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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

It’s kind of interesting. When my sister graduated from college in 2003, the speaker mentioned it was the worst time ever to try and find a job. A couple years later in 2005, I heard the same thing when I graduated. I heard it at various other times over the years. And now today it is still the worst time ever to find a job.

After hearing the same line, fairly consistently, for nearly 25 years, I’m having a hard time taking it seriously.

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We have this data[0]. It’s not that bad out there right now compared to 2008-2013 but it is way worse than a few years ago. Everything is relative when it come to how people feel.

0: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

My feeling is there are often factors which are not captured in job market statistics, which is why it's important to listen to the experience of grads seeking jobs. When I graduated in 2018, it took me a whole year to land a job (graduated with first class honours in electronics engineering in Australia, with 7 months overseas experience working for a chip design company in germany and a research scholarship at university). I came across job interviewers who had very irrational approaches to hiring, which I suspect was partly because they had too many applicants and were overworked processing them. One medical hardware company turned me down because they said I was overqualified and would get bored and quit. Overqualified as a grad. What a joke. I just needed a job before the next round of grads came out and left me forever shut out of my future field. It was a massive shock to my system as I had done nothing but work hard for years to get top marks and industry experience, and it still wasn't satisfactory (also building projects to showcase in interviews). I feel for new grads.

> My feeling is there are often factors which are not captured in job market statistics

they absolutely manipulate the numbers and choose a formula that doesn't accurately represent most people's feelings about the market. I always trust a lot of anecdata over the "official" numbers - word of mouth almost always indicates a problem before the official numbers do.

Thanks for your input. I have a similar feeling about general economic matters. I like Gary Stevenson's perspective on this. When the numbers say the economy is doing well, but you talk to "ordinary people" and they say they feel their living standard is declining, which source do you believe? All inputs should be considered to try to get an accurate picture.

>they absolutely manipulate the numbers and choose a formula that doesn't accurately represent most people's feelings about the market.

Examples of this?

Well an obvious recent attempt happened in America with their latest jobs numbers. The President tried to bully the record keeper to change the numbers. When that didn't work the President moved to fire the record keeper (the last I checked the record keeper still has their job).

As bad as the politicization of the BLS is, that's nowhere close to the original accusation that the formulas have been tampered with. Moreover the previous comment implied this was some sort of long standing practice, whereas the BLS firings only happened recently.

well, for one, there's 6 different formulas for unemployment/jobs numbers...

and they don't count ppl who stopped looking for work for whatever reason nor do they count underemployed ppl who are working, but still don't earn enough to live.

>My feeling is there are often factors which are not captured in job market statistics, which is why it's important to listen to the experience of grads seeking jobs.

In aggregate yes, but in an individual sense I'd be very careful. There are a lot of people out there that are just bad at presenting themselves in a way to get hired. While the people that are good at it are likely getting hired pretty quickly and aren't thinking much about it. This can make it hard to get a good sense of how difficult it is to get hired. Additionally, the current general mood about the economy frequently gets ascribed to someone's current experiences.

Not saying today isn't super difficult though. I think the video has quite a few good points, especially around the risk of not hiring junior employees. Its thankless to do that though, as a business you spend a lot of time and money training up someone to be good at their job, and most of them will leave to another job after a few years, and you are hoping someone else has done the same for you to hire someone at a mid level to replace them to keep the team in balance.

> why it's important to listen to the experience of grads seeking jobs.

Anecdotes from people who didn't experience any other hiring market?

For what it's worth, one of my uni lecturers in my final uni year told me that over half the cohort for that year would never work in engineering because there weren't enough jobs. He said the uni didn't want him imparting that information but he thought it was unethical. I'm sure he had a historical perspective that informed that advice. I've worked with older guys who got engineering jobs without degrees and taught themselves FPGA design on the job in the 80s and 90s. There's no chance of that happening now.

I finished the first year of Uni in June 2000, and my parents had informed me they would not support me the second year. So it was critical to find a job at that time. Found one. Didn't pay well, but covering a room + uni entry fees was pretty easy. More money than I'd ever seen except ...

Then, due to working full-time, it took me 7 years to finish my Uni degree and I managed to screw up my entry form in the final year. Meaning I got my master's degree in Aug 2008.

Both ended well. Hell in 2000 I wasn't even aware what was happening, though after a few months I figured out some of my colleagues were making 4x what I was making. But it was enough and I still climbed up.

I'm working on a doctorate now. Though one fact seems inevitable: if I ever finish it, the AIpocalypse will happen right exactly that month.

What's your field? That's a long time climbing the academic ladder. Is this Computer Vision or some other Machine Learning field?

Compared to the 90s, I'm sure those years did feel pretty awful, but 2008-2010 were far worse. The global financial crisis caused college graduates to return to school for additional 1-2 year degrees in order to simply defer student loan payments, and avoid the job market. Once they graduated from their masters programs, or additional majors, they were still applying for the same entry level positions.

That's exactly what's happening now too

I see this meme a lot but the problem with it is that in the fable, the wolf really does come at the end.

Well, if things are gradually getting worse year over year it would always be true.

you shouldn't - it was "the worst time to get a job" when I graduated in the late 90s too

there are a lot of factors involved, and AI is likely facilitating some of the bad behavior, but the problem seems to always come back to greed and corporate profit /2c

for me in 2012 as well.. 2008 having alledgedly wiped a lot of jobs... recession fears and all that...

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