I've been through the dotcom slaughter of 2000-2002 as a new grad (undergrad) and the comparatively small slowdown of 2008 (grad school new grad). Get ready to hit the Submit button... a lot. The stories of "getting three job offers after four interviews at five companies" are no longer reality. My application:interview:offer ratio has always varied from 50:5:1 to 100:10:1, and I would expect something like that or worse for the next ~12 months or however long it takes for tech CEOs to stop cargo culting each other's panic. Unlike some advice you're likely going to get in this thread, I'd highly recommend shotgunning your resume to as many viable tech companies as you can, and even looking at line-of-business programming at non-tech companies. Now is not really the time to be picky, especially if you're on your own and have rent/bills to pay or support your family.
I ended up close to insolvent during the 2008 recession, and I bit the bullet and took a terrible job just to get by. Be willing to swallow your pride and do the same if that's what it takes. That little voice in the back of your head that says "Well I just graduated from Stanford! Surely I can do better than this!" Ignore it for now.
I've been in the ML/data space for 20 years and went through the 2008 cycle early in my career. I'm not hiring at the moment but am always happy to review resumes and give career advice as part of networking so feel free to ping me.
Reaching out to managers at big cos won't get you much. They are getting a ton of twitter/etc candidates and have stricter hiring policies and rubrics to prevent nepotism and favoritism. If you can network and ask for referrals through your friends / professors that can work better. Or reaching out to early stage startup cofounders can work really well.
ML/AI is less frozen then some other areas so that is good. Most really competitive new PHDs will have either a couple of internships, strong academic contributions or previous engineering experience demonstrating strong coding ability.
You should also consider post docs or academic engineer postings. The grant cycle insulates these a bit from the economic cycle and they can be a good place to gather some experience while you ride out the cycle.
And definitely consider very early stage start ups. A startup that just raised and has 2 years of runway is probably one of the safest places to be at the moment as they are still focused on growth. A lot of great companies proved themselves as startups during the 2008 cycle and grew rapidly after. Networking can mean a lot more here as early stage founders often literally just hire their friends or people they get along with without a ton of process.
I would give different advice to someone getting a Bachelors vs someone getting a PhD.
For BS CS/EE (or any engineering field): do not overthink the "recession is coming" news. US employers always want young engineers, as they consider them energetic, willing to learn and work for less salary than late career staff. Look up and polish the in demand skills. Brush up on the basics (Python, databases, git) at least to the extent of being able to solve "one step up from fizzbuzz" problems. And apply. You might get less generous terms and no sign-up bonus, but you are almost certain to still land something that you can use as a springboard 2-3 years later.
For PhD in AI: I would apply to good companies only and consider deferring graduation for a year if your fishing turns up nothing. This requires both your mental readiness and your advisor's physical/financial one, but in general your advisor should be thrilled to have you work for him another year for a relative pittance of a graduate stipend. It should not come to this (the market is not dead), but I would personally take it easy and focus on the job search for another year in grad school over taking some soul-sucking job at a company no one has heard of.
My 2c. And good luck!
US DOL (look at JOLTS reports for more detail) statistics do not bear out the hypothesis that tech jobs are hard to get (demand is still very close to 2021, which was the record). There is a lot of evidence to support that layoffs are coming mostly from pure "Tech Companies", while the rest of the business world is continuing to hire. 94% of companies are saying they will add headcount in 2023...
... So my advice is to look at non-tech companies. Reality is that most companies really have become "tech companies", they don't make software or hardware, but have physical products and services -- and often are very technology dependent for operatiions.
If you're a new grad then presumably you're optimising for experience, not salary. I think it will be harder to find a good job for while, but it shouldn't be impossible to find any old job which will provide some relevant industry experience.
Late 2020 to earlier 2021 was nuts for tech jobs. Companies were hiring people who were massively unqualified just because they needed someone. During that time I was getting calls from recruiters weekly practically begging me to quit my job for some new opportunity they were recruiting for and unable to fill. Imo there are a lot of devs out there right now who only got hired because the market during 2020-2021. I worry a little for those guys because they were punching way above their weight to begin with and I think they'll probably struggle to find something as good should they get laid off.
The other people who might struggle are those looking for jobs specifically in the tech industry or tech startups. As someone looking for work right now I have noticed there are fewer jobs from tech companies out there, but there's still plenty of tech jobs in industries like travel, finance, and retail. Everyone needs tech workers these days so a tech industry slow down isn't necessarily the end of the world for someone with tech skills.
Maybe unpopular advice, but I do find that companies over-index on your current role. (FWIW I have hired lots of new and experienced PhDs in ML but am not hiring now.) So if you take a "placeholder" job, I suggest trying to find one that sounds at least as prestigious as your current position. So, changing your resume from "Fresh MIT PhD grad on the market" to "Researcher in boring lab of dying old industrial company" will be a bad move. If your passion is AI, it's a good idea to go for a placeholder job to be in AI/ML as well. Startups can be good unless they are obviously ridiculous or terrible ones - managers are used to seeing unknown startup companies and fresh grads, and you'll probably be forced to do lots of productive coding. But a bad research lab can be really bad - trailing edge research, bad code, not enough resources to do something meaningful, publishing in low-tier venues that nobody reads, ugh....
Don't see layoffs as an indicator of industry health. These are corrections, not melt downs. Go apply and do interviews, there are plenty of companies looking for talent.
As a 20 year vet and someone who entered the market during the first crash in 2001. Apply everywhere, give a little extra in interviews and be prepared to work in a language you didn't expect.
To get my first position involved applying everywhere no matter the skillset asked. When I finally landed an interview we had to create an application. I created an application an hour after the interview was complete emailed it over and that sold me. They didn't believe I did this myself so quickly I had to provide some of my db scripts. The other candidates were stronger on paper (finished a 4 year computer science degree) but none could finish or finish as completely as I did.
It turned a little rough. One of the other candidates came in for lunch a week after I was hired. The founder and this person became friends during the interview process. She literally brokedown and cried that day because she wanted the job so badly. I'm surprised they didn't hire her just based on culture fit but this was a nonprofit with one 6 month contract available and tons of challenging problems to tackle.
My advice is to grind it out and pry that first job out however you can.
My recommendation would be to apply to as many positions as you can, but steel yourself to the fact that you may not hear back from any of them. I'd also recommend exploring if you can push graduation back by a year (assuming funding would cover it and you have legit research to do), or if you can pick up part time lecturer, post doc etc type of positions for the next year. IMO, job prospects for software engineers will likely start improving in the last quarter of 2023 and be much better in 2024. So I'd plan to tough it out till then.
I do empathize with your position and wish you luck :) I'm ever grateful to the first manager who hired me. He changed my life forever and that of my family.
It's the usual - be as employable as you can, search for a job, apply, interview, get hired. I don't think that you need to do anything special just because the market is worse. When you start applying you'll find out how difficult the market is for you specifically (given your education, location, field etc), and you can adjust your expectations from there if you need to.
Maybe startups specifically look worse than other companies right now? But I never got the appeal of startups anyway (more likely lower pay, less stability, more likely to have poor work life balance and have to deal with inexperienced management).
Don't pigeon hole yourself into only skills or techniques too niche, but also make sure you learn skills unique to you within the organization. Essentially make yourself irreplaceable but also ensure you stay marketable.
Beyond that always keep looking at what's out there and network, network, network.
Starting out is hard, but after you put a bit of time in your resume will begin to speak for itself. For what your resume can't do for you that is what your contacts within desired companies are for.
Also, contributing to open source projects is great material for the resume!
By spring there will be a lot of changes. The budgets will get realigned and stuff. So best advice would be to stop worrying and keep applying as generic as that advice sounds. Oh and if you are on it nuke /cscareerquestions
I graduated in 09.
* It's easier to get a job if you already have a job. It's okay to take a shitty job as long as you don't get complacent about it.
* Gaps get stressed by job seekers in advice requests because it is a question that can make you look bad. However, if you are actually at an interview, they are fishing for bad dealbreakers not minor imperfections. Don't worry to much about it.
* If you get hired via a staffing agency, you could be cut at any time arbitrarily. I once got laid off 24 hours after signing a contract renewal. Keep as good an emergency fund as you can manage.
* Unemployment benefits are not charity, it is insurance that you pay for out of your wage. Dont let pride or shame convince you not to use it.
* Network aggressively and be likeable. You never know when that linkedin connection from a shit job 3 years ago will throw you a bone. I know everybody on HN really likes their leetcode but if you have an inside reference, the interview is reduced to just a vibe check.
* There are grades of recruiters and higher grade jobs tend to be assigned to higher grade recruiters. The guys sending you irrelevant callcenter gigs on the other side of the country can be ignored as they are just playing the numbers game too, but if a recruiter advertises something decent to you the least you should do is reply with a "not right now but thanks". This results in a higher quality recruiter keeping you in their rolodex for later.
* Hire a professional resume writer for you. This goes not just for noobs, but also people who have been at the same gig for awhile and have not been through the hiring game recently.
* Cold applications are just a numbers game. Managers get 1000 applications for 1 seat. Yes, tune your resume/letter for the job, but don't spend too much time on it.
* If you are offboarding, just plagiarize Nixon's resignation letter if you can't write anything nice at all. In a fiery departure, your best case scenario is that nothing happens and your worst case is that somebody who likes you will no longer want to be your reference or whatever. Your first one will always feel bad, but people coming and going is just part of life and doesnt have to be a big deal.
https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-dat...
As someone who graduated into the Dotcom Bust, your expectations need to be pulled back a bit from what you saw your somewhat older friends get right away.
Not only the amount of your starting salary (it was about a 30-50% decrease for those of us in Class of 2002 vs our friends in Class of 2000), but also the coolness of the job (Them: web startups. Us: government contracting.)
I also watched some of those slightly older friends struggle with car and/or condo payments taken on the presumption of salary and stock options going nowhere but up. Ouch.
If you get a job offer you can stand in a place you wouldn’t mind living even if the job went away, you should probably take it. As others have said, it’s a lot easier to get a job if you have one. You’re a lot less likely to become desperate and have to accept something awful if you’re already in an ok job.
As for pay expectations, look at what similarly-educated mechanical engineers in your region make.
Hiring freezes are not really freezes. It is more like, "try extra hard to justify more headcount." Companies will always have some need for specialized skills and knowledge.
Since you are a high achiever in an in-demand field, you should still have good leverage during the job search. I would hold out for a role or company which you believe will suit your skill set.
I would not, under any circumstances, hold out for a "perfect" fit. It is unlikely to exist and if the company/recruiter is making it seem perfect they are almost certainly lying to you. A former colleague of mine was burned by this not long ago.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but if you can, look for companies that don’t hire too much remotely.
2 reasons: 1. Less competition. 2. (More important one IMO) For people starting their career, in person interactions are extremely valuable. You’ll learn a ton from hallway/lunch conversations. In your first few years, likely even more than from your job. YMMV, of course, but all those chats shaped me as an engineer.
Lots of good advice. (Which I won't repeat.)
If you choose to graduate, remember, you're going to work for the rest of your career. Don't feel bad about taking some time for yourself! (Assuming this is the US,) it's going to be nearly impossible to take consecutive 2-4 weeks off, or longer, while you're employed. Do it now.
Looking for a job also doesn't have to be a grind. Even if you're playing the numbers game, you don't need to grind all day spamming out applications. Self-education in areas that you think you'll need are just as important. Don't feel bad about making every weekend a 3 or 4 day weekend.
Also, many people warn against being too selective. This is true. It's also important to have standards. When I really needed a job, over the past 20 years, I've turned down: A contracting gig where the contract came out of a nolo book (for hiring a contractor to do work in your home,) a (cough) job that came with a "stipend" that would hardly cover rent, a cryptocurrency gig run by a lucky hacker who had a few million dollars in the bank, but not enough common sense to have product-market fit... People talk about being "entitled." A lot of businesses believe they are "entitled" to your labor. Walking away from situations like this isn't being "too selective." It's having standards and looking out for yourself.
The long-term meta strategy is stepping back and realize that as long as you are dependent on a job for survival you’ll be at the whims of your employer, the market, the economy.
Build a raft instead of constantly treading water, and pursue FI.
If you like swimming, great! Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a raft right next to you. Swim for pleasure, not survival.
As a new grad I don’t think you need to do much different. At my Megacorp the college hire budget is separate from everything else. Even during the strictest hiring freeze college hiring continued.
I would advise shifting expectations a bit, it’s likely offers will still be good but not quite as lucrative as last year.
As for accepting any job- just because you’ve accepted a job does not mean you can’t keep interviewing (in the US at least). Even starting at a company doesn’t mean you can’t keep interviewing. I ran a college hire onboarding program a few years back. Of the 20 people we had , 3 had new jobs within 3 months of hire. We weren’t happy about it, but they got legitimately better offers and we couldn’t match.
So, maybe say yes to a “safety job.”
Once you start, keep your expenses low, although you don’t need to live like a pauper. Living with a roommate (or SO), picking less expensive housing, limiting bar/club attendance, and driving a less expensive car really adds up.
That all being said, my impression is that the AI market remains one of the strongest in the tech sector for “real” practitioners. I think you’ll be ok.
I wouldn't give different advice than I would have last year. It's harder to find a job now, but the approach has not changed.
Most jobs are found through personal connections. Getting referrals from those people is a lot better than submitting your resume into hundreds of web forms, along with all the other applicants.
New grads have fewer connections than people who are established in their careers, but they may have contacts from prior work experience, internships, classmates, and friends.
Really the most useful advice would be to people who have not yet graduated: make sure you do some internships and build those connections while you are in school!
Only real one is to adjust your expectations. That does not mean getting _any_ job, but do not sneer on the offers from companies tier below what you'd consider before or lower compensation than what tiktok programmers brag about.
> What advice do you have for new grads in CS/EE fields looking for jobs? For example, I am finishing my PhD in AI-related work this spring. Colleagues I've talked to in several companies have told me about frozen hiring. Is this true in your experience?
Yeah most companies are still under hiring freezes, but backfills usually aren't frozen.
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
Try and get a job remotely where you want to land eventually. Having some experience that's related to what you want to do will bode better than having nothing.
> Should I reach directly to managers in different teams?
If you know them, sure. Networking can be an incredible asset, go to meetups or other professional groups and get to know people in the industry, even if a manger isn't there employees typically are motivated to help you get a job because they may get a referral bonus.
> Who are the best people/kinds of firms to reach out to when the industry is slowing hiring?
In reality when you hear about large layoffs much of those layoffs are companies shedding full time employees and then outsourcing any work they needed from them via consulting or contract positions. So it stands to reason that perhaps contract companies / agencies may be a great place to get some experience. Some industries are somewhat immune to recessions like healthcare, utilities, government and a small subset of financial institutions.
One strategy would be to go after ML/AI jobs that are at the profit centers of companies and whose success or failure means the success or failure of the company. There are lots of AI/ML projects done at the whim of some VP in a random business unit "because we have so much data there must be something there", or working on a speculative product. Those types of projects are really interesting and can be a lot of fun, but they get cut pretty fast when it's time to trim the budget.
I don't have a PhD in AI/ML, but I have delivered ML models into production. Doing so taught me that you must go about your modeling and science work with a practical urgency for results compared to the pace of academic research. Business applications don't require you to prove how smart you are (people just assume it), but they do require compromise to meet requirements and exceed stakeholder expectations. Where a lot of ML people lose the plot (and financial reward) is that they don't make enough tradeoffs for the operational or end user concerns for the model in its entire relevant context. I've seen this manifest a few ways, but a common one is getting fixated on the data you have, but never realizing you need to "close the loop" and make something actually useful for an end user in a measurable way.
Those are the practical, "productionize AI" jobs and there is huge interest in those now given the huge interest in LLMs. Who cares about the downturn, LLM start ups are the hot thing.
There are also industry research jobs, definitely worth applying for, but from my understanding they are very difficult to get.
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
When you're first starting out? Yes, absolutely. The job for which you'd be most suited (however that's defined) will in all likelihood toss your resume into the nearest trash can without some actual work experience on it.
> Who are the best people/kinds of firms to reach out to when the industry is slowing hiring?
The more boring-looking, the better. You say you're about to be a PhD in AI? Find some small/medium business with leadership whose eyes gloss over at the mere mention of "neural nets" or "deep learning" or what have you, get into some boring technician or analyst role, and start using those fancy AI chops to blow their expectations for the role out of the water. If they don't rapidly promote you with the newfound success they're seeing, then you're in a much better position to pursue something that actually corresponds to your degree, with a resume item along the lines of "used machine learning to classify inventory by predicted velocity and rearrange inventory locations, improving warehouse picking throughput by 115%" or somesuch.
I like to think of it like a channel that you need to optimize at every step:
1. Applying
- Reach out to a recruiter — or CTO if it's a startup — but do it only for the companies you're the most interested into as it's time consuming
- Write a good application message mentioning the technologies required in the job description
- Personal Branding is key: polish your Github, have a nice website — esp for front-end/full-stack devs — and update your Linkedin
2. Resume screening
- Make sure to have a clean, easy to read and updated resume
- Complete your skillset with high-demand skills (ex: AWS if you're back-end, React Native if you're front-end)
- Ask other for reviews
3. Phone screen
- Learn a bit about the company, their recent achievements
- Learn how to sell yourself, have your storytelling ready
- Ask questions (culture, role, product, etc)
- Prepare answers for common itwer questions
- Smile :) show you'd be the ideal coworker and not just a nerd who can code
4. Tech interview
- Most tech itws are bullshit and not even related to the skills needed but that's how the game is made so just accept it and practice LC
5. Final itw / Offer
- Learn how to negociate your salary
- Remember: Equity is cool but cash is king
- Congrats!
I know that there are loads of people giving advice here that haven't been in a situation where they had almost no options when it came to getting a job when they graduated. I have been in a similar situation to you, and here are some of the things that I'd advise you to do.
1. Minimise your costs. If you can live with your relatives, do so.
2. If you cannot find a job, work on an open source project that is close to a field that you are interested in. Make sure that you do not have gaps in your resume that you cannot explain. This also allows you to keep your skills fresh and purpose to your day.
3. Invest in finishing the blind 75. These are set of interview questions that if you can understand, and master, you will be able to ace pretty much any technical interview.
4. Make sure you also are prepared for system design questions. There are many books on the matter. Although SDIs can be quite subjective, it is good to have an understanding of what you can do.
5. Do not limit yourself to your town/city/area. Apply for any and all remote jobs that apply to you.
The key thing is to teach people to be able to ride the storms. Don't get caught with your pants down by having discipline to save.
Depending on your runway and goals you have a few options.
1. Take whatever you can get that’s closest to where you want to be. I worked as a sysadmin in a large financial firm as they were close to Linux distributed systems during the Great Recession. I’d advise sticking to something with a swe title, but taking a job as MLE for a year - or SWE - instead of a research position isn’t a bad strategy.
2. If you have lots of runway, start your own business! If it pans out, then you’ll be better off than your dream job. If it isn’t successful, you will have something to talk about in a year.
3. Stick to academia/research for a year. If you can hold off your graduation for a year, the market may be more favorable. Bear markets tend to be short.
4. Hike the AT/PCT/other bucket list activity. It can burn up the better part of a year, and will explain a resume gap well. Be mindful that employers will be concerned if they see an unexplained resume gap/and may not care about your fitness.
I graduated in 2001, the dot com bust, took a year and a half to get a job, and that was partially based on a previous degree in biology. This advice is based on my experience from 20 years ago, so I hope it is still relevant.
I was sending out a lot of CVs treating it more or less as a full time job. In the UK at the time the job center would pay for postage for applications, though these days paper applications are a lot less common.
Places that accepted CVs got a lot lower responses than big corporations with their long winded online forms that took a couple of hours or more to fill out, with the usual crappy questions of "give an example e of when you displayed leadership qualities" and the likes. Keep a note of your responses, as after a few, it becomes a lot less effort, as you have probably answered a similar question in a previous one, and can just copy paste with a little adjustment.
Get some interview practice and get good at that. Looking back I was pretty down after a while saying things like "I'll take anything at this point" when I asked why I wanted the job. True, but not what potential employers want to hear. Think of it from the employers point of view and what they want to hear. Again, practice helps and you get better with time.
I got a couple of temporary jobs one for pretty minimal wage but that made a huge difference actually having some real world experience on my CV in terms of getting invited for interviews.
Have some code that you can show people. Build some example projects. I would advise spending some time building a more comprehensive project one time to show that rather than doing a crappy throwaway project from scratch for each interview - something I still seem expected to do after 20 years of experience. The hiring process in this industry sucks and is very exploitative in this way, happy to waste candidates time like this.
Build a network. LinkedIn may be cringey at times, but it's vital to build a network. If you do things right, at some point, you will be hounded by recruiters. And on that note...
Connect with recruiters, lots of them. They can mean the difference between never hearing back after a cold application, and getting your resume in front of the hiring manager.
There are so many smaller firms struggling to find talent!
Message hiring managers and recruiters on LinkedIn that say "hiring" in their bio. This should get the ball rolling a little bit faster.
Good luck and cheers!
The tech industry is still hiring, it's just FAANG that are contracting because they were the ones who had the money to massively overhire during the pandemic. Everyone else is still trying to get good hires. So, get a job that helps you and then start looking for the next job once you are building your basic skills.
Oh, new grads are golden, they have almost nothing worry about. The companies laying off workers are pushing out the senior, highly-paid, most expensive employees. They will quickly and eagerly replace with them with naive, low-paid (relatively), eager-to-drink-the-koolaid fresh grads. The only thing the new grads might have to worry about is that they probably won't get as much money as they would have prior to the layoff waves. Well, that and the fact that as entry-level grunts they will be treated like garbage and employers will take advantage of their lack of experience in identifying and fighting unfair working conditions, wage theft, discriminatory hiring and advancement, and so on.
So, go out and grab the best job you can. Just be prepared for the life at the bottom of the hill.
I left school in spring 2008. Setting aside how to search and what to pick, a thing I didn't understand at the time was how to think about the offer I received:
- on the one hand, I was in no position to negotiate the offers I received
- on the other hand, the modest (commensurate with my lack of experience) equity component in my compensation package was calculated based on current (low) prices. It didn't seem important at the time, but when the market picked back up, this seemed really fortunate.
- I joined a team of people who, having seen their unvested equity take recent hit, were less than exuberant in their outlook about the near term. I did not realize: their problems were not my problems.
If you do land a job at a company which can survive and even grow, now could be an great time to start your career.
I have one of the early PhDs in neural network based machine learning - completed in 1992. My biggest problem back then was that only a few people in the entire world even know what a neural network was - so I was a little head of the curve :-) Thankfully however, I was able to get a job in a networking group at IBM Research on the basis of some distributed systems work that I had done in the process of creating my neural network training code. You have to recall how slow computers were thirty years ago so I needed a lot of them to train my networks.
Anyway, I was completely out of the machine learning field for nearly 15 years until the late 2000s when interest in the field started to pick up again. The main advice I can offer is to be flexible and bide your time.
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
In general I'd say no although I'm not sure it applies to you. I know some people who graduated into the Internet apocalypse of 2002. They picked up crappy jobs and then got pigeon-holed into that crappy job for a very long time. It's a lot easier to get a job in a cool field as a new grad than it is as someone with experience doing manual testing or another crappy field.
Normally I'd recommend someone in your position to go for their Master's or Ph.D rather than getting a crappy job, but you already have your PhD so I'm not sure how much of my advice applies to you. PhD signals a deep specialization which may overcome the stigma of a crappy job.
I'd tell them to forget about current trends and look at long term trends based on a reliable source of data: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers"
Job Outlook, 2021-31 25% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
"Information Security Analysts"
Job Outlook, 2021-31 35% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
In my experience, teams getting laid off are generally (not always) experimental, high risk / high reward, horizon 2 type bets. Ie not the main function of the company or one of the major bets the company needs to succeed for their current strategy.
So one way to avoid being hired into a team like this is to ask a many questions centered around the impact of the team.
For example, - “what are some of the main accomplishments this team has had in the past?” - “what is the mission & vision of the team, and how is it aligned to the business operational plan?” - “what will happen to the company if this team fails on its biggest bets?”
This is naturally aimed towards bigger companies.
Lots of great advice here already.
The one thing I'd add is look beyond "tech sector" companies. Your skill set can be translated and refocused for any number of industries that will thrive in the coming years (e.g. food producers, energy, natural resources, healthcare, etc).
One way to do this is if your institute has a co-op program, reach out to the head and express interest in industries that could be interesting to get into. They'll likely be happy to help and connect a Top AI Expert with companies the university already works with. Of course you'll be doing more applicative work than theoretical
I graduated in 2008 and entered the job market during probably the deepest recession in my country. I was lucky that I landed a grant which ensured my job for the next 4 years. This was both a blessing and a curse. Let me explain.
During and after the recession unemployment rate soared past 25%. 2/3 of my company got laid off during that period. At some point more than half of my friends were unemployed. Having a stable job you can count for years to come was an incredible perk.
However this security bred both complacency and toxicity. My boss started saying things like "you are lucky you got a job", "we are doing you a favour letting you work here" or "there are no jobs out there" (BTW I'm seeing echoes of this in some managers these days). Although the job was terrible, I was conditioned to have extremely low expectations.
At the end I spent the first 7 years of my career in a low performing and toxic organization. I was so severely underpaid that when I finally changed jobs, I 4x my pay without trying too hard. The rest is history.
So if I had to capture my lessons in a tip is: do whatever you need to "survive" the recession, but keep an eye on the market and be quick to jump when the tide turns.
I'll never know how much I would have turbocharged my career if I had jumped at the beginning of the longest bull market in history rather than languishing in a career dead end.
I graduated in one of the worst possible times to get a CS degree: August 2001.
I had a college job that paid the bills but wasn't anything related to tech. I looked for jobs but the job market in Portland, Oregon was the Sahara desert. There wasn't an entry level job in sight, and if you didn't have a decade of experience you could forget about getting a foot in the door.
Eventually I took a customer service job at a call center that did work for Adobe, and after a year there I switched to one of their other contract customers, Disney. I did tech support for Disney's Toontown, one thing led to another, and Disney ended up hiring me direct and moving me down to LA.
I stayed at Disney far too long in a junior position because I had no confidence in my ability to get a better job, the experience of being shut out of the market for years after graduating broke me. Eventually I got laid off from Disney, and what followed was all the best years of my career because it forced me to shop my skills around more.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have immediately taken that tech support job, and when I made it to my first real engineer job I would have jumped after two years if I wasn't promoted. I would've kept jumping every 2-3 years. Like a lot of people there I felt a loyalty to the company that was 100% one-sided.
tl;dr get something, anything in your field as soon as you can, and promote yourself to another position as soon as you can and keep doing it. Only stay in a place if you have immediate and ongoing career growth.
1. Lower your asking price. The days of 6 figure boot camp grads are over, at least temporarily.
2. Get as much professional experience as possible. There's an entire world outside of the startup/HN crowd where you can thrive in a great career at an enterprise company doing .NET/Java. These are your name brand mega insurance companies or health care organizations that are just trying to get line-of-business apps created for internal use. It's not the brand name cachet as a popular SaaS. These mega corps often don't go out of their way to advertise for new positions, so just checkout linkedin or look at their job boards on their corporate website. These companies often have the large internal development team to pair you with a senior developer and train you up.
3. Bide your time until the market "re-opens". The market will come back, but in the meantime now is the time to build up your CV. If you still are having problems getting a foot in the door, then take on open source projects. Create a side-project. There's nothing worse as a hiring manager seeing a new grad with zero experience asking for $150,000.
Some other folks apparently of the same age have already replied, but as another person who got a CS degree and graduated into the post-dotcom meltdown, I'll add my 2 cents.
Yeah, it'll be tough. Your first "real" job will likely be the most difficult job search of your life.
Feel free to try your luck at the same company multiple times. Now, don't be annoying - don't spam them with your resume every day. But the first job I ended up getting was with a company I contacted again a few months after hearing they didn't have anything for me.
I think the issue of take any job vs keep looking for the right job depends on your circumstances. After college I moved back home with my parents, took the summer off and slowly job searched, rent-free, while also enjoying my last summer of freedom. Some folks won't have that luxury.
I'd also recommend considering being flexible with your location. Sure, maybe you want to live in City A, and maybe you can one day, but if there are more jobs in City B (or remote work that will pay the bills in some places, but not City A), it won't kill you to live somewhere else for a couple of years and then try to make the move to where you really want to be.
What kind of work do you want to do? I assume since you got a PhD in AI, you would like to be an AI scientist who does AI research in industry. I think a lot of the posts are aimed more at software engineers, but it may not be applicable if you are hoping to keep doing AI work in industry at the PhD/researcher level.
That said, a lot of the big companies have frozen hiring in AI along with a lot of unicorns who focused on AI but haven't been profitable. Some of my own PhD students who are graduating soon are worried, but they have been able to get interviews at non-FAANG companies for doing AI research.
There are a lot of faculty openings for AI, and while they are competitive, it isn't nearly as competitive in the past if you have been productive during your PhD. You would have to wait until Fall 2023 to apply for them, so you would have to do a postdoc or something like that for a year.
I think money is going to flow into AI start-ups doing foundation models and generative AI, so if your AI-related work is in that space, you could be well positioned. It would be potentially risky if you are not a US citizen due to visa issues.
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
Will depend a lot on the individual situation, but as a broad blanket advice I'd generally say, yes. Especially if you come from an undergrad/master's. There are very few of those really big tectonic shifts in life like fully entering the workforce for the first time, and a lot of it has more to do with having some job (at least somewhat relevant to what you learnt) than having the perfect job (which, frankly, you can't really know what that would be for you at that stage anyway). I don't see much good coming from delaying this just for the sake of waiting for the perfect match.
That being said, if you have other reasons for delaying, like wanting to try a startup, that might indeed be a good reason to not start in a job. Or if you're a PhD graduate, you've had sort of a semi-job experience already, and you might have ways to stay a bit longer in academia doing meaningful things (post-doc,...), while looking for something that really fits with the highly specialized profile you've already built at that point.
I graduated in 2011. IIRC it was a somewhat tough market but also I had not focused enough throughout college on building employable skills. I had studied history. The age-old vicious cycle I encountered was that you need experience to get a job, but it seemed like you needed a job to get experience. I found a loophole by taking technical writing contracts to build my experience and portfolio. At first they were very small and I worked for nothing and asked the clients to take a shot on me because I am very hungry to succeed. After a year of that a family friend got my foot in the door at the startup he worked at. The connection got my foot in the door but the skill-building and portfolio-building I had been doing over the last year sealed the deal. I mention this not to massage my ego but to suggest that they're both important so your best bet is to spend proper time/energy on both. Also during my year of contracts I took a lot of CS classes at community college. After 3 years at the startup Google poached me and I'm now going on 7 years at Goog.
I've been surrounded by people like you for decades no matter which coast I lived on or somewhere in the middle. Employment anxiety is an infectious culture, not a sensemaking operation. I'd suggest ignoring the cultural imperative and instead just go directly for what you want by following a seemingly non-existent path through old-fashioned touchpoints that can only be discovered by talking to others via beer, coffee, and multisyllabic small talk. My experience has been that the best gigs come from those birds-of-a-feather experiences and not whiteboard stunt monkey meetings. The corporation is just a different jungle and I'd suggest you don't really want to star in The Corporation anyhow and look for University, R&D labs, startups, design studios, etc. There are still some good gigs out there; they're just doing what pointy-haired bosses do, trading one set of workers for another, 10K at a time. Good luck finding your tribe no matter who, what, or where they are!
Layoffs are happening, but, at the same time, the world is realizinng the impact of AI. With a PhD in a related field I think you can be employable for the foreseeable future. It's a challenging time to get hired, so you will need to bring your A game. I'd advise two things:
1. Build a portfolio of projects. Companies like to see that you're hands-on and problem-solving oriented. 2. Invest on your personal brand (via a website, LinkedIn or other social media). This helps put your name and what you do out there, so hiring managers can find you.
With those things at hand, you can make compelling applications and get noticed. I don't see a problem with reaching to managers directly, especially if you make clear how you can provide value.
About getting any job, it depends how much different it is from where you want to be in 5 or 10 years and what your immediate needs are. If you need the money, then you can go for it - any job will provide you learnings. But don't deviate too much from the future you want.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
Focus on being the best version of yourself. Be passionate. Stand out not by being what they're looking for, stand out by being what they didn't even know they were looking for until they found you.
Focus on solving problems, not just being a warm body in a seat. Companies need problems solved, not seats filled. Identify the issue they are trying to solve before you even show up, and then make it clear you're the person to solve it.
Focus on being human. If you're not the most personable person (not everyone is, and that's fine) then spend time to make sure they know that you aren't their average applicant.
And if your prospective employer says "In 100 words or less, tell us what makes you different from the rest!" for the love of all that is recruiting, do not just paste in your cover letter. I've disqualified SO many applicants without even looking at their resume or cover letter because they couldn't bother to follow the most basic direction.
As someone who entered the work force in the shadow of the dotcom bust, I think the biggest piece of advice is that people who have only lived during the time of the "Great Bubble" don't have advice much to give you.
Entering the work force now or in the next few years, a new grad will very likely have an easier time navigating the job market than people who have spent nearly a decade working for bubble-frenzied, VC backed companies.
In the years following the dotcom bust I new tons of software folks desperately trying to reconfigure their careers. It's not hard for a fresh grad to change course, most people don't end up working in a career that is directly related to their major.
Entering the work force will be harder and harder but new grads will have less expectations and bad habits they have to overcome to find an occupation that works for them (they also won't have no-longer-reasonable comp expectations).
I would advise them to immediately learn what their universal human needs are and how to effectively meet them. Learn to let go of what isn't needed and learn learn how to meet needs through moderation. Learn how to ask for things to be given to you because so much is locked up behind money and it's real people who can let it out for free, but they almost never do it without asking unless it's to their benefit.
This will help keep cost of living way down so you don't have to give a shit of you're tossed on your ass without any notice or severance. Stop pretending the business landscape was made with your wellbeing in mind; if that were the case, your onboarding package (or interview?) would involve making sure you're aware of your needs and how to meet them. Any business unable to produce such a document is not designed with your wellbeing in mind.
Use every "unfair advantage" you have. I graduated during the height of the Great Recession, and I weathered it using the fact that I was already involved in undergraduate research and that I'm a US citizen.
My research supervisor had funding for someone who can work on ITAR-restricted projects, and I was the perfect fit for that. I made money earning my graduate degree. Afterwards, I used my research experience and connections to land a full-time job at an FFRDC [1], which only hires US citizens. I learned a lot from my group there, and it set me up for even more future opportunities. Those "unfair advantages" made life much easier for me during a tough market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...
Hopefully the job market won't get that bad, but in the worst case you might have to take a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McJob. for a while. This has happened to highly qualified people in previous recessions. If you do , the thing is to make sure its a cool McJob, like working on a ski resort, bookshop, arts cinema etc rather than actually a fast food joint. Or if it has to be fast food joint, then at least in a cool place with rock climbing nearby or something. Could be a blessing in disguise...
Doing a post-doc maybe?
To survive bad job market is not to enter a bad job market.
If you have to, then, due to supply and demand, you will have to adjust to
1. lower your expectation 2. work on area that is not your supposed expertise domain 3. other unfavorable conditions
Honestly, as a PhD in anything AI-related you're not going to have any trouble right now. AI is the one area where everyone is looking for talent right now, even in a down market.
My advice is to work for the largest company you can get into for your first job. The experience, either great or shitty, is capped at both ends i.e. corporate structure limits how shitty or great it can possibly get.
If the experience is positive, then great, stick around. If not, the name of a large company on your resume (ideally at least two years), will make it much easier to find your next gig, as large companies are easily recognizable for their products and branding.
There will always be high growth things.
Look for something new and different that could change everything (https://scroll.pub/ https://breckyunits.com/oneTextarea.html https://longbets.org/793/)
This is a numbers game.
1) Apply everywhere, literally in the hundreds. Different cities, different states, etc.
2) Make sure you are prepared. Do hundreds of Leetcode questions at least to the medium level. Do lots of systems design questions as well. The fact of life is that you need to show you can do coding questions and your competitors will all be at the top of their game here. If you don't match them, why exactly would you be a better candidate than them?
I entered the job market right after the dotcom crash. It was A LOT worse then.
My advice is learn to interview. What I mean by that is if you don't know something don't just say. No sure. Ask if you can try to walk your way through it with the person and if you get stuck or don't know something ask the interviewer for help. What that shows is you want to learn
MechE so I don’t fit your CS/EE ask exactly. I posted this before, tech is a small percentage of engineering. There’s plenty of good engineering jobs out there. Sure, the pay and benefits won’t be as good as tech but it’s still fulfilling in its own way. And you’ll still make a relatively cushy wage where you should be able to thrive, not just survive.
My advice is to run a real process and track every application. Expect around 100 applications to 25 screens to 10 interview loops to 1 offer. Best case.
I would say directly reaching out to hiring managers and recruiters is your path forward, but they get a lot of inbound, so the odds of a cold outreach getting read is low unless you have an intro.
We'll see where this all goes, but for now it seems like most companies are just reverting to where they were in 2020-2021. It's not a complete catastrophe (yet), but the open pipeline into FAANG is pretty well closed. You can still find jobs, but you might not be wildly overpaid like you would have been last year.
I've seen some people (mostly on Blind and one person IRL) very strongly suggest to those laid off from the Big Names™ to not just take a job at no-name tech companies, as it looks bad to both the Big Names™ and to the startups who like to hire from the Big Names™.
Does this line up with anyone's real world experience?
What I did in 2003 was stayed in school a semester longer. Then many of my friends graduated and had jobs. So they helped me find a job. The market began to pick back up gradually and there were more options.
Not an option for everyone (college is more expensive now for sure!) but it worked.
You need to be applying to 20 jobs a day.
Pay for something that helps you mass apply - I think there are tools out there. Unfortunately I've forgotten their names.
Put yourself in a strong situation - i.e. move back to your parents etc so money isn't a worry.
I never went to Grad School but a lot of my friends went to Grad school.
The job market is going to suck in tech for the next year, maybe less but the market is flooded with qualified people right now and that will take time to settle.
I would do what you can to kill a year, sign up for post-doc work, spend a year teaching, go travel etc.
Maybe you won’t get your dream job immediately. But I doubt you’ll be unemployed.
Try not living in an high-cost area or above your means, you can coast for a couple of years in some random corporate environment, then you could apply for some FAANG when positions reopen.
But they may not be closed for your role.
I have the same advice that I have during booms: get a job and save money. The only difference is that it will take longer to find work and it might not be your dream job. That's ok. Lives are long. New opportunities will come your way.
My advice? Realize that the tech sector is not made entirely of engineers. There's marketing, finance, etc. Just because the sector is shrinking across the board doesn't mean there's not a demand for tech-edu'ed talent.
Surprisingly, I don't think I would do anything much different but double down. List the companies you like, throw out the ones that have a freeze, start from the bottom for practice, double down on prep.
My guess would be you are going for an ML role, possibly Data Scientist rather than Software Engineer? I think that is a very different market than the one being described by all the software engineers replying here.
Do PhDs in AI really have much to fear? VC capital is flowing into AI. I’m no expert on the state of AI employment but if I was to pick a hot area that’s safe for now that would be my bet.
Aside from technologies and all the other great advice in this thread, become a product focused engineer. Learn the product domain well and understand how your work impacts the business.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for right away, can any of your research collaborators buy you more time by keeping you on or adding you to their projects for a little while?
If anyone is looking, hit me up using contact details in my hn profile. We are a small stealth startup building a data analysis environment and actively hiring.
If you're a US citizen, look into small companies that do research for the military. There's a growing amount of work for a PhD in AI CS/EE.
Apply to lots of jobs and don't fear rejection. Each process has learning opportunities and it's a chance to hone your interviewing skills.
The wider economy or market is completely irrelevant to you. Stop paying attention to that nonsense and concentrate on your own job, career, life etc.
Stick to your rates.
They likely fired people not performing, they'll rehire "cheap" new grads. Make sure you get what you feel your worth.
Stay away from software engineering. It already pays little. It will degrade over time.
Why does Microsoft keep publishing job positions on LinkedIn just a few hours ago?
If you have life aspirations to do a Masters/PhD degree, now might be the time.
Search, apply, interview. See what you can get. You’re overthinking it.
layoffs don't necessarily mean a hiring freeze. some of these companies are definitely taking the opportunity to lay off more expensive staff and re-hire cheap new grads
people keep talking about jobs.
but OP has a PHD. if you connect with other PHD's from other departments not in tech, you can easily have a job or start a company.
Switch professions, before it’s too late.
learn fp, haskell, ocaml, erlang, elixir, common lisp/racket, f#
Do a post grad??
Vote better!
1. Yes it's better to get any job BUT do keep searching and never stop just tone down how much time you spend looking (i.e no job=full-time into applying, interviewing then with job=part-time into applying, interviewing) If you are fortunate to not worry about finances, then by all means continue searching. 2. Yes reach out directly. Getting into the thoughtstream of managers can enhance your chances of getting a job (managers can and will be very busy, they forget things every now and then so reaching out is essential) 3. Everyone working in the area you want to be in. If you know a company working in X and you like X, reach out to those who are working for X and let them know who you are, why you are contacting, and ask them about their time/experience in X. Do not be afraid to reach out, the worst you get is a no. Rejection is better than nothing in the game of hiring.
Below is additional notes that helps me through the game of hiring and looking for jobs. Take time to reflect and think about the pre-existing advantages you have. Then again reflect and think about the UNFAIR advantages you have. Unfair advantages are the very things you may take for granted that others would consider unfair. These things may, can and will be things that you will completely overlook so here's some examples:
- US Citizen, you should know this but if you don't there people going through laborous and painful undertakings just to have the same priviliges that you have as a US Citizen. Visas are dime a dozen and getting to a position to be given/apply for a visa is getting harder and harder.
- Alumni of university/college/high school that has any notoriety in tech, engineering, finance (or even any form of notoriety as long as its positive!)
- Network from university/college/high school/church/weekend rec league/hometown/current residence. Believe it or not a familiar face and name can lead into an interview and/or a job. There's probably people who like you for no other reason than the fact that they associate with you and remember you (vice versa applies too but we're talking positives here)
- Skill in highly specific niche that not entirely popular or "mainstream". If you have a skill and/or experience doing something in a niche this is beneficial for your chances as you can land an interview and form connections that can lead to more (network, interview, job, association, business)
- If you can and are willing to pack your bags and move across city/county/state/even country lines, you can increase your chances in landing an interview/job. If not disregard this
- There's a higher chance because you're a new grad, you'll be given leeway and are seen as a "cheaper" resource for the business. Understand this and use it. Shop your offers when you have them and if not say you do. Just cause its a downturn economically does not mean you need to experience a downturn in your personal economics
- Contact anyone and everyone you know and let them know you are looking for work. Mention it indirectly in communication for better effectivity
- Position yourself to be seen as high value.
Use every advantage you have.
Everything I know about career comes from the 08-now era, but what I've seen has always been this:
1. Not all of the economy declines at once. Someone is hiring for something.
2. There is always a new trend spinning up. The trend may originate from the research sector, a government policy shift, or a large firm that has deployed a new business strategy. Those things result in new possibilities in the global supply chain, and therefore business formation and expansion.
3. When the trend is in its early stages - before it enters any hype cycle - you have to be on it and present yourself in a way that makes you "the person to seek out for x". If you get on and stay on, you get swept up in the resulting demand for skilled work.
4. Everything else is a continuation of that. Being a later hire means you're less central, and therefore less rewarded. When the trend ends you have to exit to a new one to have a continuation, otherwise the career is most likely going to have a gradual fade into obscurity.
All the more cosmetic stuff about whom to contact and how to contact them ranks beneath the macro trend positioning that makes you be near where the money is currently flowing, and part of the story of this recession is that the world's nations are all making big, strategic policy changes that redefine their economies.
What is probably going away: The leadership of the FAANG framework. The companies themselves will mostly stay around, but their scaling is done, and now it is about time for many of their products to be chipped away at by a swarm of new approaches, as has happened in past eras of software.
What is going to be interesting: AI, but not the nuts-and-bolts of machine learning. Those careers are made already, and you're way more likely to be acting as a consumer/integrator of their output. AI products and services in the larger view are still finding their way - approaches to integration, UX and so on.
Anything that deals with energy infrastructure and transport problems may be interesting. "ESG" is being pursued top down from Davos, and will change policies in many local governments. Software will be part of it, but it might be hard to find a niche that isn't occupied already. See Tony Seba's lectures for a sense of what might be opening up soon.
Crypto tokens have just hit another winter cycle. They are not dead at all; what the last cycle did is test the outer limits of schemes that misapply the tech, and a lot of "blockchain" companies were just that. The tech itself never broke in some fundamental way. It is ultimately another form of information system, one that indexes trades and valuations. The specifics of what is tracked in the system, the scale it should reach, and how secure it needs to be are still uncharted. It takes a creative mind to come up with experiments that reach beyond mimicry of traditional finance, but we're right around that point now. I'm following along with it; it could be interesting. Not one for finding a traditional job though, I think.
Revolt!
Ignore it.
Join Stripe
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How to lie in a resume to cover up a big gap?
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My advice to an undergrad is: Go to grad school. Now is the perfect time to apply, and generally CS/EE students get paid to attend by having their tuition paid for by their advisor and getting a stipend for research/TA jobs. There is also government money to be had. Ride out the storm in Grad school, gain some skills, and expand your network. When you finish the economy should be good again.
If you're a grad student, maybe try to get a post-doc?
But assuming more academia is not for you, look for jobs outside of tech companies. Like apply for a job building the McDonalds app or writing software for John Deere tractors. The job probably won't be great, but you might get lucky and find a company that has realized that tech is the future and are investing in it (I recently met some guys from Ford who were doing some crazy cool stuff).
If you want to try to find which non-tech companies are embracing and investing in tech, look for old companies that have been featured in keynotes at re:invent or Google Cloud Next.
And of course use your network. Find friends who did get jobs and ask them if there are any more. While there are general hiring freezes, some companies will open up a few jobs to counteract attrition, and some will exempt new college grads from their freezes (because you guys are cheap and eager to learn their way of doing things without preconceived notions).
Good luck, and try not to get too down if you get ignored or rejected a lot -- it will happen to the best of people!
I like the advice here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-junior-softwar... (didn't write it, but it jives with my experience).
I also wrote something here on how to stand out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2022/09/19/ways-to-stand-...
Finally, you ask:
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
That depends on your financial situation and emotional runway, but my advice would be that in general it is far easier to get a job once you have a job. I wouldn't advise taking a job digging ditches (unless you need the $$$), but if you can find something that is related to your chosen profession, isn't clearly toxic, and is a full time paying job, take it.
If the company is good, you'll have the ability to grow internally and you'll be a known quantity.
If the company is not great, you'll at least have some experience to put on your resume. You may even be able to help improve the company. At worst you'll have a salary and title and be able to job search from there.