In case the image of the snip doesn’t load properly (it didn’t for me originally) or for anyone using text readers, here is the portion of the article that @ucscuuw snipped:
The real drivers are much more financial than technological. In March 2020, the Fed cut interest rates to nearly zero and held them there for two years. There was no cost to borrow money, and companies spent accordingly. Meta grew from about 45,000 to over 86,000 employees in three years. Alphabet surged from 119,000 to over 190,000. Big tech, as a whole, hired employees by the millions. This period was followed by the fastest tightening cycle in 40 years, subjecting every hire to a much higher bar.
Compounding this, a 2022 tax change (originally passed in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) dramatically raised the tax burden on R&D salaries. Companies that used to deduct a software developer’s entire salary in year one now have to amortize it over five years, which effectively creates a steep increase in the after-tax cost of each developer hired.
Yes, what you quoted were the key points of that article. Several big (often tech) companies overhired when there were tax benefits to do so and are now paring down their numbers. Thank you for posting the relevant snips- it was too early in the morning for me to do it!
IMO, I think many kids are more frustrated by the job search process where they send out thousands of resumes and get no interviews because of HR screening criteria and ghost jobs.
Im sure most kids will get jobs but they may not be the ones they want. And despite what people say, getting a high paying job early on can reap huge long term financial rewards vs a lower paying job. It may take someone years before they ever catch up (sometimes never) in total wealth accumulation. And yes, wealth accumulation matters, not only in terms of financial independence but the stress factor in bad economies.
It was hard to find a job at other points in living memory, but the “good” jobs at least had stability in pay and benefits.
Blaming the kids who are struggling because they’re “soft” (not a term that’s come up in this thread, IIRC, but the sentiment appears now and again) is just survivorship bias. After all, as @beefeater pointed out using different words, Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation (I’m currently in a country where I can’t pull up a link to the Atlantic article with that title from 2013, but it’s googlable), and we really ought to know better than to fall into being overly critical of today’s kids here.
The Stanford Review article has been posted several times before. There are several issues to break down.
The Gallup poll is about perception, which is often quite distanced from reality. It asks random people whether they think it is a good or bad time to find a job. Most of the people answering the survey aren’t actively looking for a job, and probably don’t know anyone who is looking for job. They are instead responding based on what they have heard from other sources or general impressions. This can absolutely be influenced by AI fears, even if AI actually has had little impact on current hiring.
The Stanford Review article provides many references showing a negative change over the past few years, but gives the impression of a more negative change than I expect is the reality. For example, the first link mentions that unemployment rate for new grads increased to 5.x% with reference to the chart below. Yes, it’s an increase, but overall unemployment of recent college grads increased from 4.x% in 2022 to 5.x% in 2025. 4.x% to 5.x% is, a statistically significant increase, but both values mean ~95% of grads are not unemployed – the overwhelming majority of new grads.
This fits with the post grad outcomes reports that I’ve posted many times in this thread, including specifically for CS majors. Nearly every post grad outcome report I’ve seen shows the overwhelming majority of recent grads are employed or continuing education, rather than seeking employment/education. This also applies to CS majors. CS continues to be the highest median starting salary major, with the overwhelming majority of CS grads finding employment/education; usually a lower rate seeking than the average across all majors.
I have no doubt that there has been a negative change since 2022 for a variety of reasons, including the ones mentioned in the Stanford Review article, with CS and other majors on average applying to more jobs or on average having a longer job search. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of CS majors at discussed colleges still do find quality jobs within few months after graduation, with a comparably high starting salary to previous years.
What if my 22 college grad and 26 soon to be college grad are very critical of today’s kids? They walk among them. They see them when employers and parents don’t.
I’d argue that there’s always been a difference in people within an age cohort. Today, I work with gen Z adults that are like me (complimentary) and others that are like some gen X’ers that I knew when I first started working (pejorative).
Huh? As I mentioned, I was the only one of my crowd who had health care benefits at my job. We didn’t call them “gigs” but they existed anyway. One friend who worked as a temp at a PR firm and did cater-waiter events and parties at night. Another friend who worked as a waitress– survived on tips- and weekend shifts as a museum gift shop cashier. Still others who survived as SAT tutors, occasional assignments as a substitute teacher, etc. The sub jobs were in high demand at the time because if you got lucky, you’d be sent to the same school over and over and could develop a relationship with the principal who could fast-track your application for a fulltime job (which DID come with benefits and stability- subbing offered neither).
There are a lot of rose colored glasses around the previous recessions. I had worked as a waitress in HS and college and so for me, no matter how awful my first job was, I felt blessed that I wasn’t “slinging hash” as the old idiom said.
If one of them is a social worker of last resort, that would mean encountering a heavily biased sample of people (those suspected of breaking the law or who somehow were seen as a bother to someone else).
I thought Marketing was always one of the last to find jobs from the business sector and the first to lose them since I graduated from college way back when. I remember when times were tight over the last 45 years, Marketing departments were always nervous. Am I mis-remembering?
I think you’re right. But marketing is usually the lowest paid starting job (within business).
From my experience, employees who were not customer facing were always more at risk - operations, service, IT, etc.
I told my kids, dont work in ops, because you get all the blame if anything goes wrong, none of the credit if things run smoothly, and an easier target to get laid off if the business starts to slide.
Marketing is generally higher paid than HR, facilities, Help Desk, corporate travel, etc.
And the landscape has shifted somewhat– many folks in “marketing departments” are well trained data analysts who have highly fungible skills. A regression is a regression is a regression. You can pop one of these analysts into your finance, pricing, investor relations, procurement departments without a lot of onboarding. The days where the marketing folks decided what color the package should be…. that’s now an algorithm. Few folks are sitting around debating whether or not the bubble which says “buy one get one free” on the coupon should be bigger.
I counsel marketing wannabees all the time. They don’t like my advice. Do NOT take “introduction to market research” when you could take a two semester stats sequence- with programming in R or matlab or similar. Do NOT take “demographics for business” when you could be taking a behavioral economics or poli sci class. And do not take “understanding the consumer in a global economy” when you could be taking “China, Russia and India– the history of their march towards industrialization”.
There are ways to make a marketing degree fungible, relevant and “easy to hire and hard to fire” if you try….
Yes. I meant marketing is usually the lowest starting salary among the traditional business majors like accounting, finance, information systems, management etc.
High end corporate sales usually gets paid the most (other than the top executives) but it’s pay for performance.
I wasn’t talking about on the job interactions. Honestly, many of those people are resilient hustlers that chose, or were diverted down the wrong path. Both of my sons see friends of friends, and acquaintances, and they hear stories. The younger one graduates this week. I’ve heard stories about his interactions for the last four years. There are definitely some issues, external AND internal, with the younger generation. I wish them luck, but hope is not a strategy. They need to grind.
Gen X made fun of millennials. And now millennials are probably thinking, these Gen Z slackers.
Coincedentally, D26 landed an engineering internship this summer because she participated in the NASA Hunch program in Houston. She’ll find out later if NASA will use their concept on a future mission.
The fact that you think this generation isn’t “grinding” is fascinating. Same thing old folks have been saying since the beginning of time. That fact that your own grinding offspring can tell some tales is nothing new.
I’ll take a Gen Z kid over a millennial as a worker (to grossly overgeneralize) any day of the week! Millennials are so entitled, think they’re the smartest person in the room and want to be recognized and in charge from day 1. Gen Z are way less entitled in my experience (though they’re still young!) and far more willing to work hard and learn from others.
