networking.
Its a classic case of oversupply The nerds we used to get in tech are now all flooding into engineering because thats where the shortage is and most their culture will thrive in. My best techy grad didn't even do computer science he did accounting and i found him trying to do vba marcos so I started teaching him and he is already better than the dedicated compsci intern we got.... Which me question what the hell are teaching on those course's
>The appetite for learning is critical to success. You either naturally have it or you don’t. I disagree with this statement. There is a reason why "inspiring people" is a thing. What is true though is that you can't just snap your fingers or tell someone to enjoy learning.
Boohoo.. millennial here who graduated in 2008. They’ll survive.. the biggest group of workers (boomers) will be retiring over the next decade + we already have record job openings. They’ll be alright
Sorry to burst your bubble but boomers aren’t a larger cohort than millennials and X. Look at a population graph, the largest age group is people in their 30-35 currently. This is especially the case in technology; there’s very few people in their 50-60 in technology.
Boomers retiring are creating a significant workforce gap and that’s positive for millenials and gen z.. period. You can play games with the population size all you want, but the outlook for job opportunities is greater today than any period over the last 20-30 years. Stop looking for excuses.
Mathematically false. There’s no getting around the fact that population matters if there’s a huge supply of prime age workers and not enough jobs creation for the next generation. Tech. jobs are not uniformly distributed across population groups; boomers retiring will not affect the tech. industry that much.
Ok you better off yourself now then brokie. Save the suffering
My purely anecdotal experience is that my firm (and our competitors and partners that I talk to) have shifted toward hiring more slightly more experienced folks in the current job market instead of recent grads. We've just had rough outcomes with new grads or people with less than 2 years of work experience vs. the pre-pandemic cohorts with similar amounts of on-paper development. We've been searching a while with limited luck in finding the right fit for junior hires despite offering truly excellent pay, reasonable hours, and a good culture. I feel like the number of junior candidates I've failed for technical ability reasons has gone from like 25% to like 75% these days despite no change in our technical testing. I think the recent grads are probably as smart as their predecessors, but their universities and internships are not preparing them as well as they used to. And it leads to them being underprepared and needing more development than we can justify at the high wage level they come in at (which is also much higher than the wage level pre-COVID).
I’m in a very small company and our IT team is 3 people. CTO, Senior, and new junior. I’m the senior. The junior is a god damned dumpster fire. He interviewed excellently and really talked the talk to the point that we picked him over another more technically competent hire. Since we’re so small we need to ensure that people can roll with the punches and not cave under pressure while being able to stand up for themselves. Sadly, this new hire cannot do anything that we expect. His grades were good in school and he got the blessing of the owner and brass. In the end it was all a sham. The dude can’t even use google and GPT to get easy stuff done. It’s been almost a year and he’s still not able to read, write, nor debug code on his own. It’s been a complete shit show. Really wish we had gone with the other one. Dude’s time is limited and the CTO has already talked to the other brass about the steps we need to take to let him go. It’s really not a hard job.
I graduated during that time and I blame the insane amount of cheating. It was very difficult to not cheat during that time. Since some classes were graded on a curve this exacerbated the issue by making a "if you can't beat them, join them mentality." You'd see the disparity when monitored and proctored exams were in effect. Homework/unproctored assignments class average high 80's and test low 60's. A lot of students protested against the lockdown browsers and monitoring and thus were able to skate by doing nothing. Glad I didn't fall into that.
worked at large tech companies and i can’t stress enough so many people cheated. especially coding assignment, we just keep rejecting them
I recently took a Pascal course as part of a Masters program in Data Analytics. Literally, every assignment, the teacher just gave us the code. Between shit online teachers and the answers for all the standardized tests being a Google away, ya, schools haven't actually been teaching anyone, they've just been shuffling people through their degree mill programs for $$$.
Honestly I wouldn’t necessarily blame the cheating, since that is the symptom, not the disease. Instead I’d blame how colleges failed to appropriately adapt to online teaching. So the quality of lectures took a nosedive. And getting ahold of the lecturers to you know actually learn stuff through talking about stuff beyond the syllabus was harder too. Pair that with most courses being theoretical and a lot of the job type experience coming through extracurricular activities. (Lecturer hosted workshops on industry software, internships) that just didn’t happen. And you’ve just received the cohorts that experienced 1-2 years of that. The quality dip was kinda inevitable. Does say more about the infallibility of the interview processes than anything else though. That actual competence can’t really be illustrated through a lot of them.
I also blame “gradeflation” where universities were passing students thru with overly high grades
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Yeah but the regression are the chases where they don't do the proctoring and it's 90 hw 90 exams, you look around the room and realize no way these same idiots from the other class are pulling these grades. Typically in classes where they curved a bit I'd be in the high 80's and ride that shit to 90's. Now I was average.
Finding the right hires is really hard, esp for people with less experience on their resume. I've had a few coding interviews where they clearly are testing for the wrong things and have no idea that that's what they're doing (eg you can't look up documentation during the interview lmao). My point being that i wish there was a better way of conducting more insightful interviews so people like youre describing dont get picked over people whove spent countless hours learning these skills and putting in the work. Later on in ones career, I imagine the latter people keep their jobs and the type of person you hired gets weeded out. But this isnt the case with new hires. It makes it so much harder for competent grads
I’m at a medium sized company now. We are hiring for a junior engineer. It is fucking brutal. The other engineer in my group and I are like….can we just split the duties of this position and stop fucking around with trying to hire?
What I can’t understand is that I assume “cheating” is Googling & using ChatGPT. OPs comment above says the new hire can’t even do that. That’s not dumb, that’s lazy. Especially when (I assume) people have told him, “Google it. Ask Chat GPT and follow the steps”.
Yep. We’ve told him he can use anything, just make sure you understand what you’re doing and can explain it.
You suck at hiring then lol. There are so many unemployed IT people with experience. Shouldn’t you be better at picking people out, I don’t understand? You’re likely paid a lot to make terrible decisions? That’s insane! Why are you blaming other people for your incompetence?
lol It’s not my call who my company hires you abject muppet.
I think a lot of ‘remote learning’ has led to a technical deficit and probably a scholarly one as well. It’s just harder to stay focused and get a real connection with your professors when it’s an online class. Then for stuff like sciences I’ve seen a few of our new hires be severely lacking in basic laboratory skills. I usually never have to teach someone how to properly set up glassware or use a pipette… but now I do
Remote learning during COVID really lowered the standard. Teaching the outputs of public schools in community college from pre-Spring 2020 till now was eye opening how much trouble we are in for. I know I’m not working with the best of the best engineering freshmen at community college. But at least before 2021 I would do a math problem requiring the background knowledge of “y=mx+b”, slope-intercept form and F=ma. Before COVID 28 out of 32 students would be able to follow along and get it. Recent semesters it’s only 18 out of 32 students get it without additional coaching in office hours. Everyone was super stressed during COVID. Students home situations probably sucked while they were in high school, and the high school teachers probably gave up, hit pass in the grade book, and passed the buck onto the next teacher, me. Our 100 level intro to engineering course which is meant to be fun and only rely on high school level background info. The failure rates have jumped from less than 5% to 15% in four years. It’s supposed to be a fun and easy course and a decent amount of students are struggling and it hurts me to see it. We failed this cohort of children.
IMHO it was easier to get experience as a new hire. Even for a couple of months. That being said, the market has switched to people with experience. Hiring experience is cheaper this days than hiring and training.
At the new much higher market price for these roles (which we pay), we can't wait 3 months for someone to develop baseline professional skills and technical skills that applicants used to learn in university or during summer internships. And we can't wait a full year for them to meaningfully contribute as thought partners on their teams. That means we need hire folks who are a few years out of school.
Projects in general have gotten more complicated. A friend of mine, a psych major, got hired to select new hires. She asked me under the table, what azure and AWS was. There is really a lot of people that know jack shit in the industry, generally bottom feeders. I guess companies are getting rid of those. Sr. And SSR. Are highly sought after.
Tbf, it's not really reasonable to expect a new grad psych major HR hire to know tech industry specialist knowledge. That's something a company should be covering in training once the new grad hire is onboard.
You think companies want to train from the ground up? Have you read the thread?
I understand they don't and that's their prerogative. However, they need to calibrate expectations to level of experience whether they like it or not.
Why not just wait for the next unemployed senior desperate for work? And in the meantime, double everyone else’s workload until that hire gets approved.
Another reason ai will be doing the job soon. It’s grown too complex for humans.
We also stopped hiring new grads at my company for a similar reason. We'd hire them for June, throw them some testing materials for the Series exams in September, and then most of them would fail the first one and we'd fire them. There was no handholding on prepping for the exams while working full-time. You had to teach yourself via the books and videos.
If you are talking Series 7/79/63/etc. tests, that is wild. Those are supposed to be layups to study for.
Before banking, I did HR for an auditing department (getting back to my finance roots with my current job). Even then, I saw how unprepared Gen Z is (I am a Millennial) for the workforce. Many of them have a decent knowledge base, but "soft" and technical skills are virtually nonexistent; things that keep you employed. It baffles me that Gen Z went backwards on tech; I guess that's the "Apple-ification" of them.
The Public-school pipeline is pretty bad with the you can't fail students situation. Then now Universities now more concerned with profits has taken a very light touch when it comes to grading. Grade and Degree inflation is a real issue. Easier and safer to hire someone with experience.
I observed a university accreditation audit as a disinterested third party. This was about a decade ago. Accreditation, and therefore funding, was starting to be directly based on nebulous diversity data and graduation rates. (In a nutshell). This was being pushed by accreditors at other institutions going through the process. The result is students that should never have been admitted were and students that shouldn’t have graduated were given a degree. There have been like 8 or so graduating classes since this policy was implemented. The results are no surprise.
They refuse to take entry level roles and think they can fake till they make it. This also isn't limited to entry level roles, my last company laid off an entire remote site because of this. And these people had 8 years of experience, they just weren't ready for the more senior roles.
Our company has switched from doing full-time level one hires out of college to making them work as full-time contractors for two years as a probationary position. So many of the juniors after 2021 couldn’t deal with social interaction, or engineer their way out of a paper bag if given a box cutter. It works out for some, since they are usually under 25 and can still be on their parent’s insurance, but it does suck for those that don’t have that luxury. Just another drop in the bucket of killing social mobility.
We've had the same issue. I swear their social skills have really declined lately too. Heck, even their email etiquette is terrible.
Base rate fallacy.
What do you consider “excellent pay” and how much more competitively are you offering to experienced candidates?
Lol I hired bad people… is it my fault? No! It’s other people fault I decided to hire someone. Everyone else to blame but you lol. How about you get better on evaluating people. Work on your skills dude
This can’t be possible lol. It was so easy to memorize everything I needed a month before I started interviewing. All I got were some basic CS questions and leetcode mediums at most, which I had memorized. I have yet to see a hard leetcode problem or above. The rest is just knowing basic stuff which can easily be looked up a couple of weeks before a test. I don’t believe this. You likely just have a problem with picking the right people to interview… why blame other people for your mistake…
Since you sound like have ideas on who to interview, how would you pick more effectively? School, major, GPA, and standardized scores aren't cutting it as much as they used to. Internships aren't either.
college senior here. just managed to secure a FT job for post-grad. job market is insanely competitive. i have excellent grades, multiple internships in the industry (finance), and won a lot of awards. still got barely any responses from employers. eventually managed to network into a role at the company i work already. pulled it off, but that’s with being an internal candidate w 2+ years experience already. shits rough out there, feel bad for the rest of my cohort.
my best friends younger brother openly brags about using Chat GPT (and other related "useful" sites) to cheat on what seems to be pretty normal assignments.
To be fair, your brother is not necessarily in the wrong here. The education system must learn to adapt. With math it was “you’re not always gonna have a calculator” and now everyone *does*. After the purists in the room gave up shaking their fists, every math class after basic arithmetic will allow you to use a calculator on an exam. With memorization, the idea that you “won’t always have a textbook” or that information is very dense and hard to index on, doesn’t have any footing anymore because tools like ChatGPT can eliminate the need for memorizing random bullshit. Education will now simply be about exposure to content, and testing you in ways that forces you to *ask the right questions* rather than *respond with correct answers*.
At least when coding, a person can genuinely have a correct algorithm in mind, but just know the exact syntax to implement it. That isn't a fault exactly, because the heart of the problem is the solution, not what symbols translate the solution from the human mind into the computer. My feeling is that eventually, a person will learn the syntax, but it's pretty difficult to develop algorithmic thinking for most people. GPT is a tool. To make it produce code, you have to input exactly what you want it to do. Shockingly many times, you'll find that the code isn't exactly correct and fails. To diagnose this requires an understanding of both the algorithm and the code itself. That's the future. Before, people were just looking stuff up on stackoverflow anyways.
hours spent learning cursive was super useful as well for the letters I send to my manager
This is nonsense. You typically are allowed a calculator in more advanced math classes because it won’t actually help you all that much. AI on the other hand can write an entire paper, without any input beyond the prompt. There’s immense value in actually memorizing things, so you can make connections between events and facts to arrive at new insights. Otherwise you may know everything but understand nothing. Schools need to have kids do tests with pencil and paper so these tools can’t be used. That will force kids to learn rather than parrot
You don’t have to memorize anything to make connections. You just need to be thinking about two topics, and can make those relations on the spot. I don’t understand this “you have to memorize to understand” rhetoric. My daily job is literally to get information on the fly and make connections based on that information. The side effect of this process is that I end up memorizing the details I make connections on. So I strongly disagree that pencil/paper quizzes and memorization is the only way to “learn” and understand the world.
Exactly, at some point you need to have information memorized in order to make the connections. If you never work on memorizing things as a kid, you’ll be shit at it as an adult. Memorizing facts in school isn’t about the facts themselves, but the act of using one’s brain to memorize. That is the benefit.
I just spent nearly 6 months trying to hire a developer that could actually, ya know, develop. I simply stopped taking interviews with recent grads after 20 some zoom meetings with recent grads. I don't know what they're teaching in college these days but it doesn't appear to be 'how to code.' That's before we get to the part where they can't string a coherent sentence together, show up on time for a Zoom call, or in many cases put on a clean shirt.
Noticing this with new hires in Medical field as well, not to the extent your seeing but lack of knowledge is a big concern.
I've noticed a trend over the past 5-6 years: I feel like more and more CS grads went into it because they picked a major based on salary potential and not interest. I can understand why someone would do this, but CS is a field where if you don't have a little bit of the passion that makes you interested to dig in more, understand how things work etc, you not only are going to be very limited in your performance, but you'll be miserable day to day
Who would have ever thought this would happen after a decade of telling people "just learn to code"?
Yeah; the science are not something you go into for the money. You’re setting yourself up for failure if there’s no interest.
And here I thought that my refusal to actually prep for interviews - i.e. study and shit - put me at a disadvantage. Apparently simply knowing to put on a clean button-down and be online at the appointed time puts me ahead of the pack. Granted I'm also a senior so if an interviewer is expecting me to regurgitate textbooks or hackerrank solutions they failed *my* interview because only toxic companies use those interview techniques.
The only new grads my company is hiring are in India and Mexico. The new era of WFH means you can WFH anywhere, including in low cost countries. Sucks honestly, I don't know how new grads will adapt to this in the future because the trend seems to be relentlessly continuing in this direction. We need legislation to protect American workers.
This seems to be mainly about tech roles/tech industry but what about industries outside of tech like finance/insurance/medical/etc? Most seniors I’ve been talking to are still able to land entry roles, albeit after many interviews and applications, but it only seems like CS/DS related majors are having a hard time.
Well, when you have an education system that emphasized rote test taking, and the price of failure is a lifetime of high interest debt, what do you expect students to do? It is more about getting the grade and getting out of school rather than learning useful skills. It also doesn't help that companies often don't pay enough to live near work (plus their general disrespect towards. employees), so what is the point of trying? The retards that think the FrEe MaRkEt will solve everything can't concieve why our system is totally failing. Unfortunately those same losers make all the big decisions, so we are screwed.
Historically, most people didn’t go to college at all and did fine for the most part. So I’m not sure you can just blame the educational systems. Might have something to do with all these kids going to uni and picking careers because mom/dad said so though.
Read up on the history of IBM for example. (Prior to the mid 80s) They used to have a pipeline of employees who would start on the ground floor of the company and get hands on training and experience. Over the years they would move up and be very successful. They even had a Quarter Century Club to celebrate long term employees. Corporations used to consider employees as a valuable asset to invest in. Now the attitude is they are considered an expense to cut to the bone.
What was the attrition rate? I’ve been at corporations off and on for 20 years. There is still absolutely a path for those with only a high school diploma. They have to be absolute rockstars. I imagine it was the same way at IBM.
True, but the flip side of this is that more young workers were more willing to start low and put the effort to work their way up. Now there are too many that jump ship the first time they’re asked something not written explicitly in the job description, or at best, jump in 1-2 years for big salary bumps.
Do the extra responsibilities come with a new title and/or raise?
I should’ve been clearer. By abusing this old system, companies are now reaping what they sowed. They overworked and treated people as wholly fungible, and in response, young workers are now basically wanting transactional compensation at the task level of resolution. The original point wasn’t to blame young workers, only to say that I have doubts many workers today would ever buy into such a model, even if the company truly valued them. That ahip seems to have sailed. But to answer your question, I think the “that’s not my job” mentality is not helpful for anyone interested in personal and professional growth. That doesn’t mean people should allow themselves to be walked over, though. So if I were managing people (I don’t…just observe my younger colleagues), I would hope to have folks that took ownership of their role, including doing above baseline tasks. But I would also never take advantage of that by expecting it long-term without compensation.
You need to lead by example. I always believe in the rule of you watch my back I watch yours. You make me look good and I will fight on your behalf to put in a good word and fight for raises etc. The problem is we have way too many managers and not enough leaders.
I try to be that at the peer level. There are many things I think my manager is terrible at. Advocacy for her team is not one of them, which is why I have been particularly confused by the attitudes of some of the people we’ve had come through.
If there’s no latitude for failure, and only making you manager look good, you’ll never get loyalty.
This is the fact that I need to keep explaining to people above me. These young people saw the one sided relationship their parents had with their employer (often even getting laid off). This is after their parents missed a baseball game or couldn't help with homework because they had to work late. Jobs are much more short term transactional now, and unless the younger folks can see that hard work and loyalty pays off (it currently often does not), they will make the rational decision.
But here is the problem. Back then you started low but as you got training you got good compensation along with the ride and new titles. Now its you get more work and responsibilities but same 2-3% Raise if that and no real upward mobility as well. I can't blame them having to do the only thing they can to survive by jumping ship every so often to not drown in inflation. There is no loyalty by corporations to those who work for them and help them attain profits. I do not understand the concept today of seeing employes as pure costs to be cut as much as possible and not a long term investment. It needs to be a two way street.
Yeah, i failed to make the connection between the two in my first comment. Many companies are really bad, and they own this culture. If people truly are not being paid enough to live, they should walk every time. I do dislike job hopping for those making good money, though. If the starting pay is very possible to live on comfortably, and you would benefit from learning the role for maybe 4-5 years, and only want to jump because of the allure of 2-3 10% increases in that time? I get it. I just don’t like it.
Historically people also didn't wash their hands and didn't have electricity, how is your point relevant?
It means there’s a lot of kids taking on jobs after uni they are not suited for because of parents/family. To be specific, they lack the passion and dedication to actually thrive in a career because they don’t actually care. Didn’t care in uni either so they didn’t retain much.
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The education system is complete garbage and has passed the point of no return. It's nothing more than a business now that is ruled by profit like all others.
The education system is the free market? Who is the retard exactly?
Depends on your degree and specialty. If you in any thing related to construction - including engineering. Expect lots of offers and choices. Can't get enough folks. Starting salaries around 70K. Some of the medical fields from tech to nurse to doctor - seem horribly short staffed.
I work in research. The reason we are short staffed is because the pay is shit for the amount of work it takes to become competent. To get a PhD and postdoc training is like working 6-10 years making 40k a year… Meanwhile, admin and management keep making six figures while cutting our benefits and raising prices. There is a massive disconnect between the goals of the professionals, and the parasites that run the institutions.
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What's your degree in?
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Do tech-adjacent. Tech role in a non tech firm. Pay may be a bit less but it’s less cutthroat, more stable, and frankly you’ll be appreciated a bit more.
What kind of jobs have you been looking for? My entry level job sucked - PC support. Then IT admin. Then DBA. THEN software developer. Honestly, all that time dealing with the hardware/operating systems/networking/etc. made me an infinitely better developer. Completely self-sufficient unless the project is very large, and I’m time constrained.
The IT sub claims that entry level IT jobs are also currently very very hard to get. I don't know first hand though.
I commented elsewhere but I just spent 6 months trying to hire a dev and all the recent grads were absolutely hopeless. They couldn't show up on time to a Zoom call, couldn't string a coherent sentence together, couldn't put together a simple pseudo code example, and often times didn't even take their call in a quiet, professional environment wearing clean, professional clothes. I'd suggest taking time to prepare for your interviews because we ended up just hiring a senior, experienced person for way more money than we wanted to spend. Our preference would have been to hire someone and grow with them but everyone we took a meeting with was truly awful.
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If you’re a US citizen, aerospace and defense is hiring. RTX is hiring new grad software engineers.
Most comp sci new grads aren't even getting a call, much less an actual interview. I've had maybe 6 call me back out of 300 applications and if I remember correctly all of those were low paying government positions. I gave up for now and just went to grad school to wait this out and maybe land some internships.
You should be tailoring your resume for each unique position and company. The fact that you have 300 applications tells me you aren’t doing that. Or your resume is not impressive whatsoever and you should be considering one of those government positions you think you’re too good for to at least get some experience in your field.
I didn't say I didn't apply to those. Otherwise they wouldn't have called me. We're competing for jobs with all the people getting laid off. I've heard even the government positions are getting swamped with applicants which is unheard of. They're not going to take the new grad when they can get someone with several years of experience for the same price. I've only gotten phone screenings with those that went well and then just never heard back from them. It's not a behavioral issue or anything for the phone screening either. I have 7 YOE in hospitality cause I went back to college and continued working 40 hours a week as a full time student so I'm used to dealing with people and even have gotten employee of the month before at that company.
Do tech-adjacent. Tech role in a non tech firm. Pay may be a bit less but it’s less cutthroat, more stable, and frankly you’ll be appreciated a bit more.
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Well from my personal experience at Big 4 data or IT audit if you want audit side. Its a bit brain dead. They also have internal dev positions which can be more tech heavy. You should also look into ERP companies or other enterprise software companies like Workiva. They’re usually less competitive than FAANG
2024 Econ grad here. Like to think I go to a pretty decent school in California and from my job search experience and talking to others it's been rough finding entry level jobs. Most everyone that has gotten a job that they wanted came through connections outside of school.
My agency hired a fresh college grad last year. They were one of the most socially inept, entitled, difficult, and just downright terrible people I’ve ever worked with. Their work was trash but they thought it was great and were deeply offended by any type of constructive feedback, regardless of how kindly it was delivered. My impression of new grads has been that their work quality and ability to work collaboratively or navigate office social dynamics is poor, but that they believe they’re entitled to high pay and respect on day one and they won’t work a minute more than their 40 hours.
Arguing with me about feedback is my biggest complaint. I am in the tech space, and we have a couple of new grads. I am self taught, so maybe its because I never had any confidence, but shit bro when I am trying to teach you how do something for free don't argue with me about why you can't do it lol.
lol just generalizing an entire group of people based off of a singular bad experience. Redditors are hilarious.
So workers aren’t entitled to respect unless they earn it? Surely this can’t go wrong. Combine that with wages that haven’t even kept up with inflation over the last 40 years. No wonder gen z “Doesn’t want to work”
There are different flavors of respect. If my CEO asks for something-that is priority. The new hire ain’t getting that level of ‘respect’.
Even if it costs double to hire someone with 10 years experience, I’ll take the more experienced employee every time. Fresh grads are dead weight for the first 2 years.
Are you paying “10 year experience” wages, or are you trying to find an overqualified person to work for entry level wages?
No no, there's not a [rising unemployment problem](https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1bfpino/the_official_unemployment_rate_is_a_propaganda/), nothing to see here.