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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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How bad is the new grad job market, really? There's been a few high profile layoffs in tech companies, but a lot of those companies had insanely over exuberant hiring during the pandemic (and let me tell you, they hired some absolute howlers). That seems like a much better explanation for layoffs than the AI washing coming out of the C suite as a sop to investors.

Why are they booing the boomer? Well, the left hates AI, and college students are pretty left. Do we need to go any deeper?

Yeah I read that Meta has more employees now even post-layoffs than they did pre-covid. Enormous hiring followed by moderate cuts.

I'm hearing the media (always cynical outrage) is worse than reality, but it's still bad.

Most graphs I've seen look like this (Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States): a bump rising 2020-2022 falling 2022-2024, with current levels around 2020 levels, not rising nor falling. The problem is, there are many more computer science graduates than in 2020. AI probably hasn't diluted the job market (at least yet), but the massive rise in computer science graduates has.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

Or the problem may not be lack of employment, but tech companies becoming bureaucratic nightmares which don't make anything fun or beneficial to society, while evaluating employees on stupid criteria (like how much AI tokens they use) and constantly threatening layoffs. Ludicity is a blogger with stories like "I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars"; although his experience is only from 2023-2024, and maybe unusual, because he had no problem getting hired.

The problem is, there are many more computer science graduates than in 2020.

Sure, but this should be visible in unemployment/underemployment figures and there's nothing there.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

This is a major pain in the ass (recruiters are also, as a rule, retarded). I don't know if AI makes it worse though.

"How would you approach this problem?" in a 10 min interview seems like a fine hiring screen. AI or no AI, being able to ask the right kinds of questions and work out the right initial approaches seems like the best mark of a good candidate. AI is still slow enough I doubt they can type and read answers off GPT quickly enough, and having done lots of projects using AI or not using AI should give them the experience needed to answer at the high level.

There's also a separate issue: hiring is broken, so talented applicants can't get jobs even though there's demand for them. AI makes formerly common benchmarks (like LeetCode) easy to cheat, but even before AI, employers didn't know how to evaluate candidates: ironically, they don't seem to understand what the job they're hiring for actually requires, because many resume screens and interviews have completely unnecessary requirements.

I think this might be because their jobs as hirers are just old people UBI. There are 19 year old HBD posters who could do a better job.

You seem to be advocating for committing federal crimes. "HBD posters" hiring criteria is illegal. You can't Family Guy "okay/not okay" meme test candidates.

Laws introduced by the elderly out of some misguided social justice angles that take an enormous shit on the financial competitiveness of the youth, yes

It could be done race-blind, although it would produce the HBD predicted race gaps when done correctly. In tech this would primarily decrease Indian employment a massive amount.

The 19 year old HBD posters would get the company in hot water with the EEOC.

Who brought those laws and regulations in, exactly? Especially when scaled by modern travel infrastructure from nice to have concession to fairness to massive problem for young native workers

Who brought those laws and regulations in, exactly?

The people running things in 1964.

The staffers who wrote the rules and the bureaucrats who implemented them would have been Silents. I think the Greatest Generation leaders who decided in principle to do it genuinely had no idea how much trouble it could cause.

I don't think most HR and managers (the ones doing hiring, not the CEO) are old. But I do suspect their jobs are mostly useless, many aren't good at them (but stay because their boss/CEO doesn't know better), and companies could get by with much less of them and possibly AI.

I don't necessarily care if they're (not) fired, and I have sympathy for them. But it would certainly be better for employees if companies simplified long interview processes and replaced them with (paid) probation, and I think it would be better for employers (since probation is a better metric, and many talented employees will simply abandon convoluted hiring process).

I don't think most HR and managers (the ones doing hiring, not the CEO) are old. But I do suspect their jobs are mostly useless, many aren't good at them (but stay because their boss/CEO doesn't know better), and companies could get by with much less of them and possibly AI.

HR, yes. But I've had several excellent managers, and they are absolutely worth their salaries.

I'm going to pushback a bit at least on tech employment and present this data analysis posted on /r/cscareerquestions yesterday. Bolded mine:

From the data, several distinct periods can be identified:

Following the early 1990s recession and during the Clinton admin. economic and internet boom, tech employment increased exponentially at a 12% annual rate, peaking at 1.358 million in March 2001. It then collapsed in the dot-com bubble, up to an 18% downturn at its worst, and only recovered to the same level 6 years later, on March 2007. However, the market returned to growth in under 3 years.

The 2008 global financial crisis actually had only a limited impact on tech employment, since tech continued to boom during this time. From June 2009 to the pandemic in February 2020, tech employment increased in a remarkably stable and rapid linear growth pattern of around 80k per year.

The disruption caused by the pandemic was incredibly brief. It caused a net change of -70k, but by June 2020, hiring restarted at the fastest pace in history, around 130k per year. Having been a high schooler in this period, I definitely remember how insane the hype was around tech.

Hiring finally began to plateau beginning in May 2022. Total employment peaked at 2.483 million in March 2023. Ever since then, it has changed at a net rate of -42k a year.

The current slump is characterized by being less severe compared to the massive displacement of the dot-com bubble, which was much worse in percentage terms.

However, the current slump is also very protracted. This is the longest contiguous period of declining tech employment in the 36 years of data. That probably explains why this slump feels worse than anything in history. Even if it is not as intense as the dot-com bubble was, it is already longer, and it also followed the most rapid period of hiring in the history of tech.

It seems obvious that 2021-2022 overhiring has contributed to a disproportionately large glut of CS majors who had been expecting that 130k/yr employment growth rate when the market has actually suddenly shifted to -42k/yr, a gap in expectations of 172k.

This can be seen by the recent shifts in CS major enrollment. We can see enrollment as a rough 3-4 year lagging indicator for the sentiment of the candidate pool (since the data I have only tracks the employee pool, not how many people are applying for those positions). It started to drop rapidly this year.

So there is definitely a downturn in tech employment. And because tech ate the world, there are reverberations outward.

FRED source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001

That's an interesting fact, but I don't see why it wouldn't show up in unemployment/underemployment figures. If fewer people are going into CS when there's a glut of workers and unemployment is stable... Seems everything is working as intended?

As mentioned, college pipelines are 3-4 years delayed. Job numbers are currently down to -42k/year. Just as the greater economy might not have a big effect on one industry (2008 where tech only had "limited impact"), this time, the greater economy might not/has not yet noticed the relatively constant downturn of one industry. Just because the squeeze is slow does not mean the squeeze isn't there.

Who's saying anything about the greater economy? CS new grad underemployment is low compared to other majors.

Ooops, sorry, I was in a rush. I read the whole thread again and looks like I misunderstood your position. I think we have the same initial position that there has been a correction from the exuberance and so the vibes are bad even though stats wise it's not worse than average, and in fact underemployment is actually better than average for new grads in CS. The slight difference in between us is that I do believe there is a kind of protracted downturn (3+ years) in total CS employment count that has not been fully attributed yet AND that this slow erosion of total CS jobs also mean lowered wages, which changes the calculus of CS jobs attractiveness.

I think you're right, that AI is not the cause of the tech layoffs, but rather overhiring in the tech sector over the past decade.

But the tech execs themselves are clearly telling us no, it's definitely AI replacing all the workers, so... I mean, if they want to make a case to the commies for their own guillotining, who are we to stop them?

They don't want to admit they overhired. That's a failure in leadership. Blaming AI is putting a positive spin on things.

I think it's more that the tech industry feels that normal growth is unacceptable and that the massive growth of the 80s and 90s is what's to be expected. They can't come to grips with being a mature, boring industry that makes incremental advancements; there aren't any 25-year-old multimillionaires who made their fortune starting a construction machinery company out of their bedroom. So when the industry starts contracting, it can't be because their growth projections were overoptimistic, but because they're actually doing a lot better! Their products are so advanced that they don't need employees anymore, and your job is next, even if they don't know what that job is. I don't think it's a coincidence that LLM hype coincides with tech employment peaking.

I mean, tech employment peaked because they flooded the space with low-quality hires who only picked up programming because of the high salaries.

The median quality of programmers has plummeted over the last 30 years, despite the fact that the quality of the tools available has skyrocketed. The guy who designed the multiplayer networking backend for the original Age of Empires games was some 18 year old kid with no degree they grabbed off the street because he said he liked programming. You’d have to get a senior dev and pay him like $300k now to hope to get someone capable of architecting anything like that now.

I understand what you're saying, but that feeds into my point: If an industry is going gangbusters companies can't be too picky about who they hire. I saw it myself when I was doing oil and gas titles; some attorneys would be the kind who would go into excruciating detail about every possible title defect and track down every piece of supporting documentation. Others would slap something together that vaguely resembled a title report and required substantial modification to turn into anything we could submit to a client. Everyone starts off in the second category, but when the industry is hot, we were willing to tolerate a lot more people like that because it was cheaper to correct their work and hope they got better than it was to turn down business due to lack of staff. When the industry's in a slump, even the first type of employee will have a hard time finding work. The difference is that the energy industry has no problem admitting when it's in a slump, and will openly state that as a reason they had to lay a bunch of people off. They don't try to bullshit investors to make them think it's about efficiency, because anyone can look at the price of oil. Tech companies can't seem to admit that demand for their products may be declining. Or that advertising and data harvesting for free products aren't as valuable as they thought.

Tech companies can't seem to admit that demand for their products may be declining. Or that advertising and data harvesting for free products aren't as valuable as they thought.

Well. We don't have to speculate, these are mostly public companies. Meta's Q1 profit (not revenue) is up 30% YoY. Doesn't sound like demand is declining to me.

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