You studied computer science but Big Tech no longer wants you
economist.com
economist.com
On age, as a single data point from someone whose age starts with "5", I have not seen particular difficulties in job hunting. To maintain long-term employability I recommend broadening experience beyond the pure computer science to domains that leverage computers to build new things: medical devices, signal processing, sensors, computational biotech, satellites, audio; whatever looks fun. My 2c.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-education-in-the-us-is-more-o...
Also the above commenter mentioned that it needs to be a “real” comp sci degree, not one that calls itself comp sci but never makes you learn classes like Data structures, algorithms, etc. There are “fake” CS degrees out there, and big employers know they are no good.
My university CS department has a 100% placement every. single. year. Including the last 3 years, and it’s like not even a top 100 school in the US.
There are about 65k CS undergraduate degrees issued each year.
I don't think the BLS is double counting jobs. I believe they go to the companies for that info, not random job boards.
No one from there goes to FAANG, it’s not a prestigious enough school for that. But there is an endless demand in large companies like government contractors, banks, the small web dev shops, etc. that need programmers for 60k$ out of school.
The professors I knew openly told me and our classes how the system worked. And that the majority of individuals will not find a job. There are too many new graduates to new positions. Many of them were fellows and board members of the ACM. I was active in the student group and got to know these people and the outcomes. These guys often share results and data they collect privately with other researchers. And people are failing at an alarming scale. But you won't find those people on this site, and you wouldn't because of the main demographic of this forum.
School advertised job placement percentages do not care whether or not you got a job in your studied field. That's how they lie about such high percentages. As long as you entered the workforce, it's a success.
"One area where STEM students are needed is in aerospace and especially the defense industry."
One issue they didn't mention about this is the shitty work environment for many of the jobs. The people I talk to who are leaving the defense industry can't stand the politics and procedures anymore.
This is a particularly funny quote given the times we live in now: “A third is that there are not a lot of exciting new aerospace or defense initiatives that spur the imagination of young engineers like there once were.”
Space is a fairly small market, but has some stuff going on. Nothing on the scale of the space race era. Even in the 90s they were talking about how space launches would become so routine. Then, if you launched a mission it was likely 70% new tech, procedures, or experiments. Now all the missions build off of previous ones. Hey, look a new space telescope! Been there, done that, barely makes the news.
Defense is a wildcard since the interesting stuff is classified. There are some interesting problems in the DARPA competitions. Not a lot of freedom in those jobs - lots of politics usually.
Space race budgets were only really significantly elevated from 62-69, and fell off pretty precipitously after that, so to attribute all of that spending to 3 decades is wrong as well.
Aviation innovation is not suppressed by market demands, it is because the private market can now participate that innovation is happening again. But you don't seem to get that aviation and rocket innovation is indeed rocket science, and 'low risk designs' aren't just established over night.
No shit, that's the entire point - society doesn't care anymore because it isn't shiny. Take a survey on the street of space telescopes and most won't even be aware of the Jame Webb.
"so to attribute all of that spending to 3 decades is wrong as well."
Much of those subsequent decades built off of the information and ideas generated in that time period. They still had regular manned missions and large innovations like the space shuttle. No more manned launches from NASA. No more prestige.
"But you don't seem to get that aviation and rocket innovation is indeed rocket science, "
I do get that. Now please go compare the rate of innovation and newly adopted designs today versus decades ago. Today it's all about tweaking some existing model for slightly more efficiency and running computer models.
I have no real career prospects (it feels like just a job now). I'm burnt out and have basically zero marketable skills. Even out of college, I had to apply to about 250 positions. I have a masters from a better school now and it doesn't feel like it made any difference.
"I recommend broadening experience beyond the pure computer science to domains that leverage computers to build new things: medical devices, signal processing, sensors, computational biotech, satellites, audio; whatever looks fun."
I love learning about this stuff. I really love the synergistic aspect of doing what you describe. But at the end of the day, it means nothing. Who cares if you built simple apps, have a personal website, worked on personal audio processing projects, or built some homebrew IoT type stuff? Certainly hasn't meant shit for my career. They want people who have done this in an enterprise setting.
What I meant by "broadening experience" is not a hobby-level stuff you describe (still very useful on a personal development level) but gaining enough depth in another field to be comparable to an undergraduate with that specialization; or at least with a minor in that area. It is a higher bar, but someone with good CS background can master the equivalent of the 3-5 higher undergrad level classes pretty quickly.
I agree that software companies are not really interested in non-software hobby projects. But non-software tech companies often put a very high value on software as a secondary skill in their non-software hires and are willing to lower the bar for their primary tech competency. My 2c.
Well, that's sort of a catch-22. Either you need a credential (major, minor, certificate), or you need work experience in it. But of course you need that work experience in order to get the job, so it doesn't really make you more employable. Plus, most would tend to lose career velocity as they jump from one domain to the next.
"There are definitely data points different from mine."
That was all I was trying to say. Certainly applies to me as well.
It would be less impressive if Linus did the same at age 27 after a Master's at a top tier US school, but likely still enough to get a nice FAANG job with solid promotion prospects.
That's likely what the parent meant, you need to show, something, in the 99th percentile among your peer cohort.
I'm not sure how you missed 1/3 of my comment.
Clearly with such conditions it will not be an entry level job. Nor am I saying it's absolutely necessary. From what I understand a 99th percentile score on Leetcode will alone get you through the door.
Though a nice job (~40 hour weeks, good team, above average comp. package) with solid promotion prospects is about the maximum even a somewhat less impressive version of Linus could expect at 27-28.
Absolutely. Gaining expertise in another domain would also cost time and effort (and maybe money). So I would not do it first thing after graduation and would only pick an area that I really like, so the extra work does not feel like work. But if one gets to senior levels and does not want to go into management, having additional area of expertise opens a lot of doors.
> Either you need a credential (major, minor, certificate), or you need work experience in it.
This has not been my experience. IME the bar to cross is knowledge, being able to pass the equivalent of a code screen or a technical interview; few companies outside of highly regulated markets care about a piece of paper to substantiate skills. As always, just my 2c; YMMV.
This has been a question I've had too. How do you get to show you have experience in enterprise software/tech if you've not been given the chance to work in a setting that uses something like that before?
It's the chicken and egg problem. Companies are often more concerned with the candidate's experience in specific esoteric technologies for their sector, and will not hire anybody who doesn't fit that yet, instead of also hiring people who can definitely learn that tech pretty quickly based on their experience, or having shown they are experienced learners.
Personally, I believe the answer is right place right time, as disappointing as it may sound. A large amount of people I know working these sort of roles are there because Company X in the domain recruited them from University pipelines where they attended and that seems to be almost exclusively where the companies source “entry level” hires for these domains.
I still think it’s possible to get there from somewhere else, it just requires slightly different skill sets and a lot more work.
Now they might actually need to prove their value in ways that make sense or at least aligns more closely to baseline reasonable.
I'm not saying this out of spite due to being rejected either—I played the same game and came out with top internships and placements at the same set of Big Tech that everyone else wanted. I feel awful about being compelled to participate in that meat grinder.
But once you've gone to one of those, you realize that they are really no different from any other college or work experience. There are some things they do a lot better due to scale and ranking, but day-to-day is much the same.
It was obvious once I got there that the sheer scale meant that more energy had to go into menial tasks than into actual creative work. It seemed like a trap where people who had gotten a Masters or PhD in something actually hard ended up working on things that wouldn't even be challenging to someone with a Bachelors.
As for the "culture", well, you're surrounded by people who have been grinding to get up the ladder. I think my FAANG coworkers were the least interesting people I have worked with. I don't mean that to be rude I think it's just selection bias (I consider myself to be boring). Conversely, the people in the boring industries like Government and Aerospace have been some of the most interesting people. They're also tackling much more intellectually stimulating problems than most people are going to at FAANG, without advanced degrees.
It felt like a misallocation of human potential. I think the contraction of FAANG and "big tech" in general is probably better for the progress of technology and also maybe the personal growth of developers, or at least it is for me. Or not, maybe I am just biased. My $0.02
Now that they’ve arrived at graduation, the opportunities available to their older peers for the past decade are suddenly unavailable. Many of those students have spent the last 4-8 years of their lives focused on this goal, only to see the nature of the game change completely right before the finish line.
Those of us who have been around for a while know that this is only temporary and that a great CS education still opens doors to many good companies. However, it’s a shock to the system to be focused on a goal (and a specific paycheck) for years and then to discover it’s not available to you right at the end. Try to have some empathy for this turn of events.
I mentor in a program for college students and grads. A disproportionate number of our rather talented students are struggling to get any interviews at all, despite our resume reviews and coaching. They’ve gone from hoping to get a FAANG job to hoping they can get any interviews at all. It’s tough out there.
But gosh darn it, this is computer science we're talking about, in college no less! Where hath the passion gone?! I apologize for the soapbox.
Those who can't get any interviews, what are their grades like? Do they have open source contributions, a website, online presence? Internships?
but, so what? you go to any other computer-related job, maybe even for minimal wage
and put effort into learning and gettings skills and then you try to get into these high comp jobs.
Is it privilege or delusion that grads want to start with top tech companies?
The thing about CS, and ENG in general, is that it's less about who you know and more about what you know, which is a real leveller.
Right now, though, there's a pull back from the FAANGs and other big tech, which IMO is a measure of the cost of/appetite for risk at the moment (read: interest rates) as well as a well publicised miss or two (Twitter, Facebook's Metaverse).
Is it all over for Big Tech? Really hard to say, dot com bubble didn't end it. Outsourcing never eventuated (despite what recruiters are saying about remote workers having to reduce their salary expectations, because of the competition from overseas, the truth is that companies that take their ENG over seas end up paying twice as much to clean it back up when they eventually have to bring it back in house)
You can do CS and then do law school, what you can’t undo is the time you invested into building a legal career rather than a software development career after school, or vice versa. (OTOH, there’s also ways you could leverage either start into an advantage in the other career, because both are fields that reward knowledge of the application domain as well as the career field, and both are fields where the other is a legitimate application domain, so its not a total loss.)
If words are worthless now, I imagine that reading my comment is equally worthless as reading the article, so therefore it should be no skin off your back/not anything to be annoyed by.
archive.today reliably reduces internet crappiness levels.
But it sounded like a massive bureaucracy, and a little like a cult, so I avoided it, and I’m glad I did.
Thats pretty much any large, or even medium companies, right?
I'd do a lot of unpleasant things if the price was right.
I suppose that I shouldn't have said "literally" there. If a FAANG company were to offer me a million dollars for a day's work, and I only had to work for a single day, I'd be in.
But I know my own temperament, and enough people who work at various FAANGS, to know that if I had to work there for more than a couple of months, I would be utterly miserable regardless of the pay rate. I have worked at large international tech companies, and that's been fine, though.
> But none of the faang firms was here this time. Neither were Spotify, Salesforce, Uber or Microsoft. In any case most of those companies and almost 50 others – “all the famous ones” – had already rejected her internship applications a few months earlier.
Unless you're suggesting that all of the tech companies smaller than that tech Fortune 500/NASDAQ tier (again, really need a phrase and maybe listing of such firms) might come to prominence?
I saw plenty of those folks 50+ at FANG-ish companies whilst working in the Bay but ofc that's just an anecdote.
Any tips on how to get started?
I'm as unclear on how to build a serious consulting shop, as I was when I was 22, a waiter with some self-taught iPhone OS experience. Which I guess makes sense, I wasn't building business relationships from deep within a FAANG org chart as a SWE.
The great resignation = We want you!
The big stay = We don't want you!
The good times may be over for now, but there will be more good times...
We just witnessed both in less than a couple years.
If by "witnessed both" you mean "the tail end of the first period that had lasted for 3+ decades, and the beginning of the second which, who knows how long it will last", then yes.
But this kind of "both" is hardly reassuring for witnessing another round of good times anytime soon.
Worse are those that just finished a "full dev stack bootcamp" and now are trying to find a job as software developers.
1) The dotcom crash (and to a lesser extent 2008) showed us how transient these jobs are
2) You're going to age out at about 45ish unless you can secure a less common role at a less common company that values tenured folks. You're paid well partially as an advance on your unemployability later. One option is to move into management before such a time, or on to wood working or another profession.
These are never explicitly said, but if you're observant you'll realize it's the case.
I'm in a weird spot career wise because I turned down 3 management roles to oversee multiple teams and now have to signal my non-interest in stepping out of team leadership and into a staff engineering role.
I just really like managing ICs in the day to day and everything that would make me good at those other roles is incidental to me liking managing ICs.
> cost more in salary
If the salaries that show up in HN posts are true, this is a no.
> cost more in health care
My only health care needs in the past 30 years have been a couple of dental cleanings per year.
> have been known to push back [...] and to not get swept up in current fads.
Ok, you've got me on this one. I do keep up with new languages, libraries, etc. I've also lived through enough hype cycles to separate the good stuff from the fluff.
I hate to be disagreeable but that might be an example of past observations not necessarily predicting future ones.
The answer here, I feel, is to slowly phase recipients to medicare to offset some of the costs.
Even better if medicare were for all; or outright remove the private sector and the employer from paying for our health insurance.
Maybe it's different in America but that just hasn't been my experience in the UK. Loads of people over 50 still working in tech. Obviously most in management but that's to be expected. There are plenty still doing "actual work". I'm not really worried about ageism.
Of course you have to keep learning. Nobody is going to hire a 60 year old who only knows Pascal or whatever (sorry Pascal programmers).
Lots of legacy code is still out there. But that's probably a pretty thankless job.
I think it is more a question of whether the company actually understands technology. Lots of companies, particularly in the UK, have ended up in the tech business so they are always one step from outsourcing everything to India (or elsewhere, India is getting expensive now).
In that environment, it is very hard to understand what an older person brings to the table beyond costing more.
The stuff about "you have to keep learning" is also something you hear a lot in the UK. Yes mate, I know React but haven't used styled-components...your company uses it, but there is no way I will be able to learn it. When you are in a job, you are continually learning and no company fires everyone when they move a system to a new language or whatever. Part of the reason why the UK has a "skills shortage" is because, as explained above, most companies have no idea what they are hiring for. Oh, you last worked on Java 8...sorry, you will never be able to catch up to Java 1X.
This is part of the ageism situation because younger people view older people as unable to learn in almost every context. But the reality is that many companies are unwilling to learn about the things people can do if you give them an opportunity.
Some companies aren't like this but the small size of the startup market/the use of the UK as an outsourcing hub/the dominance of large non-tech companies in tech hiring means that this is the case in most of the UK.
“You really yeeted that code review,” the term leader says, a slight waver in his voice as he wonders if this will be the one that gets him caught.
“Yes it was yolo,” nods the coder.
They quickly break up the meeting, happy to have survived the interaction.
Actually I think I have to update my slang too…
Anecdote: I was asked a cultural/generational question when bronies were the rage to settle an argument.
(will the old guy get it). I didn’t like it; I should’ve used the culture card and dodged the question.
So do not reveal you have 20 years experience and graduated in the previous century?
A person of less experience will get the job and be paid the same as you anyway.
And that's before we even start talking about the fact that js was just invented when the average 50 year old was entering the workforce.
This isn't actually very true outside of SV and FAANG.
If I can live with a higher standard of living at half the nominal salary, am I really making less?
But not everyone considers living there to have a positive impact on their standard of living. They live there to get a high-paying job. Of the dozen or so people I personally know who live in that area, half of them would prefer to live somewhere else.
There's something to be said for a less common role, even if it does give me a splitting headache every now and then.
"'Yeah,' she said tentatively, in the voice of somebody who had never considered pursuing a career as unglamorous – as unsparkly! – as security."
Hahaha I'm our team's security champion (so the worst of both worlds). This made me laugh.
TL;DR: This is nothing new. At all. And it's certainly not limited to the 'tech' industry.
I have a great amount of sympathy for them, really. It has to be a huge shock. But on the other hand, did everyone think that the world had stopped working in the way it always has?
I tried Bing Search which told me it might mean Microsoft, Alibaba, Nvidia, Google and Amazon for "some of the leading companies in cloud computing and artifical intelligence." But the "source" it gave me was the Wikipedia article for Japanese comics.