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What is unemployment among software devs? It's real real low.

As someone who hires devs, I could easily hire 2-3 devs right now. However I live in a tier3 city, and don't want to do the remote dev thing right now. If I post a remote job I get 5,000 candidates, if I post a local job I get 0-3.

As a new grad, I bet winning a remote job would be hard. But pick a city, any city. Always looking for devs. If still not landing jobs, its a matter of interview skills and non-school resume experience.

Yeah MIT CS grad on OF means

1) Bottom 5% tier grad who has less than zero social skills, thus would also be a low earner on OF

2) Extremely picky about jobs. Instead chose OF for lifestyle/earning reasons.

3) Serious health, legal, psychological, or family problems that would prevent them from any job and probably also would have made attaining their degree very difficult. This is MIT OnlyFans person I feel the saddest for.

4) Some other 1/1000 possibility

The idea MIT grads are on OF in mass just to make enough to eat and put a roof over their heads is some serious sympathy farming.

Hey "quantumBerry" -- What a username to behold!

While I find this post witty and well-written ("some serious sympathy farming"!), I don't follow where the parent post was suggesting anything about MIT CS grads on OnlyFans. Do I misunderstand? (Zero trolling.)

Yeah, all I was saying is that statistically, it's likely that I overlapped with an undergrad(s) at MIT who has/have an OF. And that I know for certain from Twitter that there are undergrads from similar schools who have OF.

I never prequalified it specifically with 'CS' -- by the way, a lot of the discussion in the thread has tunnel-visioned on CS, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only STEM degree HN would consider 'useful' (if we loop back to the comment I replied to).

There's physics, math, engineering, and much, much more -- and all of those had an even worse job market than CS with the exclusion of those jumping into quantitative finance. The point of the original comment is to highlight how you can do everything 'right' according to the poster and, by necessity or tragedy resulting from a global pandemic, may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time.

The circumstances of the pandemic are only further exacerbated for the hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates not coming from top schools or internships. Finally, I'd like to note that my original comment (way up in the chain) was neither about STEM nor top schools, so I hold that my observation there still holds weight.

TL;DR: the concept that Gen-Z job hunters can simply go to 'the good school' and get 'the good degree' for 'the good job' is entirely subverted in a pandemic, leading to an especially dire job situation for those who are less privileged in education or training. This, coupled with social distancing, was the perfect social context for OnlyFan's recent hypergrowth.

Thank you for this excellent, thoughtful reply.

This point: "may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time". I grew up in a family and culture that shamed sex workers, but when I became an adult, I learned that that the truth is much more nuanced! I hope OnlyFans can continue to provide a safe space for sex workers when and how they wish to work.

Your tl;dr: I agree and experienced it myself, first hand. The year that you graduate is a roll of the dice in real life. If the economy is strong, you'll mostly do fine; if the economy is in a nosedive, most people are screwed, even hotties on OnlyFans with an MIT CS degree!

>I learned that that the truth is much more nuanced!

Yes! Absolutely, I tried a couple times to re-write that bit without getting too verbose and kinda gave up. I agree with you -- there are people who absolutely just vibe with sex work and they should be empowered to do it.

The parent comment two levels above mentioned fellow MIT CS classmates having OF.

I think this is a sign of companies not knowing how to get useful work out of junior developers with only a few years of experience, much less fresh college graduates. This is an extremely challenging problem at small scales, and one that most companies simply aren't up to. In my experience, listening to engineering management discuss these matters, the few people who entertain the idea of hiring junior developers do so for fairly abstract reasons: a sense of moral obligation, a sense of contributing to the health of the industry, a desire to challenge the software engineering team to mature in its practices, etc. I'm sure there are companies out there that know how to employ a junior developer at the going rate and actually get their money's worth, but it isn't common knowledge, and I haven't seen anybody succeed at it firsthand. If my experience is typical, we're just overall shitty as an industry at using young talent.

That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it.

As an aside, professional soccer solves this by granting a team certain rights to the players it develops, so if a player is trained in Team A's youth academy, and Team B wants to sign them at age 18, Team B pays a fee to Team A. Team A may agree to reduce the fee in exchange for a share of any subsequent sale, so if the player develops into a top professional and is sold to Team C at age 22, both Team A and Team B benefit financially.

> That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it.

With juniors being able to be easily enticed away with a bump in salary at a well known company it becomes the situation that the only companies that can afford to hire juniors are those that pay enough to make it so that they aren't enticed away as easily.

This then leads to other companies not interested in hiring juniors - not because they don't want them or that they aren't willing to train them, but rather that they can't compete with the big tech company compensation.

The result of that is then that you see only job postings for mid and seniors... not so much because they will hit the ground with less training, but that they're likely more mature and less likely to be poached (they're stereotypically interested in settling down and raising a family).

Ultimately, if everyone and every organization is similarly self interested, there is no reason to hire a junior dev unless you can pay them top dollar to avoid the possibility of them getting poached by another org before they've been able to produce a positive return on investment... or that the overall income of the org is large enough that the loss in the ROI isn't substantial.

As an MIT alum - if you had an offer rescinded please let the careers office know. Companies are not allowed to do that if engaging with MIT students in a meaningful way (career fairs, etc.) and MIT can and does penalize them for this (banning from fairs, etc.)

I wanted to add to your list of degrees of plentiful jobs.. but electrical engineering grads have no shortage of people competing to hire them.

If you include associate degrees, you can add all the skilled trades to that list. To be clear, I'm talking about all the associate applied science w/[electricial|plumbing|pipefitting|welding] programs out there.

It sounds like you’re talking about the very beginning of the pandemic when everyone was just trying to figure out what the hell was happening. That seems entirely separate from the topic of the value of a degree these days. I had a similar situation finishing school as the last recession hit, but that wasn’t so sudden. Someone else is talking about it being brutal graduating in 2002. The common theme here seems to be graduating right after crashes or right after pandemics hit sucks.

Well when you apply at GAFAM you're competing against a very specific talent pool, and it's a buyers market. Maybe try applying at a smaller company?

> I have classmates who had OF

What is OF?

OnlyFans. OF is what it’s called often in common conversations.

“What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”

Sorry, OF is the abbreviation for OnlyFans.

I am not MIT, but rather shabby mid-tier state uni, and my experience was nearly identical when job hunting in 2002/3 after graduation. With some distance, the hardest part emotionally, is that one or two years when you are only 22 years old is a LONG time to find a job!

Maybe in the US? The UK market for tech is insanely hot. But perhaps it was previously underpriced.

No. Tech employment in the US remains hot as well. Unemployment for people in the tech industry with a degree is about 1-2%. For a software developer with a degree, it's sub 1%.

When I graduated with my CS degree in 2002 the job search was brutal. I hang out in cscareerquestions on Reddit and a common theme seems to be getting that first junior dev job is really hard. Is this just an unfair reality all junior devs face?

Getting that first job is almost always the hardest. I went through nearly 100 interviews (I have no degree) before I got hired. I wouldn't call it unfair though. I've been on the other side of the interview table since then and I can tell you that the vast majority of applicants to a junior role are so far from employable that its barely worth it to hire a junior. No one wants to wait years for an employee to become productive. The fact is that most schools are not preparing graduates to work in the industry. I know several CS graduates who were almost totally unfamiliar with SQL databases. Considering that the vast majority of SE work these days is on the web, it is shocking that there isn't more focus on fundamental web technology.

It definitely seems so. Whenever I post an internship or junior position on Indeed or LinkedIn I get hundreds of resumes.

Whenever I need someone more experienced, it’s either hired by recommendation, or we need a headhunter. Salary is never the issue, it’s just that senior devs complain about getting swamped with offers, so they don’t even have to look anymore.

It’s almost like a game theory problem: people have to apply to hundreds of companies to have a shot because everyone is also doing the same.

That, and some companies seem to be shifting towards preferring having a low number of experienced developers rather than a larger number of entry-level: I know of a few companies that paused junior and mid-level hirings after getting big investments.

Joel Spolsky has written about this problem extensively. The best devs are not available and are not looking. I have seen many, many LinkedIn profiles for people who are insanely technical (much more than me) who literally write: "Headhunters: Go away!" LOL.

I think there's just a lot of competition. I never was able to land a junior dev position and gave up (was self taught, though.) I just decided to go freelance and work on personal projects until I had a portfolio and was able to get hired as a mid-level engineer.