Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
I was laid off from my charger oem. Now I work at a grocery store till I find a new job. Needed the cheap insurance plus its union. This won’t last for long.
I’m halfway through my bachelor’s CE, but really thinking about dropping and doing a trade instead.
Don’t. Just finish it and join an electrical union with your math skills. After you complete your degree. I went into electrical after getting laid off from a malware defense software oem. Get your degree. It carries you further than without it. You can always join the Electrician union nearest you right after you graduate. Check for their sign up times for the year.
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don’t mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the “good idea fairy” so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
You know its bad when dude casually drops that he’s a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.
I work in pharmacy and casually joke about being a legal drug dealer all of the time.
Not all drugs are street drugs!
Hey, its a new legal industry. And selling drugs lets me sleep much better at night compared to having to pretend whatever new bullshit they are pushing is not terrible.
You’re dead on about the 5% of what you learned thing. I’m on like my 20th tech job and pretty much every one has been different. What I learned in school has applied to only the most basic aspects of any of those jobs. Everything else was learning as I go and just generally understanding how PCs and software work. I have done fairly well with upward mobility (currently about as high as I can go without taking another leadership position) but I had to bust my ass to do it and it was only because I always stood out because of that so I would be first choice. There were never enough promotions/mobility to go around to everyone that was deserving.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with “10 years experience” on their resume for twice what they’re paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you’re unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That’s when you can really squeeze’m
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don’t even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was “qualified”, meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices
Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you’ve got your fingers in the dam.
HA, not at that sort of place. Unions where never even allowed to be talked about, they instafired anyone that even hinted, illegal or not they did not let that happen.
Edit: oh and everything did fall apart, but like a lot of large companies, they don’t care/notice. We used to joke around that we where in the business of getting out of business, and business was goood
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
Most of my social circle is in tech and we’re spread across or have worked for basically every company in our city and that isn’t really a thing here.
Hey man I hear you, so how much gor a quarter?
cheapest I have in store is $20, the fanciest is $40. All in CAD of course.
So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
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Well yeah, when the tech industry went through multiple waves of massive layoffs, that’s going to be the case in the short term as things shake out.
And everyone and their dog is trying to get into tech. The industry is bound to get saturated eventually…
I’d it’s already saturated if we’re looking at high unemployment in the sector.
Not necessarily, it might mean it I’d an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.
Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won’t even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.
Yup. We’re hiring, but the candidate pool is a minefield of utter trash, so it takes a while to hire despite having hundreds of applicants. We don’t expect much beyond basic competency, but apparently that’s too much to ask sometimes.
What you are describing is a constant. Everything is scaled up. I don’t believe for a second that it’s difficult to hire unless you’re talking about these idiots who say things like “Don’t I deserve to hire the best candidate for the job?”
To the tech people listening… I was high up in many areas for a few decades but I left it all behind. There is still a massive talent-acquisition problem, not just in tech but every industry, that is just waiting to be solved. The departments and staff tasked with hiring are not competent, nor capable of connecting qualified applicants to jobs. The entire hiring system is broken as fuck, and the “job boards” and apps didn’t fix it, they made it far, far worse for everybody on all sides.
I was going to study computer science. Instead I got a general AA and got a helpdesk job. Then A+ and a better job and a Net+ and an even better job and I’m not well off by any means but my family has a roof over our heads and food on the table and what’s more I am still employed and don’t have student loans so it’s looking more and more like that’s the right call and the best way to get into tech.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
There I’d always free time to self educate. Being a programmer means constantly keeping up with the news, new technologies, and adapting to new standards to keep the code clean, maintainable, extendable, readable, and relatively fast.
This is what we say now instead of expecting training and apprenticeship programs.
It’s propaganda
It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.
The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.
A isn’t anyone’s fault.
B isn’t anyone’s fault.
C is where businesses have gone sour, but it’s not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)
It’s not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody’s responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that’s on you. You can take what your job gives you and that’s it, and you’ll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that’s not going to make you very successful.
I really don’t want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don’t invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There’s a ton of reasons why that’s the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there’s a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn’t really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.
You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you’re a good worker, but that isn’t fast. It was never fast, and most people aren’t satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn’t get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don’t want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.
I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you’ll enjoy your jobs much better if you’re passionate about what you do, and you’ll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.
None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you’re replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he’s trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn’t knock them for that.
Well, then “their” plan backfired, because the cost is still as high as ever for senior and lead engineers, it’s just the enty level jobs that are ever rarer (and FAANG rarely hired entry level anyway).
When I started college I was in for biochem. Quickly realized there aren’t many jobs and most pay pretty shit, so I switched to computer science. Did some research and found that while there are good paying jobs, good luck finding them. Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in, and I had a full ride that I didn’t want to waste dropping out). Graduated and now I’m a mechanic and make more than I would have if I stuck with my original bio degree. I also love what I do for a living despite the possibility of making more doing something else. Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because “somebody said I’d get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don’t have right now”. Not saying young adults weren’t fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It’s not like you were FORCED to go to school.
Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in
I specifically avoid hiring students from business majors because they are only into the networking and not doing work lol.
That sounds about right lol. I went to what is known as a REALLY good business school, and I learned more about how to run a business in a year as a service advisor and the owners right hand than I ever did in 4 years of school. I know nothing beats on the job experience, but still I thought I’d learn a little more of value than I did …
Business as a major should be abolished.
In fairness they are very social and make great spreadsheets.
I’ve been saying that the market is oversaturated for YEARS now but this just enrages tech bros into insulting me personally. It’s very strange.
I always tell me CS/CE/Info students that they should focus on non profits, government agencies, etc. where at least employment will be stable.
Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you’re a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn’t even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it’s competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that
/s
That was a fantastic impression of reality. Well done.
Damn. Didn’t know about that at all. I’m genuinely glad the direction where I live (Germany) is the opposite, that way more people are needed and searched for than there is demand.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)Thing is: there’s lots of vacant jobs in IT because of the unwillingness of adequate pay in Germany. Either the employers don’t see the value in hiring motivated people or the motivated people are unwilling to work for peanuts.
Entry level in Berlin was like ~36k for IHK Fachinformatiker für system integration. As a result my last company started to hire in Eastern Europe because no one could afford to live on that even in one of the cheapest cities. And it wasn’t a small company by a long shot. Just greedy bastards
Entry level at my company is 55k, in a much smaller city, in a field that’s not super competitive salary wise (i.e. not automotive industry), so I’d slap a huge YMMV on your comment.
Nope,same story here,just not as extreme: https://www.heise.de/news/Wirtschaftsinstitut-IT-Fachkraefte-sind-in-Deutschland-deutlich-weniger-gefragt-10544518.html
From by experience, that doesn’t exactly equate to forced unemployment here. I do know of a friend from computer science in the UK who struggles to get past any interview, but I don’t perceive the market to be this hostile in Germany, even if not quite as vast as in the past.
Because at the moment we don’t have a “hostile” job market yet - as written in the article, the market is only rapidly cooling down. As the market before was massively undersaturated it just means that people currently have less choices - but they still have their share of opportunities. But tbh, pure anecdotal, it pretty much reflects what I hear from graduates atm. The market for newly graduated has cooled down definitely, unless they have a ITsec background or have a fair share of experience already.
I’m glad I never took it. Been employed in the field for thirty years.
An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren’t in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them…
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
… and you just give up?
You are not ‘unemployed’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a ‘discouraged worker’, who is also ‘not in the labor force’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
…
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and… you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely ‘underemployed’.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs… you may also be ‘overemployed’.
…
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers… did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn’t.)
You’ve also got measures like LISEP…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are ‘functionally unemployed’, by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure ‘doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job’.
…
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of ‘did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?’ would be ‘are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?’
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
- sincerely, a not unemployed but technically ‘out of the the labor force’ econometrician.
The one and only time I took compsci at a junior college just taught the basics of Office
If businesses continue believing they can vibe code some intern into success while drop kicking talent to the curb to save a buck, those CS unemployment numbers will fall off like a lemming!
