Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?

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.

The difference is only 11% of men versus 10.5% of women age 16-24 (PDF):

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf

> 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.

> college education is a shortcut to generic employment

That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.

>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.