I know a lot of junior developers who just gave up on that industry over the last 2 years. It seems truly rough for them. But also that's comparing it to the general boom over the previous 10-15 years.
I have about 10 yrs experience, and just conducted my first job hunt in 5 years (I was with one company for a long time, then took a sabbatical for half a year after our dev team was off-shored). I was pretty concerned that it could take 6 months or more to find a gig. But I found myself interviewing with 6 or 7 companies within two weeks, and had 2 offers by the end of week 3 (I'm starting the new gig tomorrow). I consider myself a pretty average full-stack rails/react dev. I don't even bother applying to FANG (or whatever the acronym is now) jobs. So... I don't know if I just got lucky, but the job market felt pretty good when looking for senior roles. My interviews were a mix of referrals from previous coworkers, a couple recruiters reaching out, and (the job I accepted) from reaching out on LinkedIn to hiring managers posting jobs.
It feels like the AI wave is killing junior jobs, but driving demand for experienced developers to harness it, even if just harnessing it as a tool to speed up coding.
Congrats on your new gig.
About the AI thing, based on my readings, I feel that more and more dev and companies are realizing the true utility value of AI programming tools after the hype, i.e. it's useful but not going to replace programmers completely.
The signal did took sometime to get transmitted to the company's leadership, but a year is enough time for most smart companies to hear it loud and clear.
Referrals are the key to non-FAANG jobs. I also have over 10 years of experience, with six of those years spent working under the same supervisor across two different jobs. Four of those years were two different jobs, thanks to strong referrals from my previous boss and the one I worked with for 6 years before that.
I fumbled a bit early in my career and burned some bridges, but luckily, I smartened up after the first 2ish years.
I figured if I have 10+ years of experience and do not have at least 5-10 people I can call up to ask for a job who've worked with me in the past, I've screwed up. Investing in relationships has been the key job security hack for me (also a completely average React dev who happens to know an above-average amount about video and webrtc).
Yeah, very helpful to have a solid network like that. My other job offer was from a previous manager wanting to recruit me.
But yeah, tough out there to land your first job right now.
Harness, or train? When a junior uses AI the junior learns. When a senior uses an AI the AI learns. Maybe the AI owners are harnessing experienced devs to train their replacements.
“AI”—assuming you mean LLM-based coding assistants—don’t learn. All they have is the context you give them. Seniors may learn how to manipulate that context to get better results over time, but that’s not the AI learning in any meaningful sense.
The LLM answers your accept/reject are used as training data
That usually isn't true if you're using the agent tools aimed at companies. They are explicit about what is and isn't used for training.
That kinda made sense except for "When a junior uses AI the junior learns"
I think people have exceedingly high-expectations due to make-believe social-media content.
What I see amongst all the people is that both skill and the quality of work decreasing. Which is why, arguably, AI _is_ taking over entry-level jobs.
High percentage of new generation spend their time on TikTok & Instagram, watching reels & stories of some popular/famous people, who tend to have some money (high chance of inheritance or rich family), posing as a "regular" person on the street.
Take this quote for example; “I told myself, by 26, I’d have my own house, I’d have my own family, I’d have my nice little luxury car. That hasn’t happened.”
This is an unrealistic by definition. I don't know what sort of thing a person needs to smoke to come to a conclusion that having _all_ of these, including a luxury car, is a norm for a 26 year old. By definition, if everyone has that _luxury car_, that car would not be a luxury item in the first place. Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one. One can probably buy/lease a car, probably second hand, but that's unlikely to be a `luxury` vehicle.
Another point is, while some people had adequate pictures/images posted, some did not even bother to put an effort to give a proper picture to the newspaper article. I am not a "wear a suit" person at all, but this attitude clearly shows how much care certain people put into actual work. Would you hire a such person who does sloppy job even at the job application? I would certainly not.
It's not about owning an house, having kids, or a luxury car. Most people just want to work with dignity, a mean to reach their workplace wether by car or a decent public transport, affording to live in a place you can call your home, in which maybe one day you could raise a family if you find a person that shares your view of life. This is not granted at all, for most people this is just not the reality and actually it's getting worse year by year.
The thing is that someone has to clean the toilets, sweep the floors, maintain that public transportation, or have the skills to fix up your car, etc. Dignity means a lot of things to different people. If you live in a society that enables you to work with dignity, it's because there is a lot of undignified labor sustaining it. The things we wish for don't just magically happen. It takes a lot of undignified human labor to get there. Now let's say you automated all undignified labor. Now your competition increased a hundred fold, greatly lowering your odds if finding dignified labor.
And the world churns.
I don't see that a contradictory. A job cleaning toilets or repairing cars can be dignified if you get paid a living wage, have reasonable working conditions, and aren't mistreated by your company.
Ask recent grads what they would think about a janitor position for $55,000 a year (average U.S. living wage). My guess is the percent who would be happy with that? < 1%.
I don't have a degree. I'd love a cleaning job I can actually live on. The last one I had worked the shit out of me and paid peanuts. See: the problem.
Not everybody goes to University, what example is that one? A lot of people would be happy to take a janitor position if it allowed to live decently, without living in fear for your future.
This is so defeatist. You may need these roles filled, but you can pay much better for them and give them more respect socially. If you automate them, you can implement massive redistributionary schemes to ensure that benefits people. It’s a lack of political will, not possibility.
> but you can pay much better
Yes
> for them and give them more respect socially
How? You can't dictate social behavior.
You can't dictate it, but you can influence it.
Imagine if we teach from primary school student to clean their own classroom and bathroom so that everyone must do at least once every x days/week, it think it would help reconsider how we view this jobs. This is just an example, but I think there are plenty of ways for a government to incentivize desirable behavior (even social).
You're going to get parents with torches and pitchforks if you ask primary students to clean the school bathrooms....
It's not much to do with the money. It is just work most people will be unwilling to do.
The number of college graduates who will willingly work in housekeeping or dusty construction sites even for 100K USD a year will be next to zero.
People will not downgrade their quality of life compared to what they grew up with. And you're lying to yourself if you think a construction site is as comfy as the Meta HQ.
In the baby boom generation it was pretty normal to be married, have a (small) house, and a kid or two by 26-30 or so. From the families I know of that era, usually they had a lower end car and probably just one for the family. This seems pretty uncommon for the zoomers I know.
I simply don’t believe this is as hard as everyone makes it out to be. I still think it’s an issue of heightened expectations.
There is a strong belief that everyone should be able to afford a place to live, alone, in some place with a convenient location (downtown or within walking distance of transit), and then after a few years you should be able to buy a house.
When I grew up, I had multiple roommates, and we’d carpool whenever possible. I scrimped and saved pretty hard to get a down payment saved up. By my day’s standards, it wasn’t crazy to cook 99% of your own food, brew all your coffee at home or the office (hopefully free), get any free food you can possibly convince your employer to give you, and have one TV everyone fights over. My dad made his own “furniture” (until my mom moved in and smacked some sense into him…). My mom grew up sleeping in an hot attic with 3 siblings, because the other 5 siblings took up all available rooms.
I’m not saying life shouldn’t improve each generation, but I think people are expecting it to improve way faster than it actually is.
Expectations are a factor, but also practicality. Back then you could get a decent job with a high school education or even less. If you had a good job, you could afford a house and a car with one income.
My uncle worked in the GM plant for many years, owned a nice house and a car and a bass boat and is comfortably retired. His wife never worked. I remember my aunt telling us that we shouldn’t get him books for Christmas presents because he couldn’t read very well.
Now to do this you need both parents working. They both need degrees that need paying off, and they need to live in a major metro area, because they both need to have good paying, specialized jobs. In the old days you might move to some little town so the dad could work at some factory, but now the mom has to also find a job in her specialty, so you need to be in a big city to find jobs for both of them within commuting distance.
In this context, everyone is bombarded with social media telling them that they should have fancy cars and houses and vacation in Bali, and they’re stretched to the breaking point and can’t have any kids.
Autoworkers were not the norm. They had the strongest unions in the country, and were able to bargain for wages you couldn't get anywhere else. Their compensation was so good GM and Ford eventually went bankrupt, while Chrysler kind of disappeared.
I remember as a degreed electrical engineer making $35k when the average auto worker was making almost $80k. That's an aberration and could never have continued.
The problem is you had to know someone that worked at GM to get a job at GM.
I had a family friend that was a union boss and after high school he got his son into GM. The family friend though wasn't going to get me in.
It was huge money at the time but it is also why GM stopped being competitive. I think the union boss friend retired at 45 or something completely ridiculous.
Of course he also had the nicest sports car, a huge boat, a huge house for the time.
I very recently did the math and with my CS job (and my wife's salary) in our early 40s (so both full time for at least 15 years) we could about now have bought the kind of house my parents bought when I was a kid - if it were the same price, just adjusted for inflation. But it's three times that adjusted cost. (Not the US, Germany)
Not sure that is a heightened expectation, you're just out of luck if you don't already have a house. And people in their twenties just have it even worse.
It doesn't matter how much you cook at home if wages haven't kept up with house prices (in australia anyway) - https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-charts-that-show-why...
In the US and probably in Australia at the top of the market. If housing prices crash like they did in 2008/2009, those charts will look a whole lot better.
It would need a very big crash, this is 50 years of price increases - https://www.realestatebusiness.com.au/industry/29004-50-year...
It's the much quoted - boomers pulling up the ladder after them in action. In the oz market new home buyers can't compete with investors that are pushing up prices.
From the peak in 2006 to the lowest point in 2012 the US we saw housing price drops of close to 1/3.
In the areas that rose the most, they dropped 50%.
Based on that article you linked a 50% drop in the hottest markets wouldn’t bring price to income ratios down to 1975 but it would be kinda close.
Especially when you consider house sizes now vs then.
Seems we're talking about different markets - the 2007/2008 crash didn't really change prices here, just slowed growth. There seems no crash in site here. https://creditmediation.com.au/news/2024/10/10/the-rise-and-...
According to that article government stimulus propped up property prices.
Maybe there’s something unique to the Australian market that justifies 30 years of rising prices with no corrections.
Or maybe you’re overdue for a massive bust.
The median age for first marriage is now 28 and 30 for women and men, respectively. It's generally a bad idea to buy a house if you're single, so a lot of the people who could buy in their 20s, don't.
The houses they lived in are illegal to build today.
The portion of labor's share of all income has dropped precipitously since the 80's. This is a public policy failure. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
Owning a home at 26 wasn’t unusual in the 80s. It is now. The average age of a first time homebuyer in that time has slipped by nearly a decade.
Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.
It feels like that’s less common now.
I bet owning a home was also an actual priority back in the 80s. In fact I bet back in the 80s priorities were fewer and most people focused. Nowadays there are infinite priorities and "must haves" - many of which are way more accessible than saving 50%+ of your income towards a single purchase.
This is an unrealistic by definition.
No it isn't, this used to be the norm.
Unless a person inherits a house, it would take at least 10 years (probably 30) to fully own one.
Most people say 'have a house' in the sense of having owner's title of one, not of having their mortgage fully paid off. You're being ridiculously pedantic while ignoring the fact that it used to be massively easier for people to get socially established on a median kind of salary.
The luxury car at 26 wasn’t normal at all. The vast majority of people would never have seriously considered a luxury car.
I make many times the median income, I’m married to a doctor, I live in a low cost of living area, and I’ve never owned a luxury car, nor do I intend to.
No, that was never the norm. I'm amazed at the extent to which people are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There were certainly groups of people in particular places that were able to start quickly, but the norm was young couples sharing a single old beater and just squeaking into a house in their late 20s.
This is really like people looking back on the 2020s and saying "It was normal back that to make $250k out of college."
It's been unrealistic for long enough. I was 26 in 2009. I did so happen to own a "luxury" car, but it was $8000 used. I wasn't able to buy a house until I was 36. Part of that was due to moving around, which brought with it different opportunities.
I still can't afford a luxury car. I guess I could finance one but that seems like a serious waste of money. We've got this funny blind spot around cars in general as a status symbol. You can get a fun to drive, older, sports car. If you do a lot of long trips then a larger vehicle might be more comfortable than a luxury model. Not saying anything against them but don't aspire to owning something unless you actually want to be sitting in it.
There are exceedingly high expectations on the employer side as well. Companies want to do more with very less. Sometimes you can find really under paying job adverts like beginner positions asking people to know front end, back end and everything else under the sun. It is no wonder there are issues like Soham Parekh when everyone wants that 1% engineer.
Sorry but the down turn in the job market is real and absolutely worst then people on this website want to realize. most are struggling, juniors especially. The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.
I think it might depend on what someone means by "luxury car". An affordable sportscar like a Miata or a Scion FRS doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
The other things (home, family, decent job) certainly don't seem unreasonable if we weren't living in a late stage capitalism dystopia.
Luxury cars have industry definitions and colloquial definitions. Miata’s don’t fit the industry definition, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a Miata a luxury car.
The person in the article is most likely talking about a Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volvo, Acura, or Infinity.
Funny thing is I am in my thirties and both my grandparents, who started as lower middle class to lower class backgrounds had all those things by 26 except maybe the luxury car but one of my grand parents had a bulldozer around the same age. My grandparents house cost $4000 to build in 1956 on two acres of land. It is worth in the neighborhood of $300k today. In their fifties another grandparent had a private airplane and multiple properties and comercial real estate. My parents went to college and got cushy middle class jobs and had houses that they paid off early. My generation has had it harder. But mind you my grandfather on one side grew up in the depression and lived in a rural house without running water or electricity for a time. My feeling is these kind of opportunities for intelligent Americans to build a successful life and enter the upper middle class or upper class are structurally less available today. I think that it has to do with credentialism and inflation of the costs of living and litigiousness and over regulation.
In 1956 you could build a decent house for the price of a year's income. Not that it was paid off in a year. But now to build a house may be 2-3+ years income depending on the size.
It is not reasonable to accept this narrative when the jobs report which should be straight up objective has been revised down by several orders of magnitude for more than a couple instances after-the-fact, where even the people who have a decade of direct experience are unable to find work.
What you call unrealistic by definition is realistically necessary in all but the little luxury car part, and its assumed you don't have a fully paid off mortgage either. The fact that its not should scare everyone because what that means is the resources required to produce children aren't available anymore, and that is just another sequential pipeline failure whose results will become evident with time and hysteresis with no solution due to mathematical chaos (non-determinism).
The primary issue is communication is jammed. AI imposes costs on the job seeker as much as the employer that requires labor to the point where matches aren't happening and the Shannon limit has likely been reached resulting in similar system behavior we typically attribute to the label RNA Interference (in cellular networks), but in communication networks.
If you can't notice there is a problem, how can you ever take any action to fix a problem you can't see. This is really disingenuous of the reality.
Career Development is another pipeline, if the first rung is gone, how do you get reinforcements that are competent? You've got a narrow lag period of time before the only candidates left are burnouts and those aging out, and eventually lost knowledge with no one able to do the job.
Nothing into a pipeline, nothing out.
Part of the reason Boomers had it so easy was that they weren't all Psychology and English majors. They worked in hospitals, they worked in manufacturing, they worked trades - industries that are all facing labor shortages today because people consider it beneath them.
My boomer dad grew up poor & rural enough he started life with a dirt floor and outhouse, puttered around doing odd & entry-level jobs but nothing that could be called a career until he was 30 (no college, of course), had kids and a divorce and child support before marrying my mom, then finally started entry-level at a railroad and worked his way up. Retired a millionaire, liquid, not counting the paid off house (their houses had all been bought cash since he was 35 or so)
So made or suffered about three “blunders” or catastrophes that’d make life extremely hard now… and his was on easy mode anyway. Five total kids, divorce and tons of expenses, not getting into his career until his 30s, no degree.
We still took a two-week driving or sometimes flying vacation every summer. By the time he was 45 or so our houses were huge and nice. He spent many thousands (when $1,000 was still a lot of money, and not two costco trips…) a year on hobbies.
Retired with more than a million liquid. Despite all that. And a million was still a lot around the year 2000.
It really was different for them. Way, way, way easier.
[edit] oh and my mom quit her federal government job after they got married and never worked a paying job again. That was on one fucking income. A guy with no degree or connections or family money working on the railroad.
Yeah current generations are screwed unless they get lucky or play their cards right or have support from family. In 1950s-1960s America you had to actively try to screw up. I mean you have stories of ex-cons starting over and making a good life while now if you have any kind of record you'd be lucky to get a graveyard shift job stocking shelves at Walmart. In my personal case that is not the problem. I started in 2009 during the last recession and did not get a job in my field. I have a poor work history relative to my capabilities. I have always felt unwanted in the labor force. Fortunately I have had some inheritance and support from family to have a shot at life. It is still mind boggling how structurally stacked against people who get off track or don't start right the system today is versus what it was in the past. In the past companies needed people, they trained people on the job and developed people and career progression was possible for most people. Now there is no long term investment or commitment from either the employee or employer. Employers are looking for people who can builshit customers (because few companies actually make things anymore) or play a regulatory or compliance game. If you're a smart, capable guy or girl without connections or good work history you might as well kiss you hopes of having a professional career in many fields goodbye. The economy just needs people to make enough money to buy things. It is no longer about improving qualitative standards of living. Pensions...goodbye. Long vacations goodbye...unions...what a joke today, just an excuse to skim your paycheck for no protection, job security goodbye.
The reason I think is we outsourced our manufacturing and society simply needs fewer people to produce the output consumers demand.
Also culturally we have given up on employers investing in people for the long term.
Help is not needed and if it is it is not valued because everything is replaceable and successful career people job hop anyway.
You should google things before you say them to make sure they’re true.
What search terms would you suggest?
I had graduated in 1984 and the market had dried up significantly until 1985, then it was booming. But, that year I searched for employment (crickets) and getting engaged in eventual very high tech, it was a great time, and I look back fondly at the personal journey. I dug ditches, painted apartments, and advanced myself. And I still tell people out of school and searching, enjoy the time to be un-interrupted as you will get fully engaged at some point and find yourself busy for the next 40 years.
I graduated in 2004 with a BS in computer science from CMU. I was always told I hadn't worked hard enough to become a software developer, even though that's what I was doing in minimum wage jobs where my title was DBA. Finally gave up after 12 years of searching. YMMV. It was weird when all my professors who said they'd help me find a job if I couldn't find one suddenly didn't have any time for me. Start your life now don't wait just because society tells you that's what you're supposed to do.
And they can just eat dried paint chips and sleep in the ditches!
It is so strange... around me in the Netherlands, the fresh graduates (kids of friends, cousins, nephews) cannot stop the inflow of job offers. The ones that graduated this summer all have jobs lined up for september. Wonder what's happening.
All of a sudden I don't hear the "pick yourself up by the bootstraps" folks anymore. Where did they go? Are they in the unemployment line, too?
I know a dozen of those, and most of them are "starting their own company (stealth)" - aka they're unemployed for many months. It's all very weird (despite people saying "it's going to start improving" for 2 years now)
They’re decrying H1-B abuse, mostly.
in fact, they are. know many of these people and helping one of them get re hired right now. and you can be sure they never expected this to hit them!
the Boomer retirement(or lack of) bomb is currently going off. This generation had quite a large cohort who experienced an economic "miracle" throughout their childhood, and developed a troublesome and largely unrealistic grasp of pay and quality of life level for expected labour. They were the generation of just showing up to work and a firm handshake was enough for automatic promotion over time.
Boomers are in their 60’s and up. Covid took some away, certainly their jobs. People who still had a pension took it and are gone. Social starts up ok at 62-63 if you’ve done ok saving. And judging from the typical ageism we all discuss here people just ain’t interesting by that age. So they’re not taking up jobs like they used to.
Houses, yeah, but unless you’re going to dump them offshore ya gotta live somewhere. Many have or are downsizing which frees up larger houses in desirable areas. Not their fault that investment firms are inhaling houses to give them a better return than stocks.
And remember all this retirement savings stuff has to start paying its taxes at 72 or 73 so the government gets their share. Downward price pressure won’t help the market but one has to sell to eat.
My sister and law and from what I can tell, most of her friends, are going on almost 2 years post college job hunting now in South Korea - https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2025/07/17/SZTLLA...
And the running discussion over there is that Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics so they expect all their jobs to be replaced by either AI or Robots in the coming years.
The situation in Korea is completely different. There are tens of thousands of jobs available, including white collar, but people don't want to work for those companies - everyone goes for the exact same handful of jobs, the very top. And because unlike in most of the West it's culturally acceptable to live with ones parents for 2 years while continuously applying for those jobs, that's what many people do. It's a tradeoff. This is nothing like "I sent 300 resumes to every place in the country and can't get a job".
In fact, the parents often actively enable and support this strategy. Unthinkable in the West.
If everyone in Denmark would go "Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg or bust", it wouldn't be any different there.
It's real fuckin bad, folks.
Most everyone I know, at all skill levels, go hundreds of applications deep before finally landing a real interview let alone a job these days (in far more than just tech, too). Their unemployment runs out and they can't even get in as a bartender or at a gas station. I used to love helping people find jobs they want, my own way of paying it forward from the people who did that for me, now nothing seems to work.
I interview extremely well, until 2022 I typically got the job I wanted on the first try, they used to find me! Now direct referrals to CEOs or founders from investors or employees result in them ghosting. I've also paradoxically been told that I'm overqualified and should be applying for eng lead/principal/cto positions... and that I don't have enough experience to apply for those roles when I do.
I've just been stringing together small bullshit contracts to pay for vices in the meantime, halfway coasting off passive income. Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.
I really do not think it's offshoring, either. The crews I have contracted work out to in the past (Eastern Europe, South Korea, Japan) are asking me if I've got anything for them, they've never done that before.
> Vaguely it feels like something shitty is coming and it's being drawn out in an attempt to lessen the impact but it's being fucked up by everything else. Reminds me of shortly before 2008, when a lot of the people who knew they'd be getting laid off found out.
The economies of entire developed world have been edging since 2020 and every attempt to release was terminated with another violent punch. One pattern within Europe is noticeable though. Countries one by one are overtaken by mafia with legal immunity, and every cash is allocated into luxury cars and real estate.
So, my son just graduated at the start of the summer with a dual degree in Math and Computer Science. He would like to find an entry level job in software engineering. Does anyone have any advice to give him?
Look for Federal contracting firms, they’re much less picky and a job is a job at the end of the day. Of course this will likely require relocation, abstaining from drugs and other touchy things.
Most all of my unemployed friends post-graduation, those C’s get degrees kids, those who just couldn’t find an internship, that’s where they ended up, working for Booz Allen Hamilton or CACI or SRC.
Look for startups connected to the university he graduated from.
Unless he ticks two or (ideally) more of the following:
- graduated summa cum laude
- from a top university (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Cornell, Berkeley)
- lives and breathes tech, writes code for fun in his personal time, iron-clad determination to succeed
- has strong personal projects that show off his top-notch technical skills
he should seriously consider doing something else. The tech field is pretty much over for new grads and it's going to get harder and harder.
try places like salt lake city, Charlotte NC
Rapidly pivot to AI engineering
Chasing rapidly evolving trends is rarely the best bet. The people who pivoted to NFTs and Web3 wouldn’t have succeeded unless they built general tech knowledge along the way.
I also have seen quite a few NFT/crypto people coming out bruised and struggling to find a new role because of the association. A guy I work with was like that.
build personal projects incorporating AI (custom mcp servers, LLM integrations, etc), and reach out to people directly on LinkedIn who might be hiring.
Junior jobs will come back when blitz-pricing of AI coding products end. Current bosses think these prices with 200/mo to "leave it and auto-code for the whole month, day and night" will stay like this. Of course it won't.
Typical startup play but in massive scale. Junior jobs might come back but not in bulk, still selective, very slowly.
Why is there no feedback mechanism on the number of H1Bs issued each year? If American citizens are graduating and can’t find a job, certainly we don’t need as many H1Bs.
This is trend in Europe as well. Native population is "too expensive" and "not suitably qualified" while businesses continue importing cheap labour in coaches.
We never needed any, but we have no real say in how our country is run so that doesn't matter.
Bit confused by the mentions of 50k and above salary but can’t afford to move out because rent is above a grand
Last I checked a year has 12 months so that should easily work no?
It is doable but highly location based and still really tight. I’m in a tier 2 US city. Our interns wage would equate to $58k annually. A car isn’t needed if in the city. Most people have a roommate, which works out to just over $1k a person.
58 (pay) - 21 (tax) - 13 (rent) -13 (transit) leaves $900/month or $30/day.
Full time grads are around $20k higher….so roughly triple the amount left over.
Or you commute further. I’m mid career and commuted more than hour most of my career because it let me get a better/cheaper apartment while affording a used car.
No? That leaves you with a bit over $3k monthly post-tax in a no-income tax state for benefit of the doubt. Applying the 30% of income rule landlords commonly use, that means you can afford about $900/mo max. The average US rent is currently >$1600.
Checking my local area, you'd be able to afford 0.5% of the current listings with that income. I'm certain that most of those units are low income housing with special application processes and eligibility criteria though.
Salaries are usually quoted in before-tax dollars, while paying rent happens after tax. Any place where rent is around “a grand“ also requires a car (and insurance) to survive. That 50k gets used up quickly.
30% of $50k is $1,250. Up to you if that’s enough margin
This is exactly my experience. Entry level/“have a pulse” jobs will ghost now
Why do these always/only talk about new graduates? My last contract ended, and I haven’t had a real interview in over a year.
Because their unemployment rates specifically are catastrophic levels. I’ve seen reports as high as 19%. Fortunately, other demographics simply aren’t experiencing difficulties at this level.
As an aside, I personally noticed the market pick up hard in the last few weeks. I work in a niche industry, but get ads for software dev jobs regularly and they’ve really surged lately. The past year truly was a difficult time to find a job.
The fact that pretty much all new grads are having a more difficult time finding employment than in the past makes it harder to dismiss. If you write a story about 10% of experienced workers being un/underemployed, it's easy for readers to say "oh, that's just structural unemployment" or "they must not be that good at their job," even if someone paying attention to the numbers would know that it used to be 5% (or whatever).
Because it's an easy to story they can run every summer - 'how are graduates doing in the job market? we asked 5 of them'.
I always find personal stories and quotes a weird way to tell these kinds of stories. Someone is always frustrated trying to find a job, right? Every field has ups and downs over time, and I know people whose fields were having a down turn in 2021 when tech was hotter than ever.
AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume, nurses are classically understaffed right?
> The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday.
The toughest since 2015 hardly seems like anything noteworthy.
I think that's part of it, however it does seem the barrier to entry for anything now is a lot higher. People can argue what's causing that as they may, I cannot say for sure what causes it. Could be economic, could be cultural/procedural within corporates.
Offshoring … (not h1bs)
> AI engineers aren’t in a slump I assume
It's in a slump if you are a junior. You see these stories about experienced guys getting ridiculous comp packages, but if you are fresh out of undergrad getting especially a researcher position at a top outfit is very difficult.
We hear about a literal _dozen_ people getting those ridiculous packages. A dozen people versus hundreds of thousands on the unemployment line.
There is a profound failure to grasp the structural nature of the crisis we are experiencing. Rather than engaging in a materialist analysis of current conditions, many continue to offer superficial or conspiratorial explanations. But the reality is more straightforward: the system is not malfunctioning; it is operating precisely as designed.
The relatively high living standards enjoyed by previous generations in the Global North (US and Europe) were not the norm but a historical anomaly. They were the product of a specific phase of capitalism, often referred to as the Fordist-Keynesian compromise. That period was characterized by rapid industrial expansion, colonial surplus, and a relative balance between capital and labor. Those conditions no longer exist, and under contemporary global capitalism—defined by financialization, neoliberal deregulation, and austerity—they are unlikely to return.
We are now in a more advanced stage of capitalist development in which capital continues its relentless drive for accumulation by any means necessary. Capitalism is inherently expansionary and must continually seek new frontiers of accumulation, a process called "accumulation by dispossession" (David Harvey). The U.S. economy, having depleted more traditional sources of surplus extraction, now turns inward by commodifying everyday life, privatizing public goods, and intensifying the exploitation of labor, time, and even human attention.
The system’s logic remains extractive, but the resources it targets have shifted. No longer limited to natural resources or colonial peripheries, capital now consumes the very fabric of everyday existence: your wages, your land, your data, your time. The conditions we face are not aberrations. They are the logical outcome of a system designed to value profit over life.
The fact that employees working in "tech" had lucrative salaries was not because of some good grace or generosity, it was a necessary component in building the companies and technology over the past few decades. The current tech job market illustrates a hallmark of late-stage capitalism: the system’s tendency to overproduce labor for roles that no longer exist at scale. Junior developers, once eagerly hired during boom periods, now face a bleak job market. Companies that previously promised growth and opportunity have shifted focus from expansion to efficiency, prioritizing experienced hires or automation over training new talent. This reflects a broader economic logic where labor is only valued when it can deliver immediate returns. The result is a growing mismatch—bootcamps and CS programs continue to churn out developers, while the market treats them as surplus. Rather than investing in the next generation of workers, firms cut costs and consolidate, revealing how short-term profit motives undermine both opportunity and sustainability in the industry.
This also sheds some light into the holocaust happening in Gaza where we see nonsensical violence. On the one hand we have a genocidal state, but on the other hand we have the global real estate developers and multinational firms who see profits amidst the destruc†ion. I fear the new operating modus of the the future will be to just destroy something and rebuild it to extract the profit, often referred to by "disaster capitalism".
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