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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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.

They’re decrying H1-B abuse, mostly.

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.

In fact, the parents often actively enable and support this strategy. Unthinkable in the West.

This is nothing like "I sent 300 resumes to every place in the country and can't get a job". Of course, such people do exist, but those are in majors/fields in which it was already near-impossible 10 years ago to get a job in most of the world. If everyone in Denmark would go "Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg or bust", you'd see the exact same.

Honestly, your story indicates that your sister-in-law and her friends are likely at least middle class. Those who simply can't afford to sit around for 2 years (lower class) do just get a job straight away.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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'.

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.

Look for startups connected to the university he graduated from.

n=1, but I graduated with a not so hot GPA so going into the market just before covid wasn't fun. Ended up doing "contracting" (still had a W2) with a really nice agency to get my foot in the proverbial door and eventually started working full-time as a software engineer, albeit in more of a support role. Working as a contractor wasn't too glamorous though (I could definitely say the same about the pay) as it was mostly writing and running automated test, but figured I had to start somewhere.

Is he going to start working FAANG making $300k? It'd be nice if he does, but it's best to keep expectations in check.

try places like salt lake city, Charlotte NC

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.

Rapidly pivot to AI engineering

build personal projects incorporating AI (custom mcp servers, LLM integrations, etc), and reach out to people directly on LinkedIn who might be hiring.

> 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.

We never needed any, but we have no real say in how our country is run so that doesn't matter.

This is trend in Europe as well. Native population is "too expensive" and "not suitably qualified" while businesses continue importing cheap labour in coaches.

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.

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.

30% of $50k is $1,250. Up to you if that’s enough margin

If that’s your thesis, $200/mo has a lot of room for price increases before you start reaching Jr dev salary/mo.