Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break
I have been putting off writing this for a month, mostly because I did everything I was supposed to do and it still feels like I have no idea what game I am actually playing.
I went to university. I got good grades. I did three internships. I ran a tiny consultancy for a while, building things for people and sending invoices that were actually paid. I studied computer science. I have done the very normal, very legible technical work you put on a CV: I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.
I am unemployed anyway.
I have been applying around as a new grad, sending out the same careful batch of CVs and cover letters that older friends used a few years ago to land solid jobs. What I meet instead is a job market that people now casually call broken. The phrase “white collar recession” has escaped into the mainstream. Articles talk about a graduate jobpocalypse and the disappearance of entry level roles just as the largest cohorts of students emerge from university. Computer science, which was marketed for years as the safest degree in the room, now shows up in headlines as one of the majors with the highest unemployment. People in my cohort are not confused about this the group chat tone is not a bit of a rough patch but this market is cooked.
On the official dashboards unemployment is still low, which is what older people tend to quote back at you. From the ground the thing feels different. The postings are there, the interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections. It is the density of opportunity that has changed. There are more people stacked against fewer real openings, and the default advice of “just apply to more places” lands differently when you know you are running through the same funnel as thousands of other people who also did everything right.
When you talk to older people, including many who are sympathetic, they often reach for familiar explanations first. Rates went up. Funding dried out. The last decade of cheap money was a sugar rush. The current US administration is running a particular mix of trade and industrial policy. These are all real. High interest rates do kill hiring sprees. Entire departments exist today mostly because capital was cheap three years ago. But behind that cycle there is something else, less visible in the graphs and much more visible if you are twenty something and trying to get your first proper job at exactly the moment capital has discovered that software and robots and offshore labour can be stacked together.
A decade ago people passed around a famous paper that said roughly half of American jobs were at high risk of computerisation over the following couple of decades. It was quoted so often that it turned into a kind of folk memory; a big, scary claim that sat behind every newspaper headline about robots taking work. The follow up work was much less memorable. When the OECD re-did the exercise at the level of tasks rather than whole occupations, the share of jobs flagged as “high risk” shrank to a much smaller slice, and later work showed that employment in those supposedly fragile occupations still grew, just more slowly than elsewhere. Automation as actually measured looked more like a slow pressure on certain kinds of work and wages than a cliff edge.
That slow pressure matters. Industrial robots in the United States have already been associated with sizeable job losses and clear wage falls in the regions where they were deployed. The OECD data shows that occupations with more routine, codifiable tasks have grown less and paid worse than occupations that rely more on social skill or physical presence. This is a story about composition, about how many of the jobs created are in fields people can actually enter and live on. The headline unemployment rate can stay low while a particular cohort feels like they are pushing against a wall that gets a little harder every year.
If you sit where I sit, as a new grad with a half decent CV and a browser full of ghosted applications, that gradual statistical story does not quite capture the feeling. What it feels like is that the entry corridor has narrowed, and that the bar for being worth a salary at all is moving faster than people want to admit. It feels like you are competing not just with other humans, which would be fine, but with the entire past of the economy: every dataset, every process flow someone has written down, every recording of someone doing the work you are trying to get paid for.
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