Comment by Rooster61 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rooster61 | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to face this when fresh out of school, but one piece of advice I can offer is to network as much as you can. Talk to folks you know that graduated before you and have a job. Talk to professors who might have industry ties in their history. Talk to folks in the career center. Try to be as visible as you can. Yes, I know that seems trivial considering you don't have job experience, but even building relationships at school can pay off.

Those types of connections are CRITICAL in the age of scorched-earth AI centric hiring. I spent 9 months recently jobless after getting laid off, and its damned near impossible to get a job through the usual resume farm (LinkedIn job board and the like).

Also, look for jobs local to wherever you are that don't look all that glamorous. RTO is a big thing now, and smaller organizations struggle to hire locally without the brand recognition of the big guys. That might be your in for your first job.

And the biggest thing, keep your head up. Keep pushing. You just got a degree from an extremely difficult program, and you can hang your hat on that. The factors affecting the job market are not within your control, and your skills will outlast them.

I second networking as the thing to do in this job market.

The vast majority of the recent interviews that I have gotten have been through networking. Sometimes just asking the right people works, but obviously you have to know who to ask, when to ask it, and how to ask it to make it work. There are also more passive methods like the HN monthly job threads, but you should do active networking as your primary networking method in this job market.

Even if I apply via a job board to positions that I am supremely qualified for, there is a good chance I'll be auto-rejected within a day. It has happened multiple times to me and I shrug it off at this point.

I know networking is hard, especially when you are just starting out, but I just wanted to write a post saying that it does work if you stick to it.

(That said, I would also prepare to be unemployed for an extended period. Even if you are actively interviewing, it can take months to get a job offer. For my current position, it took 5 months to get an offer and I started 4 months later due to a housing storage where the job was located.)

I agree with the emphasis on networking. At the risk of sounding like I am doing an advertisement, last month I gave away 5 free tickets to graduates of Fullstack Academy to come to my event, and one of those people found a part-time connection to a startup via the event. I'll do the same again, if you're in New York City, I offer 5 free tickets. Reach me at lawrence@krubner.com. Mention this Hacker News post. We will have entrepreneurs at this month's event who are hiring. Come join us. Details:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/april-28-the-inf...

Agree with everything here, with one minor addition: talk not just to professors who might have industry ties, but everyone in your orbit with whom you have reason to think might help -- even those professors (or research scientists or postdocs or grad students or what have you) who entered MIT as a freshman and never left will have had many contacts (e.g., former students or classmates) who are in industry, and in many cases people do keep in touch.

Indeed, this is a big benefit of being from MIT. Most professors at most schools don't have good connections in my experience, but that is not the case for MIT.

Asking for referrals/connections will be more effective though if you have an interest and focus and can articulate that to the prof. Imagine they are the first link in the hiring chain and treat them accordingly. You need to sell yourself to them before they'll sell you to their network.

This. My comment was definitely not meant to limit, just giving examples. Introduce yourself to a brick wall if you think it will give you a boost

Absolutely agree! I only added the comment lest yours be read too literally.

Agreed with this — don't give up, start asking around. It's fairly well studied at this point so if you'd rather believe a sociologist, read Granovetter https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/07/strength-weak-ties

I second this. I haven't had to do the typical recruiter channel since 1998. I have plenty of people I've worked with in previous jobs whose companies were looking for good people. This only works if you work hard enough to make a good impression.

I would suggest for your first job, take whatever you can get, as long as it is in your field, and deal with it for the first two years to get your foot in the industry. My first job was notoriously horrible, but after two years, I got a really good job with a company you've heard of through a recommendation.

Also, I would suggest looking outside the typical mega tech companies. There are plenty of other industries that need good people.

Networking is the most OP "soft skill" one can learn in the long run, takes time to properly have enough people who trust you (and that you trust as well), but its definitely worth it specially in bad times (like the ones we're having right now).

You can also "start small" and network via FOSS communities, I met one of my best friends while contributing to niche projects and we ended up working together because of it.

This is just old school fatherly advice, which doesn't represent today's reality at anywhere, let alone at MIT.

Most profs these days, went to grad school right out of college and never stepped foot in the industry. If they've had any contact within industry it's through some R&D grant with other PhDs. A few are in start-ups which means they only hire interns for $20/hr, and fresh off the boat indians and asians grad students.

Small or local companies don't want and can't pay salary of MIT grads; they've plenty of salt-of-the-earth local engineering school grads to chose from.

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