I am grateful for having two living parents who are not abusive and let me live in their home while I’m unemployed. With that out of the way, let’s examine what goes on in the head of an unemployed new CS grad when it comes to finding a “job in tech” right now.

Because I didn’t start programming until I started college, I’m quite literally fairly new to programming. It takes time for people to become good at anything. People study math as the concepts build on top of one another for like all of K-12 and further if you choose. A lot of people don’t like it or even hate Math because they didn’t reach a base level of competence where you feel confident in utilizing the concepts to solve the generic set of problems your school will throw at you. You don’t need to be a genius who participates in math competitions to feel confident about yourself, you just need a basic competence. The same is said for programming. Programming is the act of solving problems in a computational manner. Coding is the act of typing out characters that follow some set of rules depending on the programming language you chose to make the computer move bits around that will eventually (very quickly usually) do what you told it to do exactly; oftentimes this is not what you thought you told it to do lol. Learning and trying to become good at programming takes a lot of time. That’s why a lot of the good programmers you will see in their life history that they started really early, like before 10 or in their early teens. I’m someone who only started programming when I started college! Since competition is inherent in capitalism, there’s no way I can compete with these people! My competition is with other people like me who started this game late or even later than me and we duke it amongst ourselves for the meager entry level jobs that would be willing to take an initial loss and invest in us as we keep growing to become better and solve their business problems and make their shareholders money.

We have to face the reality that it’s no longer the time where companies are willing to invest in new programmers because there’s AI and an influx of newly laid off experienced and skilled programmers. It seems also if you do not put AI on your resume, they will think you are a luddite and are not worth hiring. If you are young, inexperienced, and poor and you are still trying to code the old way and practice to become good, the response you will receive is “go eat shit and die” but wrapped up in HR speak as “Unfortunately, we have decided not to move forward with your application.”

Let’s look at a recent Forbes Article covering Big Tech News regarding to AI: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/11/01/ai-code-and-the-future-of-software-engineers/. A snippet from that is:

That’s insane to me. “AI SKills”. Yea bro I’m a master “prompt engineer”. I’m really good at sweet talking the latest and greatest AI LLM that I use through an API or in my new fancy code editor that has AI features. Bro checkout the new GitHub Copilot drop, or that deal with Copilot + Anthropic, that’s a gamechanger bro, bro this shit is so lit and fire. Yes Karen from HR I can type import openai in my Python backend and now I have “integrated advanced AI LLMs to serve enterprise customers’ needs with 150% higher throughput” and “increased user rating satisfactions by 69% with new AI powered pipelines” or something. Do I need to jam in as many invisible AI related keywords in my resume that the Application Tracking Systems (ATS) used by employers will read?

In all fairness, most business leaders probably are just soaking up in the hype marketing a lot of these AI companies are throwing around and it’s genuinely hard to make good hiring decisions. But like that’s kind of ridiculous, no? I guess conservative approaches to business is not good enough if you want to take risks on what’s hot and new to believe you will out innovate against your competitors and come out on top.

Back to the new grads, let’s say you hated programming all along and never found a liking to any aspect of it and begrudgingly finished your degree, and now with entry level jobs impacted you think to yourself “finally, i can pursue my true passions in the creative works”… something in art, music, animation, etc… Oh wait, it looks like that’s also being impacted. Sucks to be young and inexperienced! Oh no you’re also poor? It looks like you will have to take whatever you can find for now and put your passions to the side as hobbies.

It looks almost like I will have to do the same thing soon. Unless I freeload off of my parents for the next year or two until I figure something out.

Anyways, conclusion is to continue to improve your own set of skills and marketing in any way you can while balancing how much of the AI hype is bullshit and how much of it is real. Unfortunately if you enjoy something that is like completely automated, it’s gonna have to be a hobby while you find something else for work. A day job, if you so wish. I imagine like a LOT of independent artists and indie game devs for example fall in the category of finding a day job whose work is not what compels them to wake up in the morning, but it is their hobby that may or may not be able to become their full time job. I have a lot of respect for artists and everyone else that basically falls into that category.

I didn’t choose that path, I chose a “safe path”. Is this God telling me that it’s time to wake up and realize that you cannot let reality tell you how to live your life forever. You need to take your own life by the balls and understand what YOU want to do. But it feels impossible to do that, when I’ve lived my whole life trying to appease the expectations and norms around me… It feels like I obsessed about programming for the last four years as a means to “catch up” amidst the sweaty nerds and I’m glad I was able to find many aspects fun. Now I gotta stop yapping, gotta stop yapping and specializing for these jobs…like is it time to start learning Java 8 and learn Spring Boot or C# and .NET for the enterprise web backends…maybe it’s not that bad yet. I’ve already dug into this shitshow we call “modern web dev”. I’ve gotta wade out of it a stronger man and not be consumed by the swamp first.

chat, is this real life? chat, let me cook.