This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. Articles warning of the skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.
Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb
Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".
> Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.
> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
> Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
> Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
If you haven't got a degree on your resume, it just gets autodropped at the application stage by an ATS. No human sees it. Same if you're missing keywords.
Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.
> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.
This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. Articles warning of the skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.
> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.
Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb
Are the companies hiring fewer people than they need? If not then perhaps the fault is not with their standards but with an oversupply of applicants.
Have a friend just graduated in cybersecurity. He’s going into the military with it.
I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.
Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".
That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.
There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.
> Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?
I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
Yeah, I also wanted to question the "now" in the headline. But if you can believe the article's data, this is new - new since 2019.
>as China's "lying flat" movement
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
Even then, it's only possible when someone is willing to subsidize it, unless both food and housing are free.
Our lying flat is opiods. Generating dark money and killing off the useless, isn't late-stage capitalist empire great?
American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.
Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.
BA/BS in many fields and also depending on the university and social connections are worthless.
Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything
Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%).
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
> Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
> or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
Assuming there are any seniors offshore either
> college education is a shortcut to generic employment
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
How else would you sell it?
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
> Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
> ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
> Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
Yes but I can't promise Hard Data about Estimates (for anything): https://kagi.com/search?q=data+on+ghost+jobs&r=us&sh=RKCfaG9...
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
If you haven't got a degree on your resume, it just gets autodropped at the application stage by an ATS. No human sees it. Same if you're missing keywords.
the bar is higher and higher for less and less. donezo as a career.
Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?
For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.
Deleting those desk jobs requires understanding those desk jobs. Which means either working them or teaming up with someone who does
law is a parasitic job, with shit life-work balance, if you want a job, unless you want to work solo, good luck finding a law firm that wants you.
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.