This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.<p>However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.<p>My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (<a href="https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-center/" rel="nofollow">https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...</a>). As you said, he was unhirable and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.<p>Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. Articles warning of the skills shortage are <i>still</i> being pushed out by industry:<p><i>Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive</i> (2023)
<a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workforce-shortage-reaches-4-million-despite-significant-recruitment-drive.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...</a><p>It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.<p>It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expensing any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.<p>I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.<p>I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (for most jobs) w/o an introduction.<p>My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.<p>I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.<p>The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
Have a friend just graduated in cybersecurity. He’s going into the military with it.
I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.
Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.<p>The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.<p>They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.
Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?
I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.<p>We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
>as China's "lying flat" movement<p>No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.
Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.<p>1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.<p>2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.<p>I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
> college education is a shortcut to generic employment<p>That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.<p>But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%).<p>College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares
for academia (graduate school).
> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.<p>> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
Outside of medicine and law, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.