Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
wsj.com
wsj.com
The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.
Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.
After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.
Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.
Good times. Sigh.
Dey don't make em like dat no more.
Grrr.
:)
That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.
I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.
Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
Nobody takes such people seriously unless that startup later has a successful exit.
And by successful I mean a big exit. Like IPO or high 9 figure or bigger acquisition.
Imagine working somewhere and then walking away with peanuts and calling yourself a “director”. Of what? You got played lmfao.
Didn't all the characters in American Psycho had the title VP on their business cards?
All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.
For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.
Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.
Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.
So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.
[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.
The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.
> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.
If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.
By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.
Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.
People are as ignorant and stupid as their experience in life permits.
This is why highly imperfect messages about privilege resonate despite being imperfect (which they must be to resonate, perversely).
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
This is increasingly the norm - for example, entire product lines in GCP are owned by their Warsaw and Bangalore office (especially K8s side).
Otherwise the BBB just shot all that in the head.
Pre-BBB, the tax rules favored that kind of outsourcing.
But it is those sized organizations that tend to represent the majority of hiring.
A company with 100 or fewer employees tends to be much more hard pressed with hiring, as revenue for these sized orgs also tends to be lower.
The Section 174 changes didn't have much of an impact one way or the other for larger companies and organizations.
The expectation for output has largely been set now, and even with the current changes I don't see much of an impact on hiring trends.
This also doesn't include the impact that AI productivity tools like Cursor is starting to have on AoPs. It's already the halfway point and I myself am starting to see increased proposals from Engineering leadership to leverage Cursor style tooling wherever possible. And a number of the seed and Series A companies I've funded over the past 2-3 years have largely kept headcount below 100 and heavily utilizing automation where possible, and are on track to hit Series B style FCF metrics with a much leaner workflow.
That said, larger orgs can weather it better - but it’s a fundamental change.
Interesting phrasing, but how do you actually make it work? What does it look like on paper? Taxing ""imports"" of services is really, really tricky.
As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.
I haven’t paid much attention.
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it.
The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute.
I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.
Hope I’m right?
For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
> about the highest level in a decade—excluding the pandemic unemployment spike
Why "about"? What was this number 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? During the dotcom bubble? The housing crisis? An actual recent crisis (the pandemic) is conveniently excluded from the comparison for some reason.
Weird for the WSJ to declare an "unemployment crisis" based on a handful of anecdotes and no actual data.
My qualitative view on the job market right now is this line holds true
> But it is a bad time to be a job seeker—especially if you are young.
There's other questions about full-time or part-time, or multiple jobs.
(Multiple jobs are interesting because you'd think they'd belong to overworked underpaid poor people. But they're not really associated with that, and they go down in recessions since that's when you have no jobs.)
This kind of attitude - I don't like your statistics so I'm going to reject them and replace them with imagination - makes technocratic government very difficult.
Additionally it's funny to see the term "housing crisis" be applied to the past rather than the present. If that means 2008, we tend to call it the 2008 financial collapse, but our response to it created the current conditions of what Canadians would now call the "housing crisis"
Because they're stuck with this fairly illiquid asset and therefore have a very big incentive to exert their inconsequential shred of control over the institutions that more or less unilaterally control their experience owning that asset.
Unlike the 60s and 70s the number of people coming of age now and in the years to come is smaller than older people (unless we get liberal with immigration). How will that impact the future direction of society?
It isn't a crisis for them now. It was a crisis for them in 1980, someone buying a home in 1980 would have had an interest rate of around 14% on their mortgage.
I met an old timer a few days ago with a beautiful garden, who bought their house in Vancouver, BC for $24,000 in 1972. Checking the tax assessment data now, the land underneath the house is worth $1.6m, while the building is assessed at $40k. Based on recent sales nearby, his property is realistically worth (on the market, maybe with some renos) 100x what he originally borrowed to buy it in absolute dollar amounts, about 20x accounting for inflation, or about 2x a conservative compounding investment. The guy was pleasant to chat with, and sympathized, because he knew his son-in-law who's probably my age won't be able to set up even close to the same sort of shelter without some very high incomes coming in, and he can see the future not looking so great for people in his life.
But that's a modest, old, not that nice detached home. If I were to shoot for a small ~800sq ft 2 bdr condo built in the last 20 years, it would be require $120k down, $20k just in transfer taxes, and $7k a month to service the debt.
Yes, 1980 sucked, money lost a huge amount of value relatively speaking, but what are we talking about here.
First kid gradudated end of 2023, and I played an active role in helping him finding jobs to apply for. Applied to easily 200+ roles. Many of them seemed like spam or junk listings that fullfilled some regulatory obligation. It wasn't that the kid got back a no thanks, just silence. He eventually did find a job, but it was almost a bit of dumb luck that something came together. CS degree for those curious.
Second kid graduated May 2025. Same boat. We apply to everything that is a match or is even a bit of a reach, because why not. The reply rate is terrible. It's not a no. Just silence. He did score a virtual interview. But so far, no answer there either. Nuclear Engineering degree with this one. So more specialized, but fewer graduates... so... maybe easier than CS these days? I dunno. Makes me nervous for those who are further away from these STEM fields.
Kid #3 is still working their way through the system. We shall see how this plays out.
I got my first real job in a very down employment market--much worse than today. Got skills, learned how business worked. Found a pigeonhole where I could profitably work for myself based on the new skills. Built a reputation. Was hired by folks who needed my expertise, etc. The key for me was to get an accurate read on the employment market and let it guide my decisions.
My path night not be directly reproducible, but the orientation in OP's post nails the kind of thinking that's needed.
Some people run errands. Some people make stuff. Some people are valuable friends. Some people are wise advisors. Some people help you get healthy. Whatever!
I know this is painfully obvious in hindsight, but maybe something about 18 straight years of “your choices are military, college, or trades” prevented me from thinking outside the box. I probably would’ve gotten started on a career I was excited about a loooot earlier in life.
That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?
something has come along - the new fangled AI stuff.
People back then also didnt think the internet would amount to much when it first came out, and people also thought mobile phones were for business users not casual consumers.
Once you’ve automated manual labor and mental labor, what’s left?
To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
Better to be optimistic and make moves to position yourself for the “new thing that comes along” then to give in to despair. Then if it does come along they are ready to jump on that train.
In this case their is nothing lost with cautious optimism.
This feels a bit unwarranted. There doesn't need to be some major new paradigm shift for things to get bad from an employment perspective. All that needs to happen is for this creative destruction rate to slightly exceed the new job creation rate, and there's your tipping point. I certainly feel that your average grad today doesn't have the same opportunities I did in the late 90s.
Measurement then becomes graded upon standard features as differentiation becomes harder: GPA, test scores, essay rubrics, etc. Combined with increased communication, online portals become spammed within minutes.
All this leads to quite a difficult time for the young. Inequality likely ends up being a function of the country size. It explains the USA, PRC, India, but not sure about places like Pakistan, Brazil, or Indonesia.
Still draft, but wrote a bit here about the roles in society: https://bedouin-attitude-green-fire-6608.fly.dev/writing/a-d...
But the truth is, and has always been, that smart people (and you need a base level of cognition to successfully graduate with an engineering degree) are always needed. What they are spending their "cleverness beans" doing (as an early mentor of mine once called the propensity for humans to innovate) is always in demand. And no matter what you have heard, there has yet to be invented any replacement for either human intuition or creativity.
Not exactly. I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise. Moreover, even if what you say is true, it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
> I feel like the rise of big tech showed us that it's corporate cogwheels that are most successful career-wise.
I would be interested to hear how you reason to that. What is your definition of "success" and what is your definition of "cog wheel"?
Here is why I ask, I know hundreds of engineers who consider themselves "successful" because they have accumulated enough wealth to not ever have to work again if they choose not to. Recent data[1] shows there are over 342 thousand millionaires in the Bay Area alone. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that they were all 'corporate cogwheels' (which sounds a bit pejorative but again, I don't know how you define it).
> it's becoming ridiculously difficult to tell who is smart and who isn't.
Again, I really would be interested to hear more about this. I find it trivially easy to tell who is "smart" and who isn't. But I will grant you that it is a skill that is enhanced by a lot of exposure to people who aren't smart but would like you to believe they are. They are a LOT of those types around. There is also a nuance between "smart" and "lazy" in that I know some really smart people who are also incredibly lazy, avoiding actually learning things if they can get by with faking it or cheating.
Your comment also made me realize that I have a working definition of 'smart' that is different than 'book learning' smart, it is more a mixture of a willingness to learn, the humility to learn from anyone, and the fortitude to put effort into seeking out new information. That is different than what some people call 'smart' and I might call 'quick' in that they can make up a plausible answer quickly so it sounds like they are speaking from understanding not just bullshitting you. My wife used to call that 'Male Answer Syndrome' :-). The idea that one must never say "I don't know" or "I have no idea."
[1] https://www.alonereaders.com/article/details/3057/top-10-cit...
2. Sure, you in particular can sense who is smart and who isn't according to some arbitrary definition that you have. The problem is, this doesn't scale. There's no process that allows ten recruiters to recruit fifty smart programmers efficiently. For a while we had Leetcode, until it turned into a memorization contest, and in my opinion, memorization is a different skill from intelligence. We rejected Leetcode without pointing to any alternative. And now in the age of LLMs and international jobs, cheating is rampant. If you apply to 500 jobs using automated scripts, there's decent chance that at least one company won't notice that "PhD in Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" is a problem rather than an asset. They have 50 000 applicants anyway, so they just use LLM to go though the resumes. And then you use LLM to answer whatever questions they have.
"... a single developer simply gets a ticket, implements the functionality, and moves onto the next ticket."
In your first bullet there, you describe what I think of as CRUD jobs, and I agree with you that not only are they more 'assembly line' than art, a lot of them will be eliminated by the ability of LLMs to synthesize common solutions. Typically if the company's business is extractive[1] rather than value producing then much of the company's work will be to revitalize its novelty rather than actually achieve anything. Value producing companies however typically both value innovation and creativity more and they generally create durable net wealth growth over time (they are valued more for their core competencies than their monthly recurring revenue or daily active users). Having some of your compensation in equity in the latter is valuable, equity in extractive companies evaporates when the company's herd of data cows moves on to other pastures.
But your examples speak more to poor management and training than to the job quality. Yes, there are managers who are so unsure of themselves that they cannot tolerate having their decisions questioned, and yes there are developers for whom their managers haven't helped them develop the ability to lead and lift up others to their level of understanding. And that makes for a shitty work environment.
When a developer questions their manager with regard to the assignment it is on the manager's shoulders to help them understand the constraints and to listen to the questions. If they can't share some of the non-public parameters that are affecting the available choices, they can say ask for the developer's patience until those things come out which will answer the questions. And of course good questions can open up even better solutions so should be entertained and explored. Too many managers however are already suffering from imposter syndrome and that makes them really resistant to questions. If you're manager is bristles at your questions, that's something to work on in itself. Learning to 'manage up' as they say is just as important as learning the best way to update a database with the current transaction.
"Figuring out a solution when left alone" is a leadership test. If no one else understands your suggestion, you can work back from first principles and see where you diverge, when they ask questions you have to listen and teach rather than listen and correct. No one will listen to someone, no matter how smart, if they aren't willing to listen themselves. Further, even the most ignorant and 'stupid' person has something to teach. There is tremendous value in 'helping' someone develop their 'stupid' idea. Both parties get a better appreciation for how the other one thinks about things.
I agree 100% that hiring is broken. It was funny because when I was at Google and part of the hiring process they did lots of data analysis and discovered that no matter how they selected, 10% of the people they hired did well, 50% were average, and 40% ended up getting laid off within a year or so. They pushed and pushed to have people submit the resumes of people they knew because Google knew that this was a much better selector than recruiters or head hunters. I've been at companies where another factor would hold, managers would get '1' requisition to fill, so they wanted a superstar, but it is impossible to know if someone is a superstar because there is so much entanglement between what the person likes, the environment they work in, and the management style that works best for them. I knew people who were superstars where I was working, got recruited out to a different company and failed miserably. Similarly people who came in as 'just get someone' and rose to the occasion to become really great.
Hacker rank, leetcode, others, all were great at figuring out that someone could write code creatively and actually understood it, but said nothing about whether or not that person could be civil with others who were there to help. You need both for success.
Thanks for adding the additional information. I agree that it sucks that there are a lot of 'job slots' that fit your descriptions well and and it doesn't help that the managers are under trained as well. I'd also agree that those jobs are set up, intentionally or not, to make long term success in them unlikely. And given how little capital it takes to start up an extractive business there are more of those jobs in the pool than the ones where the company is making products of intrinsic value. My unpopular opinion is that licensed software products fill that gap, but that is a different discussion.
[1] The 'web 2' business where a company creates an website that attracts humans for the purpose of extracting data about those humans for re-sale to third parties. The websites come in many flavors 'games', 'news', 'fashion', 'recipes', but have in common that they need to maintain novelty to prevent boredom and their users 'leaving', so they essentially rewrite themselves over and over and over again, and work on ways of trying to extract more kinds of data from their users. Every one of those I've seen up close has been run by someone who sees exploiting people for personal benefit as a 'business model' so workers there are just as exploited as the users their code is exploiting, just along a different vector.
Being successful at business doesn’t require being a “cogwheel”.
I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...
I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.
Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.
Might have something to do with the appalling employee retention numbers in today’s tech scene.
Why bother spending six months, and five figures, training someone, only to have them hop to another company in 18 months?
For some reason, companies would rather pay insane salaries, than treat employees well enough to encourage them to stay.
(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)
Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.
Ended up as the director of public policy for a small nonprofit only because the new policy staffer was going to be paid more than I was. For the board to give me the substantial pay increase I deserved based on experience, I had to be a director. Yet I only managed myself; I'm a crap supervisor so that was fine with me. What was funny was that people outside the organization were perplexed about why the policy work across the organization was so varied. I operated as a lobbyist because that was what was required and that is what I'm good at. But the new staffer was a policy analyst and advocate. The executive director and board seemed to be fine with that arrangement, but again, the difference was noted outside the org. Not sure that was good for the organization and the mission.
And yet, he can't even get an interview. He worked at Dropbox for a year as a contractor right out of school, until they did a huge layoff and hasn't been able to find anything in 6 months. Real interviews are super rare - most of it just recruiters fishing for stuff.
So that is the reality that he and his peers are facing.
Recommendations from trusted employees are valuable not out of nepotism or some other sinister force, they're valuable because it acts a pre-filter for the kinds of fuckups that no one would be willing to recommend.
There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.
For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.
As a CS student I have many thoughts around the reasoning for this (AI reducing need for junior engineers, oversaturated market from COVID bubble, opaque job requirements/too low of bar). As much as I'd like to believe it's just a skill difference on my side, it's hard to deny my peers' and friends' struggle around me. I don't want my livelyhood to come down to a numbers/chance game. But sadly, that's what it is looking like right now.
My only advice is to keep costs low, don't give up, and find work where you can. It seems to cycle around so hopefully you'll end up ok but the days where degree=job were dying when I graduated 20 years ago so I assume there is left of that by now.
To be fair, the previous iteration of "degree=job" that was dying 20 years ago was the older definition - broad enough to include "degree in literally anything", which was closer to how it operated say 50 years ago.
GP looks to have gone with the newer advice of "get a more useful degree = job". That wasn't really dying 20 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.
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Definitely agree about keeping costs low. Even if you do get a good job, if you keep costs low for long enough, it compounds like crazy.
My career path is so bizarre I don't really ever talk about it in great detail because it is so unique I think it identifies me and me exactly. Lots of others I know with similar stories. I would not want to go through it again.
We never really recovered from the 08 crash imo. That was a changing point I think that doesn't get enough attention.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Literally nobody noticed because everyone had covid trauma the second time, so we had a "vibecession" where everyone felt like there was a recession because they wanted there to be one.
2008/9 was a change in the expectations of college degrees. Going into 2008, we all got the advice to get degrees and jobs will just show up. After the crash we never got back to that point. Common knowledge ever since 08 has been college doesn't ensure a job at the end and your stuck doing unpaid internships and dealing with a competitive job market
A CS degree was the major people "should have been thinking about" until recently.
If it’s not an ivy league American or something very noted in its niche I don’t think it’s been worth it for a while.
It’s not the degree, it’s the relationships you build along the way and how much it makes you think is possibly within your reach.
I also don't understand this. For years now, social media has been flooded with objections that this is not the case. Where were these people who didn't hear this message?
But it goes further: the young people around me who are brand new to fairly fresh into the job market - who must have heard of the problem - are still coasting probably scared but as far as I can tell not doing anything about it. Where are efforts at building references? At buidling networks? Some education streams have been (for years also) very much about building networks: THEY understood (and in the case of MBAs, to the point that everybody complains about them.)
And still further, this applies to more senior people also! It feels like many people with years of experience also have little network to show for it. It's not for lack of opportunity. And go through interviewing on (self-destructive) auto-pilot when they might have enough experience with that for significant statistical results just from their own experience.
I'm way at the front when it comes to arguing that schools do not teach fundamental skills like career development, business (/real) world awareness, or even basic reasoning skills, intro law, etc. But there may also be a question of passivity, obliviousness, wishful thinking.
Blaming the victim? Yes but I also blame the schools. Perhaps there is plenty of blame to go around. And not much of it is about the latest AI nonsense.
(And historically this can go pretty far: In the US there is a background of fast food jobs as entry level youth jobs. Whyyyy? Plenty of the high school and college students around me are plenty qualified enough to fulfill the duties of much more responsible and higher paying jobs. But they don't look for them.)
1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.
2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.
We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.
If you want college degrees to not mean something, you'd need to stop paying people with college degrees more.
Note the high paying no-college jobs may also have filters like apprenticeships.
It's not all rose petals but overall seems like a valid option for someone who can't/doesn't want to pursue a higher education career.
The hardcore version of this is labor unions of course, but the small version is occupational licensing for all kinds of small-time occupations like hairdressing.
They shouldn't worry so much, since Americans are also culturally afraid of any kind of job where you have to do X if they think they aren't an "X person", to the point they won't apply to do it for any amount of money. Applies to physical labor (farmworkers) as much as mental (anything where you have to do math).
1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project
2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.
3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing
4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you
5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting
6. Highly specialized and targeted education
And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.
This would be hugely beneficial to society but there is obviously a lot of rent seeking and cartel like behavior by some in the network or we would already have something this obvious.
There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.
Now I can't get a job, so I'm going to university.
Anyways, you don't get to tell me how valuable I am to society, that's disgusting behavior.
In my classes there is hardly anyone that has been able to get their hands on an internship, and even the professors have started their classes with monologues about "I don't even know why you show up, none of you will have jobs after graduation, good luck out there." (quote from my DS professor) A lot of my peers are looking to move out of the US and look for jobs elsewhere, or perhaps jump straight into graduate school to ride it out.
On the Computer Engineering side, the faculty seems a lot happier, and the students also seem to be better off. But I don't think this will last however, I have noticed a steady decline in the businesses that have been searching for Computer Engineering in our career fairs. When I enrolled there were about two dozen "Computer Engineering Wanted" posters at the fair, and the last one in Feb 2025 I only counted one.
I'm honestly thinking that if this continues I'll be looking at the military, right now I'm trying to work on side projects in the meantime.
In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, one of my commencement speakers (and the recipient of an honorary doctorate) was Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express. I don't remember his exact words, but his message to the graduating class was, we have a different perspective on the world and different values— thriftier ones, necessarily— and if we stay true to them, the world will reflect them when we succeed.
"Maybe instead of having a car, like your parents' generation, your first big purchase may be a bike. Times change." Something like that.
Four days later, he laid off four thousand workers from AmEx, just a smidge more people than the graduating class.
Edit: according to Wikipedia, that year he took home $16.6 million.
I've conducted two phone screens this month and asked each candidate to implement FizzBuzz in their language of choice after giving them an explanation of the problem. Both took more than ten minutes to write out a solution and we don't even require them to run it; I'll excuse trivial syntax errors in an interview setting if I can tell what you meant.
When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
I honestly think that doing an in person fake technical interview with a few easy Leetcode questions at the end of your education would be a good way to weed out those that have failed to even learn the basics of the trade.
One way I try to disincentivize cheating on projects is by having in-class paper exams, including weekly quizzes, as well as in-class paper assignments, and making sure that these in-class assessments are weighted significantly (roughly 60% of the overall grade). No electronic devices are allowed for these assignments. This forces my students to be able to write code without being able look up things online or consult an AI tool.
I still assign take-home programming projects that take 1-2 weeks to complete; students submit compilable source code. Practical hands-on programming experience is still vital, and even though cheating is possible, the vast majority of my students want to learn and are honest.
Still, for in-person assessments, if I had the budget, I’d prefer to hand out laptops with no Internet connection and a spartan selection of software, just a text editor and the relevant compiler/interpreter. It would making grading in-class submissions easier. But since we don’t have this budget, in-class exams and exercises are the next best solution I could think of.
As the world changes, education can be slowest to adapt. My father did his math on a slide rule. I was in high school as we transitioned to using calculators.
My personal take on your approach is that you're seeing this from the wrong side. Creating an artificial environment for testing suggests to me you're testing the wrong thing.
Of course most school, and college, classes devolve to testing memory. "Here's the stuff to learn, remember it enough to pass the exam." And I get it, this is the way it's always been, regardless of the uselessness of the information. Who can remember when Charles 1st was beheaded? Who can't Google it in an instant?
Programing on paper without online reference tools isn't a measure of anything, because in the real world those tools exist.
Indeed, the very notion that we should even be testing "ability to write code" is outdated. That the student can create code should be a given.
Rather an exam should test understanding, not facts. Here's 2 blocks of code, which is better and why? Here's some code, what are the things about it that concern you?
Instead of treating the use of AI (or Google, or online help, or that giant C reference book I had) as "cheating", perhaps teach and assess in a world where AI exists.
I truly do get it. Testing comprehension is hard. Testing understanding is hard. Testing to sift wheat from chaff is hard. But, and I'm being harsh here i know, testing memory as a proxy for intelligence or testing hand-code-output as a proxy for understanding code is borderline meaningless.
Perhaps in the age of AI the focus switches from 'writing code' to 'reading code'. From the ability to write to the ability to prompt, review, evaluate and so on.
Perhaps the skill that needs to be taught (to the degree that community college seeks to teach skills) needs to be programing with AI, not against it.
I say all this with respect for how hard your job is, and with my thanks that you do it at all. I also say it understanding that it's a huge burden on you that you didn't necessarily sign up for.
It's similar to a calculator. We give student graphing calculators, but ONLY after they have already graphed by-hand hundreds of times. Why? Because education does not work like other things.
Efficiency, in education, is bad. We don't want to solve problems as fast as possible, we want to form the best understanding of problems possible. When I, say, want to book an airplane ticket, I want to do that in the fastest way possible. The most efficient manner. I care not about how an airport works, or how flight numbers are decided, or how planes work.
But efficient education is bad education. We can skip 99% of education, if we wanted. We can have, say, the SAT - and spend 1 year studying only for the SAT. Don't bother with the other 12 years of schooling.
Will you get an acceptable score on the SAT this way? Maybe. Will you be intelligent? No, you will be functionally illiterate.
If we use AI for programming before we can program, then we will be bad programmers. Yes, we can pass a test. Yes, we can pass a quiz. But we don't know what we're doing, because education is cumulative. If we skip steps, we lose. If we cut corners, we lose. It's like trying to put a roof on a house when the foundation isn't even poured.
I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.
So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.
Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.
To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.
So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.
And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.
College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
You're gonna have to do a lot of work to convince me that people who only know how to drive an LLM are learning how to adapt to sweet fuck all
At least with a calculator, people still had to know the difference between addition and multiplication, in order to use the calculator correctly
What if changing from a "write code" based idea of programming changes to a "remove technical debt from code" skill?
What if the next generation of programmers is not focused on the creation of new code, but rather the improvement of existing code?
What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality (something we dont especially prioritize at the moment?)
I'd argue that we're asking the current generation to be massively adaptable in terms of what was expected of us 10 (or 30) years ago, as to what will be required of them 5 years from now.
And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that LLMs will teach them to be adaptable. I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
I don't believe you can do this if you can't write code, but sure. Maybe
> What if the current crop of programmers has to literally adapt from a world that has valued code quantity to a world that values code quality
LLMs seem more likely to increase the value of quantity and decrease the value of quality. That's playing out in front of us right now, with people "vibecoding"
> I'm suggesting that a world that contains LLMs will require them to be adaptable.
And ones who can't adapt will be ground to mulch to fuel the LLM power plants no doubt
Driving an LLM properly requires knowing to evaluate if the results are correct. People can certainly try to pass generated code over for PR. But even just one code feedback or debugging should uncover if the person understood what they were doing.
A calculator will always give you correct result as long as you give it correct input. This is not the case with LLM. No matter how good your prompt is, there always a chance the output is completely garbage.
Don't lock down the computer unless you are hiring people to work in a SCIF. Instead, give candidates a brutally hard/weird problem and tell them to use any resources they can get their hands on, by fair means or foul. (They will do that anyway if you hire them.) Then watch how they deal with it.
Do they just give up and stalk off in a huff?
If they Google for answers, do they use sensible queries?
If they use AI, do their prompts show skill at getting ideas, avoiding blind alleys, and creating effective tests?
If they call their friends, see how effective they are at communicating the requirements and turning the answers into a solution. Might be management material.
I feel like this doesn't get said enough, but I'm almost certain your issue is happening during filtering prior to even getting to the interview stage. Companies are straight up choosing (the wrong) applicants to interview, the applicant fails the interview, the company does not move forward with them, and then the companies does not go back and and consider the people they originally filtered out.
I know companies get swamped with tons of applications, and filtering is basically an impossible problem since anyone can make their resume look good, but every applicant that applied can't be that bad.
Bad applicant filtering at the first step is hurting both companies and applicants.
I graduated into a world without internet (we had it at university, hosted on Unix and Vax machines, but it wasn't available commercially. ) People who had computers were running DOS. Most businesses had no computers at all.
So the job market was both good and bad. We graduated with skills that were hard to find. But we graduated into a world where big companies had computers, small companies had paper.
So huge market opportunity, but also huge challenges. We'd either graduate into big business (banking, insurance, etc) or start something new.
I joined a person doing custom software development. We'd sell both the need, the software, and usually the hardware. ) When we didn't have work we'd work on our own stuff, eventually switching from custom development to products.
We had to bootstrap, there was no investment money in our neck of the woods.
I won't pretend the job market is the same (or even vaguely similar) now, but it seems to me that opportunities for self-employment still exist. Software is still something you can build with basically zero capital.
Ultimately a job is just someone else finding a way to add value to society. Software us one of the few ways you can do that yourself, skipping the employer.
95% of people see "a job" as the goal. I get that. My own kids are like that (zero interest in starting something new.) But there are opportunities for the other 5%. Yes, it's lot more than just coding, and yes it's a lot more risky, but the opportunities are there.
As for me, I'm closing in on retirement, but at the same time building a new (not tech) business from scratch, because there's still value I can add, and a niche I can service.
I say this all to encourage current students. You can see the world as "done" or you can see it as an infant just waiting for you to come and add your unique value. And in 35 year's time feel free to encourage the next generation with your story.
GenX'ers will remember the days of 'Slackers' 'Reality Bites' and the malaise of those who graduated with fancy degrees in the early 90's but stuck in barista jobs etc.
I always wonder about things like that stifling the start-up ecosystem and lower numbers of jobs
You might want to be a bit more trendy, or else boring and corporate, but what's really important is that you can pick anything up quickly the first time you see it. So technically, what you actually know right now doesn't matter.
anyone in corporate america in a hiring position knows the prevailing trend -- you either hire h1b (for maximum leverage) or overseas (for cost savings). we've been told to hire h1b ONLY.
No, it shouldn’t. Treason has a specific meaning.
Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Even things that are treasonous in a colloquial sense are still pretty narrow, and tend to refer to other specific forms of betraying your country, that just happen to be other crimes -- like espionage, or insurrection.
Adversary to the people, or the state? These are wildly different concepts. Just because my state has beef with China doesn't mean they can't convince me that my life is better with China in it. Sometimes states just misrepresent the people.
Our definition for what constitutes treason is purposely narrow specifically due to the abuse potential.
The focus and the main point remains: It's unethical, it's illegal, and I wish punishment on the companies and the individuals who fraudulently scam American workers out of jobs.
Personally, I think there's lots of treason that pervades our life. Hell you could argue the meaning of "national interest" used by our state department is itself treasonous.
Any definition of the word will come down to what you perceive as in our interests. For easy examples, see Snowden and Manning.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-3/section-3...
If you’re not being hyperbolic, this seems like fraud on the part of whoever is submitting visa applications for your company.
https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/in-brief-u...
Rather, the opposite is generally true, the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment.
So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?
More people working doesn't just mean more jobs filled. It means more people making money and spending it, so more people needed on the supply side.
The fact that it sounds circular doesn't make it bad logic in this case. It's actually a magnitude increasing spiral. All funded by the Sun.
It is also, obviously, a limited resource that doesn't compound directly. Although its usefulness could compound in terms of density and vertical use increasing housing.
The problem that slows that:
In almost all areas, "property taxes" actually tax both the land (the exclusionary resource that should be taxed since its use reduces land available for others) and the property on it (a wealth tax).
The result of it being a combination tax, is that increasing the value of property on land increases its tax as well. So there is a strong disincentive undercurrent reducing investments in increasing housing on property. It isn't as profitable as it should be.
Even worse, land which is underused, is only taxed as land. Basically getting a tax break relative to the same land nearby which has been developed for maximum use. Meanwhile, the land value goes up parasitically, if while holding but not improving land, neighbors invest in their properties.
The result makes owning land a very good passive parasitical value-growing investment.
Which makes it useful for rich people to store vast sums of money in. Driving prices way above the market value that simple housing should have.
Until the tax issue is fixed, housing can't be fixed. Other changes may be needed to, but just that would make a big difference to everyone's incentives.
(It does happen - but rarely. In 2002, Altoona, Pennsylvania adopted a pure land-value tax, meaning they taxed only the value of the land, not the structures. By 2011, this system fully replaced their traditional property tax, renormalizing so the total tax remained stable. I.e. land was taxed more, improvements none. The effect: owners of productive, developed parcels (homes, businesses) paid less tax, while holders of undeveloped or underused land, such as mansions rarely visited with lots of open acreage, paid more—effectively removing the financial instrument advantage, and turning them into money pits. Land prices declined, development increased, and affordability improved for locals. -- Unfortunately, in 2016 the property tax was reinstated as before.)
But once you do have growth and innovation going one way or another, then that leads to more jobs.
Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.
When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.
That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.
[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.
[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.
That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.
But wave stickiness is sorta just part of human nature.
Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.
I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.
While having no degree hasn't historically been much of a blocker, during a weaker job market credentials can and do play a role in tie breaking during hiring.
Honestly, even a WGU style bachelors degree can be enough depending on years of experience.
That said, be strategic when re-enrolling - if you have a job today, hold on to it tightly and try to finish your program remotely and/or via transfer credits. Finishing a degree at the expense of having a job today is really dumb given the current market.
If you can take low cost and/or remote offerings from a CC or normal college, you can continue to hold a job. Also, most colleges now offer their courses online for credit - even Stanford and Harvard type programs. I'm sure your original program offers a significant portion of it's coursework online for credit.
Finally, Ds get degrees. You can skirt with the bare minimum and you'll be fine. If you are mid-career and kept your day job, no one will ask about your GPA.
My uni's online offerings drop off like a stone after a students sophomore year. Very little online classes for seniors, which has been a big problem for me as I work full time and live over an hour from campus. If I get a schedule change mid-term, I just have to drop out. It drive me nuts as this policy disproportionately impacts the lower income / higher expense students who can't afford to live in the city and need to work full time (i.e, we get 3/4 of the way through our degree via online classes and debt, then it becomes inaccessible as in-person requirements are required for completion). It's especially ironic as a CS major!
But anyway, I'll probably wrap it up this academic year if things remain stable for me, it's just a questionable time to complete a degree now more than ever. I just want to work on a team doing interesting, challenging work. If I could I'd go to grad school.
Don’t worry about timing at all.
/s
I've read that since then 70s the ratio of blue vs white collar in US has shifted by few % digits, but the number of graduates has boomed in the meantime.
This means that now jobs that never required a degree require one and titles are inflated to make people feel better.
We saw this in 2008 post-GFC where entry-level white collar jobs just completely disappeared. It was really the start of millenials graduating with a ton of debt, possibly postgrad degrees, and working at Starbucks. Not because their degrees are useless. Their entry-level jobs just disappeared.
This has never recovered.
So you don't have to search long to find now 40 year olds who are permanent renters, have barely enough in their bank account to pay this month's bills, definitely don't own their own house, still have a ton of student debt they're unlikely to ever be able to repay and realizing they have no hope and they have no choice but to work 3 jobs until they die.
Yet those who believe in the myth of meritocracy just write this off as a personal moral failure or getting "philosophy degrees". At the older end, boomers simply have no idea because they bought their $2 million house for $11,000 in 1976.
Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose.
Gen-Z is now going through this exact same thing. Many don't yet understand they're looking at their future when they see a 40 year old barista or DoorDash driver.
All while the ultra-wealthy continue to get even wealthier at an extraordinary rate. We will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes.
This cannot and should not continue.
I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.
It is not unreasonable to say that some degrees are not as valuable as others and will be more likely to struggle financially. Its a game of statistics. You are more likely to struggle financially with a degree in philosophy than a degree in engineering. Because even companies themselves when hiring for completely unrelated positions to a persons degree will take into account the fact that the engineering graduate probably worked a lot harder than the philosophy graduate.
But I do agree that the average non-degree or "less valuable" degree holder from the past had a much larger chance of making it out okay than nowadays.
the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.
I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?
I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.
Thankfully that went so well!
Sure, a few more poor people voted for trump and a few more rich people voted for Harris, but it basically rounded to 50-50. Rich people want to tear down the system too.
In fact, I think I'd want to see a breakdown by belief system. My gut is that generally speaking working class people believe in meritocracy more than rich people, and that is in fact why they voted for Trump. To not be lumped in with the 'DEI hires'(their perspective, not mine).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12930#...
The above research suggests that poor people living with high inequality are more likely to believe in meritocracy.
Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).
And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.
The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.
Don't forget that it also had the highest level of tax dodging available through various mechanisms.
If you think the lengths people go to now are extreme to avoid taxes-- think about what they did were willing to do then.
UK had a scheme where people would take out ""loans"" from their employer that would then be "forgiven". I believe this one blew up Rangers football club.
Fun UK example from the 70s: the tax on car parts was much lower than the luxury tax on cars, so people invented the "kit car" which you assembled yourself: the Caterham 7. Still niche popularity today.
Minus the Covid blip, not lately!
Sure.
Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.
You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).
Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).
It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].
[1]: https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...
Real median household income is up over 36% since 1984 (the furthest back the linked chart goes: 1984 was in the middle of an economic expansion, so you’d expect a comparison with four years earlier to look even better).
And CPI has just as many potential substitution issues the other way: Hedonic adjustments are made, but it’s effectively impossible to quantify the value of decades worth of novel and improved goods that simply didn’t exist decades earlier.
HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience.
I linked decades of numbers about the median household, which you then numerically misrepresented. Bubble, pop thyself.
(Personally, my preferred measurement of inflation is "how much prices go up", but economists don't agree with me)
Wages have been rising faster than inflation, that’s link #2.
Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.
Anyway, I'm not sure how democracy can really work in huge super-complex societies. This is why we have the "iron law of oligarchy".
Maybe the Epstein client list is the propaganda?
Why would Epstein keep a "client" list? What criminal goes out of their way to document their crimes? What service was he even offering? I don't think even the local drug dealer is stupid enough to keep a written list of clients.
If some shady forces killed Epstein in prison why didn't they just kill him before he got to prison? The shady forces can get to him in federal prison but don't know he is being investigated to go back to prison? Why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell die in a mysterious car accident?
Why do people care about a client list that makes no sense and not all this supposed video evidence?
Your post just shows you spend too much time on social media reading bullshit that you think is real and it is not.
Even when you fly private, you need to provide a manifest of who is on the plane. There were hundreds of flights. The FAA has that information. One can argue it's not evidence of malfeasance and by itself it's probably not but there's also a difference once sharing a flight and, for example, visiting the island 60 times.
There are also documented connections to all sorts of people including Prince Andrew, the Clintons, RFK Jr (which he voluntarily disclosed [1]), former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, etc.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was a known Mossad asset, so much so that he essentially got a state funeral in Israel [2]. He also mysteriously died (drowned) on a yacht.
Ghislaine herself was herself convicted of sex trafficking. To whom? Nobody in particular. She has remained steadfastly silent on the issue.
It's also documented fact he got the plea deal of the century in 2008 that even allowed him to travel from jail anywhere he liked as long as he was back within 24 hours, even when there was grand jury testimony of SA of a 14 year old. The US attorney who authorized the deal, Alexander Acosta, became Trump's Labor Secretary until he resigned after details came to light following Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Between the home in NYC, the home in Palm Beach and the island there were hidden cameras everywhere. There are multiple, credible accounts of tapes that went missing following the 2019 arrest.
Nobody has ever really accounted for where his money came from and what services he actually provided.
Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.
But there is absolutely information the government is sitting on and tons of evidence that he (or Ghislaine) are linked to 3 letter agencies in a blackmail operation (as a so-called "access agent").
This isn't even a partisan issue: the current administration has zero interest in releasing more information about this (and is trying to downplay it, even though Epstein is core foundational mythology for the MAGA cult) but we had 4 years of the Biden administration who didn't release it either.
[1]: https://front.moveon.org/rfk-jr-s-troubling-patterns-continu...
The failed security camera pointed down the hall Epstein's cell was in. No guard stations would have been visible from it. The security footage they did finally release was pointing directly at the guard station.
Also, that footage combined with the map shows if you entered the floor and went straight to Epstein's cell without going to the guard station, you wouldn't have been visible on the camera. So it doesn't even show what they wanted it to show by releasing it.
> everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)
> and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason
These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.
This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.
Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.
It has been like this since 2012
The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".
Oh, I don't mean because it is actually doing people's jobs, or even because it is making people more productive (though it certainly is doing that in some cases).
I mean because management has bought into a lot of strange and misleading ideas about where it is right now. They think that you get a 10x engineer by using AI IDEs and other tools. If it fails with their existing tech, that clearly means it wasn't trained on their current tech stack so they should switch!
There are a lot of sales opportunities, but the reality and the things that non-practitioners and practitioners are seeing are far apart.
In truth it’s always a crisis mode. Build your networks and demonstrate value and competence such that when people leave your company they’ll regret not having you on their team. This is the right way to stay employed once you land your first gig.