Out of those that are real, how many of them are completely out of touch with what they're asking for? Whether low salary, unrealistic expectations regarding experience/skills, etc?
Out of those that pass the above filter, how many of them have unrealistic application requirements such as tech tests, etc?
And so on. Hiring is a market for lemons, with scammers on both sides.
Anyway, if all of those people applied to each of the companies in who's hiring, and got hired, the unemployment rate for this subset of applicants would still be 50%. And this was for a junior role as well.
Even with experience I have found applying to full remote jobs to be difficult these days, they are generally voids that thousands of resumes get submitted to and you'll never even know if yours was looked at.
I've had better luck via networking and recruiters with jobs that are asking for at least occasional in-person visits which means that the city / metro area you live in remains very important to your ability to land a job.
- Must have 10 years experience with ChatGPT and 20 years experience in PyTorch.
- Entry level
- Must be willing to relocate to a red state in the US and work under the table
- Must be willing to take the fall for our mishandling of data
1 "Zigment (https://zigment.ai) | Bangalore / Bengaluru, India | Full-time | ONSITE"
2 "Rinse | IT Manager / Network Administrator / System Administrator | Hybrid in SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York (Brooklyn), Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, or Newark. (Primarily remote with some on-site responsibilities.) | Full-time | https://www.rinse.com"
3 "CVector | Full Stack Software Engineer | USA | REMOTE | Full-time | $75k – $120/yr + 0.3% – 1%"
When a company advertises a role, they are increasingly looking for someone who either has done the same exact job in the exact specific niche with proven success for a number of years, or an absolute super star who would excel at anything thrown at them.
Most people are neither, so matches are exceedingly rare.
Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
1. contribute to a significant open source project
2. write some significant work of software
3. design and build your own computer
4. build a robot something
5. work as an intern in industry
6. do work as a research assistant
When I was at Caltech, students did (entirely on their own):
1. built a gas powered helicopter from scratch
2. built a tracked robot with an arm and a manipulator
3. built an electronic synthesizer
4. built a functioning railroad that ran through the dorm
5. many built a single board computer for their own use
6. designed and built the campus radio station
7. one fellow designed, built, and sold custom speakers in the student workshop. After graduating, he turned it into a real business and made a fortune
and so on. In other words, turn yourself into someone useful to a company.
Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).
That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)
And as a manager, I'd absolutely lean towards a recent graduate with some experience over no experience. My "success rate" for grads who have co-op experience (full-time job, often delays graduation by a semester or year) is the highest. Next would be those that had long-term part-time employment (university IT office, etc). Then basic internships. And last, no experience at all - and the "success rate" on them has been low enough I probably wouldn't chance hiring another one.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
They do—actually, by a massive margin compared to citizens born here—we just don't have the legal immigration framework set up to support this.
EDIT: I was unaware a "debate" was even happening, I was just clarifying that immigrants start businesses at a massively higher rate than birthright citizens do.
I paid for school (admittedly not that much, I stayed in state and lived in relatively poor accommodations). I’m also the only one of my siblings to not be a felon or dead before 45. Life is often a game of deltas: given the same or similar starting conditions, where did you wind up?
If you keep making delta positive outcomes, eventually you’ll wind up somewhere interesting.
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
I cannot think of a single person in my extended family across three generations for whom that heuristic is true. I don’t doubt that it applies in some situations. I can’t tell you what the actual ROI is; but “belonging there” seems a little encumbered by assumptions about the diversity of ways and timings in which young people develop academically and emotionally.
When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarter than your peers, but having that initiative lets you avoid competing with them directly. My particular path is just one of many.
For example, one guy I interviewed spent all his time asking about what benefits he was going to get. He had no interest whatsoever in what he'd be doing, and what the company was doing. No hire.
Unfortunately, such is commonplace. This gives the savvy interviewee an advantage - approach the interview from the employer's point of view. Save your questions about how much vacation you'll get until after the employer has decided to hire you.
Secondly, yeah, I'm not like that. I've got three or so side projects (I guess they're just projects now) I'm actively working on and have been building things with my teens. It doesn't matter anymore socially, like everything else in the US your counterpart just never shows up.
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico
In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants
In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore
Given that the T" is "Technology" I should hope so. Likewise the "E" and "M" are broad and include many fields that have nothing to do with "tech".
I'm on the other side of the hiring table now. I proactively look for students that exhibit these traits. I'm not the only one.
Showing interest in the company is very helpful. Asking questions like how does the company make money, what is their criteria for a successful employee, what does the division you're applying for contribute to the success of the company, what kind of person are they looking for, and so on.
That wasn't my point. My point was the candidate should show interest in the company.
After all, if you're buying a car, does the car salesman sell you on the commission he's going to make?
BTW, Caltech places emphasis on get-up-and-go in their student selections. I was a marginal candidate, and I found out years later that my projects I worked on in my spare time made the difference. I was always building things in the garage and in the high school shop. (But I didn't tell them about the flame thrower I made from a lawnmower.)
Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)
Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.
How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
1. Fact 1: There is unusually high unemployment rate for new STEM graduates, including those with advanced degrees like MS and PhDs
2. Fact 2: Our politicians and business leaders are noting there is a "massive shortage of workers in STEM" and thus we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to meet the demand.
How can both be true and in line with your position?
Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.
My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.
You don't need to restate your point. I understood and it's what's trite and insulting to new grads.
> Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire.
This isn't the alternative and hasn't been for a decade. It's absolutely mainstream thinking among students and new grads that the traditional career is dead and that they need to take alternative routes, one of the most common being to present themselves as "problem-solvers for hire", with personal brands, turning friends into networks, etc.
It's so common it's a trope, and of course the market of businesses who need problem-solvers for hire is absolutely saturated. It's a segment exploited by employers for cheap labour and terrible opportunities for progression as you're competing against so many people, many in LCOL areas.
So after their entire youth being told the same thing you're saying by podcasters, influencers, slightly older peers, etc and then arriving into a labour market which is absolutely barren, your advice is trite and it is insulting.
It's even worse than when challenged, you assume I must not get your profound advice and choose to reiterate it, instead of reflection on the possibility that the world and opportunities you enjoyed 20 years ago simply don't exist any more. Not that there aren't other opportunities.
> But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system.
The irony of this comment.
> By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
Yes, you and literally everyone else. It's almost ridiculous how out-of-touch this is.
> perhaps fine, for the trades.
As an aside, this is an absurdly arrogant comment.