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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

What jumped out at me is that the author had three internships. Those are essentially "entry-level positions". If you do well at an internship, you typically get a job offer. If you don't do well, usually you can at least get some useful feedback.

I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fine in the job market right now, it's just a lot more productive to focus on "what skill do I need to work on, that would have let me convert those internships into full time jobs", rather than "man the job market is bad".

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That or the hiring pipeline broke, which is what we keep continually hearing from high ranking graduates of the past few years.

It’s certainly possible the author is a bad candidate, but it seems in bad faith to first argue that the author is bad because he doesn’t have an job instead of actually considering the argument.

I don't intend to say the author is "bad", I'm just trying to follow up on this reasoning:

I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.

The rules are, do well at your internship, and you'll probably get a job offer.

The author also seems to be saying that they are getting interviews, but no job offers. ("The interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections.") Another rule is, if you do well at interviews, you will get a job offer.

So, without putting any value judgment on anyone, this is what's happening. The author isn't doing well enough on internships and interviews.

So my advice is not "just apply to more places", but to do that and also practice programming in order to interview better.

I have to agree with you. Companies don’t waste time on interviews if they don’t really want to hire. And if they didn’t hire him, maybe is because was not a good fit, and probably hired someone else. So the job was probably filled — by someone more competent?

Companies do waste time on interviews when they don't really want to hire, for numerous reasons. 1) To test the labor wage pricing of the market, 2) for legal or tax or optics reasons (in order to get cheaper H1B labor you have to have been trying to hire domestically for the role), 3) to placate someone internal (cheaper to perpetually pretend to be hiring than to actually hire).

I'd bet there are others. It's easy to imagine that "companies don't waste time" but companies waste time and money all the time. The bigger the company, the more waste.

Yes, but from the hiring effort what you said maybe is 10-25%. Any reason for this to increase in the last years to justify so many rejections? TBH I know many people that changes jobs in last 24 months just fine.

I would be careful assuming that a lack of performance was responsible for the internships not converting.

At my company, I've recently seen a lot of cases where interns don't get return offers. Maybe they're all underperforming for pre-entry-level, but I seriously doubt that.

I will also point out that hiring is rarely skill based. I mean seriously. You can be great and not get hired, and you can be a liability and get hired anyway. This was true even before the post-COVID squeeze.

Yeah, our team of two gets two interns a semester. We cannot convert them to full time as there is no position open. Complete hiring freeze since 2022.

We paused hiring fresh grads, but still hire interns, and those who prove themselves get full-time offers. We've found internships to be a great pipeline to great hires over the years.

We've had several candidates with completed bachelor's degrees apply for internships, prove themselves, and get full-time jobs that way. This "back door" job hiring pathway might work elsewhere as well.

Same here. We pay interns pretty well and we invest a lot in them during their internship. It doesn't make sense for us (and I imagine others) to take in interns and then not hire the good ones. That's the entire reason we do internships to start with.

I believe they addressed this implicitly as a familiar explanation without actually needing to say it. Despite it being extremely rare to be able to pinpoint via external feedback mechanisms which areas conceivably provide tangible roi, it's just always relevant work on your weak spots.

The reality of the situation (which varies a bit depending on region and discipline) is that many people and economies are indeed cooked for a variety of reasons, and it's a much better explanation than some skill issue. People who think they're in the same economy just don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, or legitimately don't know many people in that age group.

It was a skill issue to some extent for me when interviews weren't working out because I couldn't do niche algo problems, or I didn't get a second or first call, but it was never the way it is these days. It was difficult in pre-covid times to get back into a job if I got laid off, sometimes took a year, but there was some information to go on. I'd get interviews periodically, maybe second interviews, maybe 5 interviews, before I'd be rejected. It was maybe 1 in 40 in terms of interview to application ratio; bad enough to end up living in the car, but even then I could pick up a manual labor or barista job. Now.. it's honestly not even worth applying in many cases. It got real dark before I landed my current one, to the point where I considered switching industries, but there was no viable path to do that and see prosperity on the other side. Even now that I'm in a relatively well-paying position, it's still precarious, and long-term prosperity is not even really a remote consideration; I have to assume that despite my best efforts to preserve my income, it can and likely will go away at any time, and therefore even the most basic mortgage (which would still be ~4x my annual gross income and give us less space than renting, doesn't seem feasible. I think it would be more beneficial to just completely forget about trying to aim for milestones that barely exist anymore.

Currently, my spouse has been out of work for nearly a year, not in CS, and she's depressed—rightfully so—because it's never been this bad in our adult lives. No responses _at all_ for any job, and she's way more capable on paper for the stuff she's applying to than I am for SE. One single interview in the last 6 months for something paid, and it didn't pan out. This is Canada mind you, but still.

The economy is now composed of people who have jobs and are stressed about them disappearing, people who don't need work and do own all the land, and people who might miss a majority of their 20s in terms of working life unless they pull some miracle out of their ass quickly.

My partner also has good qualifications and skills has been out of full time work for bordering on 2 years now. Similarly she has become depressed / nihilistic about the job market after hundreds and hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews (and this was after a job she had to resign from after only a couple of months due to the company being incredibly incompetent). She has multiple part time gigs now to stem the bleeding, but it's wild and crazy how bad the job market is in places, and how much the older generations seem to generally just not care.

Look it could be better, they could be missing the majority of their 30s.

Canada under its current leadership is probably a dead end. I'm not trying to be cruel but that's just the reality of your situation. Time to think about emigrating if you want a better future.

My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.

This is a candle in the dark, thanks for sharing. Hopefully this has residual effects outside tech, for my spouse's sake and that of many others, but it's good nonetheless.

Although deeply cynical, it's hard to wholly disagree, with the exception of specifying the current leadership. I think it's a problem composed of really bad system-level feedback loops at multiple levels of government and society that extend decades back and are only now becoming this evident recently. I do think that in terms of the tenure of the Liberals, they've had a rare amount of time to try and mitigate where we're at now, so I can't say I'm a proponent.

Additionally though, I'm quite happy to just forego the obvious material goals instead of emigrating, because despite the leadership, I'm a happy Canadian and love where I live, but hopefully I don't need to question that for a while. I'm not that interested in other countries atm.

Agree 100%

It's very hard to get a job right now, I don't doubt that. Also it's not very helpful in getting a job to look at macroeconomic trends: the relative change in the trends is much smaller than how you show up in the process.

The poster had consulting work, and 3 internships.. I sense a disconnect between what a potential employer needs (ie why they would pay you) and what they have to offer.

Its easier for the ego to go "man the job market it bad", ie if I don't get this job what does that say about 'my worth as a human' but its not very helpful in getting a job.

Yeah either he’s just really unlucky - it’s certainly possible to intern at a place that then implements a hiring freeze or something, or there is more too this.

This was my experience after I did an internship in 2024.

During that period a lot of companies had hiring freezes and even internal transfers were basically impossible. They may still have had limited intern programs but hiring those interns could be very challenging.

Yeah, my counterpart who interned for a similar team, and performed better than I did also didn't get hired. My manager was honest with me about what was going on.

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